Larry J. Fontana Coaching

"We know what we know, we know what we don’t know, and we don’t know what we don’t know."  The tricky part comes in when what we know  has been successful in the past is no longer working; or when a key insight or piece of the puzzle for moving forward remains hidden in a blind-spot of our awareness.

To a large degree this simply comes with being human. Our natural wiring loves to figure things out, draw a conclusion and then do them repeatedly. In some ways this points to the real gift that is available when we experience breakdowns in our lives. When things are working well there is very little need for us to innovate, change and grow as a result.

In coaching we say “in order to change a behavior we need something more compelling than what we are already up to.”

 I was watching a PBS special a few weeks ago on the Neanderthals, a race of people that lived hundred of thousands of years ago. An interesting thing about them, other than their being an earlier version of us, was that they managed to survive for over one hundred thousand years using the same simple tools and lifestyles, and not growing or evolving much during that entire time. In a simple comparison we might want to judge them as being boring or ignorant, however, the part of them that continues to dwell in our reptilian brain still holds on to the idea of doing the same thing successfully over and over for a hundred thousand years.

The second part to the story speaks about our modern human (logical) prefrontal brain, which the Neanderthals did not have. A very interesting point is that our emotional programs of fight-and-flight also are lodged in our reptilian brain, which has a direct super-highway path to the prefrontal. On the flip side, however, the prefrontal brain can only connect to the reptilian brain through small side roads and meandering pathways. So, the moral of the story is -- our emotions have much more control and access to our logical brain, than the other way around.

So, when we know what we know, and it has worked for a long time, we tend to hold on for dear life until something more compelling, challenging or mandatory comes-a-calling…