Neuroscience, Aristotle and You

I’ve talked before about the neuroscientific challenges of being mammals hardwired to survive daily life or death struggles. (Yes, there’s a reason you feel a little out of sorts! Managing all those primitive reactions with that big brain of yours, lots of feelings, and all the inputs from our knowledge based, capitalist economy — it’s a lot. If it makes you feel any better, it always was.) What I haven’t talked about is fear — the emotional signal that we detect danger. Fear is a sign that our bodies are experiencing threat and risk.

When we detect a threat, in an instant, we are in “fight, flight or fawn” mode; our prefrontal cortex goes offline. Thinking simply cannot happen in a state of fear. Ironically, a response designed to protect us (this is no time to think) makes us easier to manipulate and more vulnerable in our world where thinking is the most useful reaction to any circumstance that causes fear and is not actually immediately life threatening. (Most of the threats we face are not immediately life or death.) For us, fear becomes the biggest challenge to our best thinking, developing our characters consistent with our own values, and achieving our goals.

Spot the Fear

What can make a difference is “fear spotting.” Fear spotting is catching the fear before you act on it. Quite simply, recognizing fear can create enough distance for you to get your prefrontal cortext back online to choose your own response, which may even be no response. This is uncomfortable (it is very scary!), but not impossible. The insight here is simple — you can’t change your hardwiring, but you can change your reaction. Some people do this all the time. Some have never really tried. Triggered people are acting instinctively, so when you are triggered, you are out of control, literally out of your mind. And if you stop to consider how many times a day fear drives you — notice that the entire marketing industry, the media, has picked up on the fact that you are twice as motivated by fear as the possibility of success, well, that’s even scarier. You live in a world, more and more, that is being intentionally designed to drive you based on your fear, and to prevent you from driving yourself by pushing the button that takes your brain offline. (And if you are being chased by a tiger, stop reading… you’ve got this!)

Choose Your Path

Help is here. More than 2000 years before neuroscience proved that fear can derail you from achieving your goals, Aristotle described our capacity to recognize our own feelings and our habitual reactions, and to choose more wisely. When you feel fear, it just happens to you. This is your body sensing danger. Aristotle puts it like this “Again, we feel anger and fear without choice, but the virtues are modes of choice or involve choice. Further, in respect of the passions we are said to be moved, but in respect of the virtues and the vices we are said not to be moved but to be disposed in a particular way.” (Book II, Sec 5)

But you choose whether and how to act on your fear. The choice of action is within your power, regardless of the presence of the emotion. And the choice of action is what you can be judged for, because your choices create your character. The more you choose to run from fear, the more familiar it becomes to run, until you feel as if you must. But you can stop running. Virtue, for Aristotle, was cultivating the appropriate reaction to the emotions you feel - a balance between extremes that he called “the mean.” (“Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean” (Book II, Sec 7)

Doing what wise people do until it becomes a habit that can give you control over your life — the ability to act based on reason and your own values. You can become courageous by facing your fear and acting anyway. This is the opportunity, regardless of how you are hardwired.

Aristotle was far more comfortable with moral judgment than we are. Nobody in Ancient Greece wanted to think of themselves as a rash fool or a coward. We don’t like to think of ourselves as cowards either.

I’ve been “humaning” — Here’s what I’ve learned.

Recommended Reading

•  Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, 2015. Research that started a revolution on the value of vulnerability in all our striving — an antidote to stiff upper lip style hiding (and shame.) Her inspiration? Theodore Roosevelt on daring greatly.

• “A Culture of Belonging Creates a Team that Thrives,” Forbes, March 2024. Why belonging is more human need than political slogan, and how it benefits teams.

• Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle, Books II and III, 335 BCE. Want to inspire yourself to spend more time with wiser people? Read Aristotle’s discussion of virtue as the mean between extremes plus his thoughts on particular virtues, like courage (which he contrasts with anger, which is not the same, and overconfidence.)

Wanted: More Community, Better Education

Membership associations have been important, historically, in supporting people’s careers, to put it simply. I’ve written about their opportunity in education, which is growing, as Higher Education faces unprecedented pressures, worsening an existing preparation and skills gap. At the same time, the next generation of professionals has increasingly high expectations for education and for connection. They are not interested in their father’s membership organization. They are not comfortable with even the appearance of exclusion and hierarchy is also not their jam.

The next generation of professionals wants to belong to an engaged community; they want help and support, and they want to give back to a world that needs their energy and enthusiasm. Even the Center for Association Leadership (ASAE) which is really quite bullish on association education, (go figure!), published a report this week from Tagoras, an education consultancy, whose research shows that “associations need to do more now that they face more competition from the corporate sector and stronger demands from learners.” Just as I suspected.

How can associations respond to this moment? Even more importantly, what should you look for in the associations or groups that you devote your time and talent to and to whom you turn for education?

• Develop high quality education and community building activities specifically designed for professionals at different phases of their careers. Every group needs their own cohort and each cohort has different needs, from early stage professional to mid-career professional to c-level leader.

• Ensure updates not just to educational materials, but to course content itself. If you have not taken a look at your course catalogue in the past three years, it is very likely time to refresh your offerings.

• Ensure that delivery methods are excellent. There is more education available by the day, and it is compelling visually and also engaging. The days when we tolerated being lectured at are over.

Party Conversation: Our Cities and Commercial Real Estate

The nationwide outlook seems to be improving for commercial as noted this week in the Wall Street Journal “Commercial Real Estate is Getting too Cheap to Ignore.” Most of the article recounts the problems that led many property types in commercial to drop into value territory (high returns in the tech drunk stock market, higher than before interest rates, the pandemic). Shocks also included a “now you see it now you don’t” return to office mandate that stressed urban cores almost everywhere except New York City (Go big apple! The WSJ Monday described how Office to Residential Conversions are booming and NYC is the Epicenter.) Well, apparently all of this mess may have finally pushed valuations low enough to make commercial multifamily and office a “buy.” And lest you imagine this is monolithic, I remind you, real property is not a commodity, because every property is unique (within reason).

Apart from rehabs that may now be penciling, I wonder how many of these old offices are tear downs at this point? I’m not the only one wondering and looking carefully. Developers are creative and optimistic professionals and they are always looking to make a deal.

Land in urban centers has exceptional social and commercial value for creative developers and jurisdictions willing to plan well. (By the way, I am hearing very credible reports that developers have been leaving DC for North Carolina because of the willingness among public officials in NC to create the conditions for great development — most especially shorter timelines from project approval to breaking ground, which means lower carrying cost and more certainty. Capital loves certainty. This is a nightmare scenario for cities that need development but cannot figure out how to partner. Developers, let’s work on educating public officials before the situation worsens.)

Needless to say, creative mixed-use and placemaking projects are worth the effort for social as well as financial reasons. (For those in DC, imagine a redevelopment that activated sad, soviet-style, l’Enfant Plaza… I’ll give you a minute to enjoy that…) Unoccupied office buildings, long stretches of concrete, and class C “upside down boxes,” are of negative value to community builders and politicians alike. Investors and jurisdictions may be eager to get them off the books. It may finally be a buyers’ market, and a redevelopment moment.