We believe we’re rational beings. We identify with our conscious - thinking - minds. They’re where we locate our ‘selves’. But, actually, our unconscious minds – our intuitions and emotions - are in charge. The psychologist, Jonathan Haidt has compared the relationship between our two minds to that of an elephant and a rider. The rider – the conscious mind – thinks he is directing the elephant. But the elephant – the unconscious mind - is much stronger and more powerful. If the elephant wants to go in a different direction, the elephant will always win.

This is just as true at work as it is in our personal lives; and it has inspired me to spend the last few years reading and thinking about the role of the unconscious mind in our working lives. It came to me, one day – in the way that new insights arrive in the conscious mind after much hidden, unconscious reorganisation – that many of the challenges I had wrestled with in my first career as a senior civil servant and which my coaching clients now brought to me had unconscious processes at their core. So, I thought it would be useful to produce some practical guidance to managing and getting the best from our unconscious selves and those of our colleagues in the workplace.

The workplace presents us with a fiendish mix of cognitive and emotional demands: making judgements, solving problems, engaging our teams, persuading our colleagues, finding work which fulfils us, and, sometimes, dealing with very powerful feelings. For example:

• We rarely have access to all the information we need to make a complex decision or the time we would need to analyse it properly; indeed many decisions require us to predict the future, how people will react to a particular intervention. To make judgements in these circumstances we have to use our intuition. But how do these gut feelings work? And how do we know whether we can trust them?
• Where do new ideas come from? The knowledge economy requires constant innovation. There can be no personal growth without insight. How do I stimulate and nurture the creative process in myself and in my team? This is of course particularly relevant to you if you work, as many of my coaching clients do, in the creative industries.
• When I’m absolutely convinced I have the right solution, why is it so difficult to persuade my colleagues even with the evidence and arguments to back it up? How can I work more effectively with people who seem to think in an entirely different way from me?
• How can I inspire and motivate my team to perform better?
• I’m not happy or satisfied in my current role. How did I get here? How can I find what I really want to do?
• Why am I a workoholic? Why do I get so upset at work? Why is my boss so difficult? And why are the people I work with so sensitive to criticism?

And, most importantly, what can I do about any or all of these problems?

Some of these issues require the magical powers of the unconscious mind: the way intuition can enable us to find our way through a forest of options and somehow put our finger on the one which will work; how new ideas and insights arrive, as if from nowhere, when we’re in the shower or out for a walk; why a project has particular meaning for us and we feel passionately committed to it; when the enthusiasm of a colleague ‘rubs off’ on us; and how we find we can somehow tap into the emotions of our team and motivate and inspire them.

But others relate to the unconscious mind’s powers of misdirection. Intuition can play us false: we follow our gut but the solution it leads us to doesn’t work - we’ve jumped to conclusions. We don’t fully understand ourselves and what matters to us and make wrong choices – and perhaps find ourselves in a career which doesn’t fulfil us. We find a colleague impossible to deal with for reasons we just can’t understand. Or we find setbacks trigger strong feelings in us, which at some level we know are disproportionate but we find hard to manage; we become so bound up in our emotions that we have little energy left for the job.

We see these phenomena not only in our own working lives, but all around us. The dark sides of the unconscious mind – irrationality, a refusal to acknowledge and deal with reality as it is, distorted emotions and values – have been much in evidence in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. We’ve seen psychologically damaged leaders driven by an apparently irresistible personal compulsion for power and status and uninterested in the public good; a growing preference, fed by social media, for ‘alternative’ facts and conspiracy theories, stories which tell us what we want to hear, so we don’t need to grapple with unpalatable reality; and misguided decisions, which should have been taken on rational grounds after careful evaluation of the facts, but instead are made by policy-makers in thrall to a host of ideological and cognitive biases.

We’re familiar with how our conscious minds work - by means of rational, logical analysis. But our unconscious minds operate in a completely different way by constructing simplified representations of reality and looking for matching patterns. The first step in unlocking your magical unconscious powers and avoiding their misleading promptings is to understand this difference. So in this series of articles I will put forward a simple model to explain how this instant pattern-matching ability enables us to solve problems and understand and influence other people, but also how it can go badly wrong and lead us into faulty judgments, wrong choices and, indeed, personal unhappiness.

Just as I do when coaching, I will draw on theories and research from cognitive and personality psychology, management and leadership theory, neuroscience and psychotherapy, and case studies from my own experience, my coaching practice and the wider world, and try to extract the gist. Most importantly, I will attempt to formulate practical lessons for use in our working lives.

Our unconscious minds all construe our worlds in different ways, depending on our background and experience – that’s why it’s always illuminating to share perspectives. So, I’d be fascinated to hear what you think; and please share these articles with others in your network who you think will be interested. If you are an academic or a coach, does the necessarily simplified material give an adequate account of our current state of knowledge and would it be helpful to your clients? If you are a hard-pressed leader or creative, is it illuminating and useful in your professional life?

Sources
Haidt, Jonathan The Happiness Hypothesis – Putting Ancient Wisdom and Philosophy to the Test of Modern Science, William Heineman, 2006