THE subtitle of this book is “The mind management programme for confidence, success and happiness.” The author is a consultant psychiatrist who lectures, consults to businesses and was the resident psychiatrist to the elite British cycling team. His area of speciality is described as “optimising the functioning of the mind.”

This book could easily be relegated to the “self-help” section with no relevance to business, but for the fact that we take our whole selves to work each day, and how we function at work is based profoundly on our inner stuff. A colleague put it succinctly: I advertise for a CEO, and who shows up? A human being!

We often come across people who sabotage their own success at work and negatively impact their careers through behaviours they could not justify rationally. Peters’ book explains the struggle that takes place within the mind and shows how to apply this understanding to every area of one’s life. If you can recognise how your mind is working and understand and manage your emotions and thoughts, you are in a better position to manage yourself.

The Chimp Paradox provides a simple, perhaps simplistic, understanding of the way in which the mind works and how you can manage it, by dressing the science of brain physiology in metaphor. It aims to assist you in your self-develop by giving you the skills to, for example, reduce anxiety, build confidence and choose your emotions.

The focus is on three of the seven aspects of the brain that in combination form what Peters calls the psychological mind. They are the frontal, limbic and parietal. The frontal Peters calls the Human, the limbic, the Chimp, and the parietal the Computer. The Human and the Chimp have independent personalities with very different agendas, ways of thinking and operating. The Chimp is the emotional aspect that can be very constructive or very destructive and is the focus of the book.

Success is when the Chimp is working for you, not against you. The Chimp, he explains, is like your pet dog – you are not responsible for the nature of your dog, but you are responsible for managing it and keeping it well behaved in the park.

When you are using a part of your brain, functional brain scanners are able to show the blood supply going to that area. If you think calmly and rationally, blood can be seen going to the frontal area, the Human, and you are probably performing as you wish to. When you become emotional and irrational, especially when you are angry or distressed, blood supply goes to the limbic, the Chimp, which is rarely how you would have wished to come across.

Consider this situation: A colleague comments on how tired you look. This message goes to the Chimp first, and Chimps react emotionally, typically thinking it is being criticised: You are not pulling your weight in the team. It becomes agitated, annoyed or upset. However, the Chimp could as easily react emotionally, but positively, thinking that the colleague is concerned, and is possibly right and you should slow down. The Human, in contrast, would calmly check what the colleague intended so that the response could be a rational one.

The Chimp jumps to conclusions, thinks only in black and white, is paranoid, catastrophic, and judgemental. The Human is evidence-based, rational, sees matters in context and with perspective and understands that there are shades of grey between black and white. 

The parietal, acting as the Computer is viewed as a reference source housing experiences to which both the Human and the Chimp refer. If you have had a poor experience with a previous manager who criticised you and never praised you, when you are called to a meeting with your new managers, your past experience is referenced by both the Chimp and the Human. The Chimp takes the past experiences into the present, all managers are critical, and so you enter the meeting ready for an attack. The Human would see the situation differently, not all managers are the same and this is another manager and there is no reason to believe the meeting will be adversarial.

Each chapter ends with an exercise such as reviewing how you dealt with your Chimp over the past 24 hours and logging your conclusions in a few sentences.

The book is a repackaging of what appears in many other books of similar intent. It is differentiated only in that it dresses up brain science as metaphor. Despite these limitations, if this is unfamiliar territory, Peters’ book is an easy entrance into the arena of self-understanding that is useful in the unforgiving environment of corporate and business life.

Readability       Light +---- Serious
Insights        High ---+- Low
Practical        High ---+- Low

Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy.