How many of us have gone into a meeting or a confrontation with a predetermined thought of how it was going to go? How does that usually go? I know there have been times where I walked into a meeting upset about it before it even started. We are trained to prepare for the worst. Our brains want us ready to react in fear. Can we rewire that? I believe we can, with something called “priming”.
Prime the Mind
There are many examples of how priming works. The most common example I can think of comes from Ivan Pavlov and his dogs. Pavlov was a psychological researcher interested in studying “conditioning”. His most famous experiment involved him testing salvation response in dogs. He would ring a bell before giving the dogs food. Eventually, after enough times, he could ring the bell and the dogs would salivate without even seeing the food.
This type of conditioning or priming happens everywhere around us. People in the marketing business are great at it. They are able to insert an idea like “you will look like this if you buy this car” into a 15 second clip without us even knowing. Take Apple for example. In the 2000’s, Apple ran an ad with the slogan “think differently”. Another test showed this Apple commercial to Group A, and an average IBM commercial to Group B. After the commercial, they were given a test on creativity. Group A scored about 20% higher.
Put it to Practice
Famed life-coach, Tony Robbins, dives really deep into priming. He talks about his old events held in buildings built next to train tracks. One of these events was a week-long event where the train would drive by with the horn BLARING, five or six times per day, every day. By Wednesday, people were ready to erupt every time that horn blew. Tony Robbins used that as a teachable moment.
He instructed everyone to erupt as if you were a kid on Christmas when they heard the train. Imagine this train is bringing you all of the joy in the world when the horn sounds. Rather than slump over in our chair, lets jump up out of our seat and breathe happiness into the room. This may feel a bit extreme, but it worked! By Thursday, people were excited for that moment the train whistle would blow!
You can do this in any area of your life. Maybe you have a group project coming up you aren’t excited for. Maybe you just get overly anxious trying to step into the box. Rather than think about all the stress of it, try getting REALLY excited. It may feel strange at first, but after a few weeks, I think you will start to see a change!
