You, Your Executive Brain and Your Management Style

You have probably seen your Executive Brain in action for at least fifteen years now, maybe quite a bit longer. You probably have some idea of its personality and management style. If You don't - think about how you treat yourself. Are You a yeller - yelling at yourself when something goes wrong? Or are You kindly and sympathetic? Do You try to motivate yourself with criticism - or with rewards? Do You ignore yourself whenever possible on the theory that you are not that interesting and probably up to no good - or do you lavish time and attention on yourself? Do You check in with yourself frequently to see how Your corporation's doing and how worker morale is these days - or do You focus relentlessly on your public image and the bottom line? Do You get jazzed up by vision and mission statements and long-range goals or do You revel in day-to-day operations? Do you follow Your own directions - or do You get no respect from your workers and find Yourself constantly overruled by yourself?

Once you've got a vague sort of feel for your management style - ask yourself if you're running yourself the way you'd like to. Do you believe in worker autonomy and decentralized authority yet wear yourself out micromanaging yourself? Do you run yourself according to criticism because that was your parents' style yet really you are a big softy who'd like to give all your workers a bonus just for showing up?

You do have some latitude here - You are of course constrained like we all are by the incessant demands of our stockholders, (e.g., friends, relatives, creditors, employers)...but You are the fucking CEO. The fucking stockholders don't have to hear what's in your head as you interact with yourself, fuck 'em if they don't like how You talk to yourself, it's none of their goddamn business.

It gets easier to understand why You sometimes treat yourself strangely if you remember that you are not one monolithic entity - you are gigantic conglomerate made up of many different departments. You are not treating You strangely, you are treating your different departments as if they were other people - because that's exactly what they're like. All the people skills or lack thereof You have acquired in your life come into play when You are interacting with your own different departments.

Let's take your Operational Brain for an example. It has a personality too. And it may be quite different from the personality of your Executive Brain. You've spent some time with the OB over the course of your life - accidentally of course because you didn't actually realize it existed, but You have had some opportunity to hear its input.

What kind of personality does it have? Is it the hysterical type - constantly screaming 'Oh my god, we'll never be able to do that!' Is it a worrywart constantly telling you - 'you're going to get a cold, I can feel it coming.' Does it like to be an alarmist, yelling out when you get a twinge 'Heart attack! Oh my god we're dying!' or 'Cancer! This is one of the seven warning signs of cancer, I know it! My god we're fucking doomed!'

Or is it one of those stoic, silent types - so that when your Executive Brain looks down at your leg gashed open by an unfortunate encounter with an electric chainsaw and says 'oh fuck, what's that? It doesn't look good' your Operational Brain replies - 'it's just a little blood don't worry about it'. Or - 'it's a headache, not a brain tumor, take an Advil and forget about it.' Does it tell You - 'don't put any of those chemicals in me! I'm opposed to pill-popping or pesticides or junk food or anything else. I like to keep myself pure.' Or does it say - 'bring on the fried Doritos and cheese - we can handle it.'

Is it conservative with your energy, encouraging you to take the elevator in your own two-story home? Or is it reckless and exuberant making you want to run when everyone else wants to walk? Self-effacing and content to stay in the background and follow orders - or a showboat who encourages you to throw yourself on the ball even though 8 very large football players are inevitably going to pile on top of you and squash your little football-playing body? Wary of injury or contemptuous of pain? Your Operational Brain has a style and a personality and a typical manner of communicating with You. Does it calm You down or rile You up? How does your body seem to react to things?

Not that it's under any obligation to be completely fucking consistent - it may like to be enthusiastic about alcohol on Friday nights and completely opposed to it on Saturday mornings, but by now You've probably learned a thing or two about its personality. Keep in mind that its primary responsibility is to allocate your resources effectively to ensure your survival - its personality, paranoid or easygoing, stolid or excitable, is an attempt to do just that.

Now think about whether You are particularly happy about the way You get along with it or don't get along with it. When it tells you you're getting a cold, do you obediently go along with it and get one? Or do You explain to it that you don't like colds and You'd appreciate it if it'd allocate resources towards fighting it off? When it tells You you're getting tired and run down and running dangerously low on resources do You listen to it and try to shore yourself up with extra resources - or do You ignore it and wait til you melt down?

Think Captain Kirk and Scotty. If you were fucking Captain Kirk, how would you handle Scotty? Respect him, overrule him, push him, cajole him, flatter him, manipulate him, bully him or consult with him? Defer to his expertise but ask him to defer to your authority? What would you do?

What kind of a Scotty would You like to work with? A technical genius or an enthusiastic can-do achiever? Do You like your information slow and calm or does the occasional excited outburst get Your attention?

If You are having a personality conflict with your Scotty, You can tell him. You can work it out with him just the way You'd attempt to work it out with anyone else. You don't have to let your alarmist, panic-prone Operational Brain jerk Your chain every week and a half with another fucking cancer scare. You can explain to it that You'd really prefer to work with it on a more rational basis. Of course, if You're going to do that, You've got to be prepared to hear his side of the story. Maybe he has learned by bitter experience that You don't fucking listen to anything short of a cancer scare.

You may be forced to make some compromises in your style and grudgingly listen to your fucking body every once in a while. Or you may be able to use charm and intuition to cleverly beguile it out of a bad habit - maybe it just wants attention and if you soothe and flatter it by telling it what a big, strong, handsome body it is and what an efficient allocator of resources your Operational Brain is when it climbs the stairs for You - it may very well start preening and showing off for You and darting around energetically as it shows the ladies it can still handle a quick game of touch football with the younger guys.

Since it's a planner and it uses the information You give it to allocate resources - it stands to reason that if You give it bad information it is not going to do a great job. Maybe there is a little longstanding resentment around that issue - eh? Maybe Your Executive Brain and Your Operational Brain need to have a little meeting around the issue of expectations. Maybe it's time to give your Operational Brain a performance review. Maybe it's time to let it air some gripes. Your Operational Brain is ruthlessly dedicated to Your priorities - as it understands them - and will literally rob your bones to feed Your ambitions or rob Your dreams to feed your gut - it will let you get cancer because it understood from You that your career was more important than fighting it off or your family was more important than your health - so are you giving it the information You want about your priorities?

Society likes to tell you that Operational Brain matters should be handled by rational Executive Brain thinking based on current input from government-approved Consultants. For example, they tell you that you should make rational nutritional decisions based on the USDA food pyramid and that you should get Proper Exercise and Have Good Sleeping Habits and Eat Broccoli and on and on and on. And if you are not in a government-approved mood, society will tell you take soy supplements and St. John's Wort and get yourself acupunctured and engage in a Healthful Yoga Class and on and on and on. And this makes a certain amount of sense. Boning up on a little information about Pernicious Anemia can be damn helpful if you have it and learning what the fuck to do if you have a poisonous snake bite can come in handy when one bites you and Understanding Hypothermia can be a major plus when you are lost on a goddamn mountain-top freezing to death. Lots and lots of Consultants have dedicated many many resources and lots of time to trying to figure out your body and why it gets so goddamn many pimples when you are thirteen. They are to be commended for this.

On the other hand, society basically knows jack shit about Your Operational Brain and will insist on telling you the most goddamned fucking ignorant idiotic stupid shit you can possibly imagine. Consultants used to tell you that you'd be much improved by sticking lots of leeches all over your body when you didn't feel well. Your Operational Brain didn't think so! The high priced Consultants used to tell you that if you had breast cancer, the smartest thing to do was to hack those suckers off. You never cared for that and lo and behold! - wrong! High-priced Consultants used to prescribe Thalidomide to pregnant women - that wasn't very pleasant when armless, legless children started showing up. Consultants have a long and illustrious history of being dead fucking wrong. Look up Consultant in the dictionary and one of the definitions is 'expensive way to fuck something up.'

And the truth is, you don't make your goddamn nutritional decisions on a rational Executive Brain basis, unless you have an extremely strong-willed pushy Executive Brain that won't listen to anybody but high-priced Consultants. In reality, your Operational Brain is constantly trying to get your ear and make startling recommendations like 'More Cheesecake!' 'You need a salad'. 'Taco Bell sure sounds tasy right about now'. 'How 'bout some chocolate?' And so on. It's not just a one-way path where you tell your body what you think it needs. Just because you are the fucking CEO doesn't you can call all the shots without input. Your Operational Brain is not just there to take orders - it's there to make recommendations.

Sometimes it will make recommendations you have a major problem with - like 'don't quit smoking, we fucking love that shit and depend on it.' Or - 'please consume mass quantities of alcohol until your liver gives out - it makes us feel better and motivates the workers.' Or 'I was never much of a fan of crack cocaine until I got addicted to it - now I fucking can't live without the stuff!' And so on. Sometimes your Operational Brain and your Executive Brain are going to have a major disagreement. And when that's the case, you might just as well get to know your opponent. Listen to it, learn about it, feel it out, try to figure out what the fuck it's talking about. Why does it hate exercise? Can you cut a deal with it? This is where your Executive Brain can really come into its own, circling around your Operational Brain, probing for weaknesses, strategizing, cajoling, manipulating, communicating priorities, persuading, allowing objections to be aired, doling out rewards and so on. It is an Executive after all.

And sometimes your Operational Brain is dead fucking right and everyone else is wrong. It encourages you to avoid spinach like the fucking plague - because it knows your body doesn't fucking handle spinach well. Bad minerals. It encourages you to sneak mushrooms into every conceivable dish - because it knows that mushrooms are better for you with your particular body chemistry than they are for the many people who have just never been all that interested in mushrooms. It won't let you eat avocados even though everyone else loves them - because your gallbladder has a major problem with their delicious oily fat.

In other words, your Operational Brain is part of your management team, for better or worse. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong. Handle that situation however You like. Bicker, play practical jokes on each other, consult, argue, reason together, problem-solve, cooperate, push each other, have a pissing contest, bond, agree to disagree, jostle for position, undermine each other's authority, fight and make up, be polite, be respectful, give each other big hugs, yell, apologize, meet, strategize together, insult each other, adjust to each other - establish any type of working relationship you like. Or fuck yourself up and don't establish one at all. Hey - it's your brain. I am one hundred percent fucking behind you no matter what you do. Because I can't fucking help it - I love the both of you - ya big lugs!

Next - meet one of your favorite brains - your Sex Brain!

Your lovable but confusing sex brain...

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