The power of paradox can be found in so many parts of our life. ‘Less is more,’ saying no is the right yes for a goal to be manifested or being ‘alone together’ in our technology-driven world. These distinctions can be hard to perceive yet missing these nuances can be disastrous, particularly for high-net-worth clients and family offices that run high-stakes operations, where errors of judgment aren’t just a mere ‘oops.’ When we train our brain without the skill of discernment of nuance, we risk compulsively doing things that feel right, which may in fact be far from it. And since the brain is addicted to patterns and reducing dissonance, we can feel good while we insidiously sink. Here’s a look at the important role of mental health in a family business context.
It can be difficult to admit that people in human service professions don’t really know human nature. They simply know what they want to do with it, what others should do with it, or what’s wrong with what others want to do with it, swapping out their “doing” as better. In the case of many HNWIs, where money is abundant, the cost of throwing a few dollars at a poor solution is minimal. In a way, this parallels the dynamic of the addictive self-help industry. While not all HNWIs are addicts per se, they’re at a higher risk of falling victim to their own dopamine dumps due to the very nature of their lifestyle. So while the average person is simply addicted to doing whatever an infomercial promises, the HNWI has the potential to be similarly deluded by worldly evidence of success. This dopamine dump can ‘protect’ them from seeing nuanced wisdom beneath.
And so the cycle of madness continues
But madness isn’t always clearly visible. It’s often cloaked in great words such as transformation, change, happiness, peace, high performance, alignment, conflict resolution, profit and success. What’s fascinating here is that you can be giving the wrong advice using these words, but when the brain hears them, it creates a sort of dissociative and calming response. One could even argue that a neurochemical response pattern akin to addiction circuitry is activated.
What makes humanity fascinating is the way it can hang out with contradictory concepts and seek dissonance reduction more than truth but use words as substitutes for “truth.”
Why would soberly, grounded and engaged brains fork out millions for self-help products mostly done by buyers who have bought similar “solutions” in the past? This suggests that most of the dollars are coming from people who realise they need to embrace some form of change, but their approach to doing so is skewed. This is due to the many chemical changes in the brain to rewards achieved. Oftentimes, this dopaminergic reward circuitry is the consequence of their success but at times a huge barrier to actual sustainable joy.
What is going on here?
I think it is said best by one of the great apologists of the 20th century, Frank Sheed, in the quote below. Given the time his brilliant book Society and Sanity was written (1953), and from where this quote is taken, the use of “man” for human nature was commonplace, and so I share the quote unadulterated for the effect underneath gender that he was trying to make a point of, outside of an inclusion issue:
“But in the whole of our social life, man is overlooked. Man is taken simply as a word, the label for a particular kind of being (the kind of which we belong ourselves), and nobody stops for any serious consideration of what the word means. We proceed immediately to consider how to make the creature happier without ever asking what the creature is. It should be just the other way around. When some new proposal is made which affects the way men live our immediate reaction is always to ask, Will it make men happier? But this should be the second question, not the first. The first question should be, Does it fit the nature of man?” – Frank Sheed, Society and Sanity (1953)
Because of a difficulty to look at what makes a human being – perhaps at the risk of hitting a wire that makes those truths unpopular to say in this raw and tense world we live in – we are questing for things that may not be possible. And God forbid we say a heresy sentence like that in this everything-is-possible culture of autonomy. This is often seen in the phrase “In these uncertain times, we are living in now.” We have this strange sense that we can control more than we did years ago, but technological breakthroughs are methodological changes and not changes to the reality of the human itself. In the case of HNWIs who have achieved so much, it can be difficult for them to release their ego in smaller, day-to-day situations.
What are those quiet yet persisting things that make us human, which seem immune to progress or increased happiness and perfection at all costs? Or better said, the things we should accept about our nature before seeking limitless change in the hopes that the change would happen quietly and more authentically.
Emotions before reason
Like it or not, the fight or flight circuitry runs more of our show than we think. Even when we believe we are engaging with others, listening attentively, seemingly motivated to “change,” and open to requests coming at us. Many times what seems like the above is fence-hedging. Parts of us are trying to make ‘change’ talk while being afraid to lose something we want to try to hang on to while using the words of change. This is our nature. To seek growth and not at the same time. Or try to rewrite reality over so we can make it truthful. This neural state of affairs suggests it is in our nature to doubt whether what we say is what we want because most of us are way more internally conflicted than we want to admit. And a self-help product for the “internally conflicted about buying the product itself” likely won’t sell as well on QVC next to the product assuming a unified, singular motivation.
Einstein said ‘no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.’ And this dilemma fits this advice to a tee. With these clients and this kind of issue, it’s worth finding a safe and non-invasive neurotechnology solution to rewire the vagus nerve to self-soothe or self-protect. Much of this compulsive success-seeking has roots in a disordered or anxious central nervous system. And with change work being a bottom-up brain problem, the methodology has to come from the brainstem level.
We are sense-makers over truth-seekers
As marketers and Hollywood can all attest to their success over the human perception of reality, it is clear that human beings love the packaging of a good story at all costs. So much so, that someone may cease going deeper once satisfied with a good-enough story. We are wired to seek the reduction of that anxiety in any way possible. We are, in essence, lazy discerners, verbally addicted to words of excellence but living out ways of the “good enough”. Why? Because telling a good, dissonant-reducing story is easy and feels good. One way of dealing with this is to hire someone able to tell you the truth, to help you find what you don’t know. Ego can be hard to allow this, but HNWIs need to ensure their identities are subsumed into their work.
Social transactions are our currency, be it counterfeit or otherwise
Ever notice the apparent pressure one feels to return a call, text, or email? Or answer something when asked a question? It seems that we are driven by some law of social exchange with a back-and-forth rhythm greater than the content inside it or the boundaries that are supposed to contain it as meaningful in the first place. Remaining silent, saying “I don’t know,” or something else considered culturally contrarian appears out-forced by the norms of feeling the need to convey something at all cost. Even the notion of dialogue has an implicit bias in that it should be preferred over not speaking or engaging. To deal with this, look at hiring a mental health professional to help you identify the insecurities you’ve been feeding through your success, which have kept you from looking deeply into this. Neurotechnology can help uncover and fix stuck fight or flight circuitries.
With these powerful undercurrents at play in our lives and our perceived rightness on everything, one wonders if we know what we think we know about why we do what we do. And even if we can be discerning enough to know these issues of amount, context, timing, and other perceptually non-salient variables that we flat out ignore or make “all the same.” Brains are subject to masses of sensory data that they don’t necessarily process every nanosecond. Behavioural economics has proven these biases and we still insist we are not affected by them. Agreeing to this is the first step to being able to make meaningful change.
A great lyric from a song called Ignorance and Privilege by the folk singer John Gorka points to this invisible force of influence:
‘… if the wind is at your back and you never turn around, you may never know the wind is there. You may never hear the sound.’
We could argue that the way we think is similar. If we don’t develop an awareness of this wind, we will continue to solve the wrong problems of life, however well. We risk being blinded by the pleasure creation in our brain that was glad to create anything at all. Let’s hope we don’t stay stuck looking at the water like Narcissus, loving the creator we deemed ourselves to be.