Concluding our quick tour through How to Walk on Fire (aka How Bad Do You Want It?), let’s talk about one more “coping strategy” for rocking it.
It’s called “The Audience Effect.”
Short story.
Researchers have brought people into a lab (or brought the lab to them!) and tested them on everything from how much weight they can lift to how clean they keep their cafeteria.
For example, you can put pictures of human eyeballs on a wall in a cafeteria and students will keep it cleaner. (Hah!) (Seriously.)
Or, you can test people on how much weight they can lift in different settings and what you’ll find is that they’ll lift more when doing it on a stage alone in front of an audience.
The Audience Effect.
As Matt Fitzgerald says: “The online Psychology Dictionary defines it as ‘the influence of the presence of other people on an individual’s behavior.’ Psychologists believe that the audience effect is mediated by a so-called sociometer, a mechanism involving multiple regions of the brain, including the anterior insula and the inferior gyrus. Through this mechanism people notice and interpret the attention of those around them and use this input to adjust their behavior in ways that are likely to earn more positive attention.”
Isn’t that fascinating?
Slightly different context, but I’m reminded of Angela Duckworth’s wisdom from Grit where she tells us: “The bottom line on culture and grit is: If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader, and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture.”
And all that inspires me (even more!) to create our Heroic (noble!) social platform where we support one another with accountability “eyeballs” as we all elevate our standards and make our best our baseline within a community where the OPTIMAL behavior is the NORMATIVE behavior (aka it’s weird NOT to Optimize/meditate/prioritize sleep/etc./etc./etc.).
Oh!
One more thing: Know whose eyeballs we want to make sure are present as much as possible?
Your daimon’s.
That’s Today’s +1.
From my eyeballs to yours, LET’S DO THIS!
Unlock this Heroic +1 (and over 1,000 more)!
Create your account to get more wisdom in less time. Personal development made simple so you can flourish in energy, work, and love. Today.
