Leash The Lizard Unleash Your Creativity

Seth Godin, marketing genius extraordinaire, has been talking about the lizard brain lately—that’s the older emotional/reptilian part of your brain that deals in fear, sex, and food. Lizard brain often kicks up fear when you do something new and creative.

If you are lucky enough to get paid to do creative work, you are being paid to do stuff that scares you. So deal with it. Fear increases as you get closer to the delivery date for your creative work. Lizard brain will make sure of that.

Here is one idea for taming lizard brain—or at least putting him or her on a leash. 

Research from Columbia Business School has shown that posture affects testosterone levels. Puff out your chest, lean over your desk, or kick up your feet, and testosterone, the power hormone, goes up; cortisol, a stress hormone, goes down.

What you do with your body will affect how you feel.

But what is your body doing? To find out, you need to be able to pay attention. And that’s hard when we get stressed and fearful.

I’m a big proponent of meditation and mindfulness practices, simply sitting quietly each day for 15 minutes and paying attention to your breathing and what is going on in and around you, while letting your thinking come to rest. This daily practice builds your muscle for paying attention and being able to handle upsetting thoughts and physical feelings like fear.

It may not sound like much, but paying close attention to your thoughts and bodily sensations and acting mindfully, such as breathing fully or standing tall, when you feel like collapsing like a kicked dog, is a very powerful technique for calming down lizard brain, dealing with fear, and delivering your creations on time. 

Men Don't Cry--They Die Instead

Manuel died day before yesterday. He was 39 years old. Stopped eating and started drinking a few months ago and didn't stop till his liver shut down. He was a decent man who could pick up rocks as big and heavy as a medium-sized safe, but he had a soft heart, and maybe no place to share it.

About a year and a half ago his relationship fell apart after twenty years. His step-son of twenty years wouldn't talk to him. His daughter was angry with him. He worked for me doing the gardening on two rental properties I own. I'd see him once a month when he came by to get paid. When I would ask him about how it was going, he would say, "It hurts, but I'll get through it." A few months ago his father died of cancer. He said that was really tough. He had worked with his dad since his dad had started the gardening business when Manuel was a kid.

Manuel told me that when he separated and moved to his new place, a young neighbor, a woman in her mid-twenties saw that he had been crying. "What's up with you? Men don't cry." He told her they did but they didn't show it, and walked away. I tried to get Manuel to come in to see me. I could have tried harder. Two months after his father's death, Manuel was dead.

There's a lot of pain out there--always has been. Do what you can to help. Of course, in the end we can only save ourselves, but we can make it easier for one another to get help, to find the right medication and people who can listen and support us and help us find our way back to life.

I wish that young woman had said something else, something that might have pushed Manuel to get some help rather than go deeper into the darkness inside. I wish I had reached out sooner and done more. I wish Manuel were still alive.