Imprint: Triarchy Press
Published: 2018
List price £18.00 
Format: paperback, ePub, Kindle
Extent: 248pp.
ISBNs: 
Paperback: 978-1-911193-34-0
ePub: 978-1-911193-32-6
Tags: Organizational change, leadership, business psychology, organization development
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Beyond Threat
Finding your centre in the midst of uncertainty and change
​
Nelisha Wickremasinghe

How the hidden drives and motivations of the Trimotive Brain determine our behaviour at work -- and what we can do about it.

Unless we are in physical danger few of us think we are living ‘under threat’. Yet our brains believe we are at risk many times a day.

Nowhere is this more true than at work, where our response to deadlines, budget cuts,  abrasive managers, competitive colleagues and dissatisfied customers is too often controlled by a part of our brain that’s better suited to detecting, devouring or running away from predators. This is our threat brain, and on its own it is little help in dealing with the complex challenges of organisational life.

In Beyond Threat, business psychologist and international leadership and organisational change consultant Dr. Nelisha Wickremasinghe takes us beyond the threat brain and describes the workings of our evolved Trimotive Brain which can respond with intelligence and compassion to unwanted, unexpected and unpleasant life experiences – if we learn how to manage it.

This book is an invitation to:
  • Discover how our biological heritage (nature) and individual experience (nurture) combine to create who we are - and why that matters in organisational life.
  • Learn to notice and re-direct the hidden motives that control most of our behaviour – especially those arising from our threat brain.
  • Find out, in three detailed case studies, how executives working in different corporate environments identified and overcame the problem habits arising from their overactive threat brain.
Beyond Threat is written for people leading and changing organisations. It offers a radical new understanding and awareness of the limitations we bring to work with us every day - and the possibility of transforming our experience and capabilities.

Further details:

Most of our problems in and beyond the workplace arise because our body and mind is over exposed to real or imagined threat.  This activates the so-called 'threat brain' system. When this is combined with our 'drive brain' system we can - and do - get pulled into destructive loops of compulsive or addictive behaviour.

Leaders need to support all employees to notice, understand and regulate this threat response in order to stay ‘centred’ when responding to, for example, work load pressure, performance anxiety, disruptive global trends, team conflict and rapid change.  

Research shows that self-compassion triggers neurological activity in our ‘safe brain’ system that regulates threat and restores emotional equilibrium. By cultivating our safe brain we increase individual and group resilience and with it, the potential to thrive and succeed in today's VUCA  environments.

Most people’s threat brain is too alert and too active. This is not good for us. Threat brain was designed to get us out of physical danger not to trap us in psychological loops that damage our health and performance.  

This book demystifies the complex and often unconscious experience of threat/fear and how it motivates our behaviour.  It explains the evolutionary benefits of this experience and also the problems it causes us in terms of the feelings, thoughts and reactions it triggers.  

Drawing on research from developmental psychology and the contemporary neuroscience of emotions, the book offers new thinking (the 'Trimotive Brain') to help readers identify threat-based emotions and how they motivate ‘toxic drive’ behaviours related to over-consuming, achieving and competing.  

Learn how to regulate threat by stimulating the ‘safe brain’ and by becoming more aware of unconscious motivation.  This helps to develop drive behaviours that are value-aligned, non-addictive and respectful of others.  ​

Read more:

About the author
​Introduction
​Reviews
Images from the book

Readership

This is a book for leaders, managers and change agents in any organisation.

​It explains why we behave in the different ways that we do under pressure; how to notice, understand and manage that behaviour; and how to work with others to help them recognise and alter their behaviour. 

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