This document discusses how self-image and perception impact performance. It explains that people have a natural tendency to perceive things that confirm their existing beliefs while missing other important details. This "reticular activating system" acts as a filter for selective attention. The document encourages developing one's "causative power" by understanding how the RAS works and using goal setting to focus it on solutions. Understanding both one's own and others' RAS can help overcome limitations and design an improved future.

1. Self Image and Performance
UWECI February, 2013
© 2007 Inside Results, LLC

2. Self Image and Performance
• This multi-part series is intended to give you the
tools and knowledge for designing a better future for
yourselves, your families and your organizations
• This information will help you leverage and develop
the performance potential inherent in yourself and in
the people around you by strengthening your own
Causative Power, your Efficacy for change.
• Other expectations

3. The ADKAR Insight
• AWARENESS which means that not only leadership but
everyone in the organization has an understanding of the
underlying issues, problems and challenges which are the
cause or the impetus for the proposed change.
• DESIRE which means an identification with and a
personal motivation to engage in the change i.e. WIIFM.
• KNOWLEDGE which means the training, the tools, the
processes required to implement the change.
• ABILITY which means each person‟s ability to do the task,
to operate the tool, to perform with the all of the
components which were covered in the training or in the
knowledge transfer phase of the organizational change.
• REINFORCEMENT which involves all of the follow up and
sustainment activity required for persistence.
(We‟ll draw on literally dozens of authors, video, resources. This is just 1 example.)

4. Perception Awareness
• Lets do an exercise - Basketball Passing Video
• This is a test
• Count the number of times that the team in
white shirts passes the basketball

5. Perception Awareness
• We operate from an assumption that we are
extremely aware of all the important things in
the world around us
• We generally have confidence that we see and
know close to 100% of what is going on
• We also form opinions and beliefs based on
this high confidence we possess in our
perception of objective reality.
• Consider this video

6. Everyone has a RAS
• Reticular Activating System (Google it!)
• This is the perception filter and scanner that
allows us to exercise Selective Attention
• Blind Spots or Enhanced Environment Awareness

7. The RAS and Your Beliefs
• All of your past experiences and conditioning
creates your „world view‟ including blind spots
• We selectively filter perceptions and information
which support our beliefs – „Is man a rational animal or a rationalizing animal?‟
• Optimists and Pessimists both confidently cite
evidence to substantiate their world view
• Decisions, Risks and the RAS
• The New Car paradox “Psychology of Decision Making”
• What‟s the term they have for this in Real Estate?

8. The RAS and Goal Setting
• Put your RAS to work for you, it finds the „How‟
• When you focus your thinking on a goal in
detail, your RAS starts scanning for solutions
to get you there. It opens the filters to allow
more options to be presented for your
conscious consideration.

9. Putting it together
• Develop our Causative Power to effect change
and design an improved future, a New Normal
• Understand the RAS in yourself
• Limitations inherent in the filtering function
• Capacity for scanning the environment
• Relationship with your beliefs, assumptions
• Remember the RAS in others, too

10. Clues Abound
“So many time it happens
That we live our lives in chains
And we never even know we have the key”
Our Journey together is to find our key, loose our
chains and boldly live our aspirations

11. Resources Before Next Time
• TED Talks
• Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you are
• Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy
shows how “power posing” -- standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don‟t feel confident -- can affect
testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, and might even have an impact on our chances for success.
• Explore TED
• Youtube
• RSA Animate - The Divided Brain
• In this new RSAnimate, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our 'divided brain' has profoundly
altered human behaviour, culture and society. Taken from a lecture given by Iain McGilchrist as part of the RSA's free public
events programme.
• Google “Reticular Activating System”
• Facebook “WE.R.CR” group
• www.excelatlife.com