Applying Survival Skills for Greater Productivity in Business

Available for Interviews: Roger Hall.

Dr. Roger Hall has a doctorate in Counseling Psychology, is an Executive Coach to entrepreneurs and leaders, and is an in-demand public speaker throughout North America.

 

Talking Points from Roger Hall 
on Applying Survival Skills in Business:

If you’re ever lost in the woods or in the wilderness, you’ll be in good shape if you managed to remember this helpful acronym, S.T.O.P, which stands for Stop, Think, Observe, Plan. And now you might be thinking, What does that have to do with anything?

If you were four years old and you got lost in the wilderness, what would you do? Well, four year olds, what they typically do is they walk a few hundred yards. They get scared, they cry, they sit down and they’re easy to find.

What we learn in wilderness survival works in the rest of the world and what they teach people in wilderness survival. Stop. Think, Observe, Plan.

When you get afraid, you start moving and you start thinking, I gotta do something different, otherwise I’m going to be in trouble. No, no, no, no, no. When you’re anxious, when you’re keyed up, the part of your brain that starts firing is the basic, is the lizard brain, the amygdala. How do I respond to this fear?

But the part that gets turned off is this convenient part up here, right above your eyes called the prefrontal cortex. This is in charge of what’s called executive function planning reason, patience, self-control. Guess what? When you’re afraid, all of that turns off.

1. Stop. This means literally stopping. Sit down. Settle yourself.
2. Think. You’ve got to start to analyze. Okay, here’s my issue. Here’s my problem. What do I need to do? Where do I need to go? What’s the best resources that I have to address this issue?
3. Observe. Once you’ve stopped and slowed yourself down and thought about your problem, you observed what your resources are—
4. Plan. Come up with a plan. People are like, “Oh, we gotta get our profits up,” and they start to, they get spun up in a way that they do all kinds of activity. Most of it’s not very productive.

The biggest problem leaders I work with have is that they don’t spend enough time in quiet reflection. They don’t Stop and they don’t Think, and because they don’t stop and think, they can’t Observe and they can’t Plan.

So they’re in a flurry of unproductive activity. Incorporating this basic wilderness survival tactic can help professionals be more productive and be more successful in attaining the goals they are after.