Leading with Emotional Intelligence: Hands-On ... - always yours

290 LEADING WITH EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
and that is one reason we use only 5-10% of our brainpower. These
same or similar thoughts form patterns or clusters of our beliefs, yet
leave out a plethora of other possible views. Senge defi nes “mental
models” as “deeply ingrained assumptions,
. . . we have as
many as 60,000
thoughts a day.
Ninety-five
percent of those
thoughts are the
same ones we
had yesterday.
generalizations, or even pictures or images
that influence how we understand the
world and how we take action.”
The term mental model has been used
by psychologists since the 1940s. Cognitive
psychologists, cognitive scientists, and
more recently managers use the term.
In his book The Fifth Discipline, Senge
popularized the term as one of his five
disciplines. In the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook,
“mental model” is defi ned as “both
the semi-permanent tacit ‘maps’ of the world which people hold
in their long-term memory, and the short-term perceptions which
people build up as part of their everyday reasoning process.” 15
WHY IS UNDERSTANDING OUR MENTAL MODELS IMPORTANT?
The mental models we carry around are usually invisible to us
and others yet are very powerful in their influence over our actions
and responses to anything that occurs in our world. Often these
mental models hold us prisoners to the “same old story” when
openness to new learning is necessary to grow and advance in our
careers. To continually learn and grow we must think and act differently,
and our invisible mental models hold us back like a prisoner’s
ball and chain.
As a leader, it is important to make explicit your thinking. We
have the tendency to take shortcuts when we think and speak. People
don’t have the benefit of seeing our thinking process, what we focused
in on, what we discounted, or what building blocks we crafted to support
our thoughts and decisions. So isn’t it natural that people may