The Chimp Paradox

Tom Frearson

Oct 3

12 min read

The Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness

By Prof. Steve Peters

The Book That Started All Of It

This isn't the first book I read when I started working on myself. It's the one that made the rest of them make sense.

It didn't come to me off a bestseller list. It came from someone on my team.

He had a pattern. He'd fly off the handle, properly, and then come back an hour later and regret every word of it. What was unusual was that he'd worked that out about himself, and he'd gone looking for an explanation rather than an excuse. He read this book, and for the first time he could see what was happening inside his own head while it was happening. That gave him a gap. In that gap, he could interject.

He handed it to me.

Fourteen years later I still use it most weeks, and I use it more on other people than on myself.

Three Parts, One Head

Peters is a consultant psychiatrist. He spent over twenty years in clinical practice before any of this reached a bookshop, and then spent two decades inside elite sport, with British Cycling through its dominant Olympic run, with Sky ProCycling, Liverpool FC, England Rugby, GB Taekwondo and World Snooker. Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton, Ronnie O'Sullivan and Steven Gerrard have all credited him by name. Pendleton has said she doesn't think she'd have stayed in cycling without him.

The model he built is deceptively simple. Your mind has three parts.

The Human. The rational one. Thinks in facts, evidence and consequences. This is the part that is actually you.

The Chimp. The emotional one. Fast, instinctive, driven by survival. Not evil, not a flaw, and not optional. It is a machine you were issued at birth and it is doing its job.

The Computer. Storage. Everything you've learned, believed and repeated, running automatically.

The numbers are the part that makes it land. The Chimp is around five times faster than the Human. The Computer is faster than both, four times quicker than the Chimp and twenty times quicker than the Human.

Which means in any heated moment the order of events is not what you think it is. Your Chimp gets the information first. It reacts. Then your Human arrives, several beats late, and spends the next ten minutes either justifying what the Chimp just did or apologising for it.

And here's the mechanism that explains almost every argument you've ever had. The Chimp decides first and then goes looking for evidence to support the decision. The Human gathers evidence and then decides.

That's the paradox in the title. The same system that gets you out of the way of a car can also destroy a relationship in four seconds flat.

You Cannot Control It. You Can Only Manage It.

This is the line that did the work for me.

You don't get to remove the Chimp. You will not out-discipline it, out-train it or out-think it. It is stronger than you and it is faster than you.

What you get is management. Peters gives three routes.

Exercise it. Let it out somewhere safe, with the right person, and let it rant until it's tired. Vented, it becomes reasonable.

Box it. Talk to it with truth and logic. Not suppression. An actual conversation with the part of you that's gone off.

Banana it. Distract or reward. Sometimes the Chimp just needs feeding.

And alongside that, the sentence in this book that every leader should write down. Your Chimp is your responsibility in the same way your dog is. If your dog bites someone, "it was the dog" is not a defence.

I'll come back to that, because it's the one thing about this book that gets abused.

The Computer Is Where The Real Work Is

Most people remember the Chimp and forget the Computer. The Computer is where you can actually change something.

Peters breaks the Computer into four. Worth being clear about this, because it trips people up. These are not extra parts of your mind. There are three parts, and these are the four kinds of thing stored inside one of them.

Autopilots. Helpful beliefs and habits that fire automatically. Someone cuts you up and an autopilot says "not worth it" before your Chimp gets a chance to speak.

Gremlins. Unhelpful beliefs you picked up later in life. Removable, with work.

Goblins. Unhelpful beliefs laid down very early, roughly before the age of eight. Far harder to shift, and usually managed rather than removed.

The Stone of Life. The values, truths and beliefs you actually live by, written down and referred to.

The Stone of Life stopped me when I first read it, because I'd been doing a version of it without the name.

I read my Daily Alignment every morning. Values, priority order, what I do and what I don't do, affirmations. People assume it's motivation. It isn't. It's pre-loading the Computer so that when something lands badly at nine in the morning, there's already something sitting there faster than my Chimp can get to the keyboard.

That's the whole mechanism. You cannot out-argue your Chimp in the moment. You can get there before it.

Goblins: You Don't Know What People Are Carrying

Of the four, the Goblins are the ones I'd want every leader to understand.

A Gremlin you can find and remove. A Goblin went in early, before the age of about eight, and it does not come out. You manage it or you don't, and either way it stays.

One of mine is bullying.

I was heavily bullied as a kid. It went on a long time, and it stopped the day I'd had enough and took the bully on. One person at the time, and metaphorically it was a lot bigger than that.

That was decades ago and the Goblin is still there. If I sense someone bullying me, or bullying somebody else, I go protective very fast. Faster than I'd like. The Chimp gets there before the Human does, and I've had to work at catching it.

Here's what I've made peace with. That Goblin is also why I won't have bullying anywhere near a team I'm responsible for. It's why I spot it early, why I'm hard on it, and why people getting a rough time tend to find their way to me. The same wiring that occasionally hijacks me is the wiring that makes me good at the thing.

You don't get to delete a Goblin. What you get is to know it's there, name it, and see it coming.

And then the second half, which matters more if you lead people.

You have no idea what anybody else is carrying.

When someone reacts out of all proportion to what just happened, the odds are they didn't react to what just happened. Something hit a Goblin you can't see and were never going to see.

Which brings you back to four words.

Rewriting A Gremlin

Peters says find your Gremlins and replace them with Autopilots. He's lighter on exactly how.

That's where CBT and NLP earn their place. I trained as an instructor in both, originally just to understand my own head.

Take the Gremlin Peters names himself. I mustn't fail.

Start with the word. "Mustn't" is a rule with a punishment attached. Run that sentence and you're not motivating yourself, you're threatening yourself, and your Chimp hears the threat.

CBT names the pattern, which here is all-or-nothing thinking: a pass, a catastrophe, nothing in between. Then it tests it against evidence. When did you actually fail at something and survive it, and what happened next? For most people the honest answer is that the failure was the most useful thing that year. Then you write a replacement you'd say out loud.

NLP does the frame. Change the words and the frame moves with them.

I use two rules in every coaching conversation. No buts, only ands. No shoulds, only coulds.

Put them together and I mustn't fail becomes I can get this wrong, and I'll know more than I did.

The first is a Chimp with its back to a wall. The second is a person with options.

Two caveats. One rewrite won't do it, because an Autopilot gets built by repetition exactly the way the Gremlin did. That's why a Stone of Life is read daily rather than framed and hung on a wall. And a Goblin won't rewrite at all.

Three Mornings

Theory is cheap. Here's what it actually looks like.

The pedestrian. Very early, dark, and I didn't see a man crossing the road until far too late. He started shouting and swearing, and he was entitled to. The old version of me shouts back and the morning is ruined for both of us. What I actually thought was: that man is having a terrible day, or has had something terrible happen to him, if that's where he goes that fast. That wasn't generosity. It was just a different read of the same event.

The frozen road. Pulling out of my road at stupid o'clock. There'd been flooding the night before and then a hard freeze. Parked cars blocking the view, narrow road, steep hill, and my van is heavy, so once I'm committed I'm committed. A car came down fast at exactly the wrong moment. He braked. He started screaming at me. I started screaming back.

And then I caught it. A second, maybe two, and the model arrived.

I said, "Good morning."

He stopped. We looked at each other for a beat, both of us with a smirk starting. He said, "Good morning. Have a good day." I said, "And you." That was it. Over.

I want to be honest about that one, because the useful part isn't the recovery. It's that I didn't catch it at the start. We'd already been shouting. The skill isn't never having a Chimp moment. The skill is how fast you notice you're in one.

The late arrival. The one I use most. Someone is late, or off, or acting out of character. The instinct is to lead with the fact. You're late.

They know they're late. Telling them achieves nothing except handing their Chimp something to fight.

So the first thing I say is: are you okay?

Are You Okay?

This is the single most useful thing this book gave me and it costs nothing.

It does three jobs at once.

It de-escalates. Their Chimp was braced for a confrontation that doesn't arrive, and a Chimp with nothing to fight sits down.

It gives you the facts before you commit to a position. Nine times out of ten there's a reason, and it's usually a better reason than you'd have guessed. Peters' whole point is that the Chimp decides first and gathers evidence afterwards. Asking the question forces the order back the right way round.

And it keeps your own Chimp out of it. The moment you lead with the accusation, you've already started building the case, and you'll defend it even when the facts turn up and say you shouldn't.

There's a fourth thing, and it's the one I care about most. We manage things and we lead people. People have lives, and things happen in them. A person turning up late is almost never a performance problem on the day it happens. Treat it as one and you'll create the thing you thought you were correcting.

And there's a boundary in it too, which people miss. Asking "are you okay" is not taking it on. If someone has a go at you, the only way it reaches you, short of physical contact, is if you let it. Understanding what's driving their behaviour is how you stop carrying it.

The Part I Don't Usually Lead With

I read this book after I was diagnosed with PTSD following Afghanistan.

Before that there was a long stretch I'm not proud of. Anger. Close to violence at times. Pushing people away who didn't deserve it. Denial, and drinking more than I should have been, which is its own way of not dealing with something.

Eventually I went and saw someone, and I got a diagnosis.

The diagnosis itself wasn't really the point. A label doesn't change anything on its own. What changed things was someone explaining what was actually happening in my head at those moments, and then telling me it could be rewired. Neuroplasticity. The brain is not fixed.

That's when I started reading. This book, and then a lot of others, and then courses. I qualified as an instructor in CBT and NLP, which started as a way of understanding my own head and ended up being something I could use with other people.

The Chimp Paradox was the first one that gave me a picture I could actually hold. Not a diagnosis, not therapy, and not a substitute for either. A model simple enough to use at six in the morning on a frozen road with someone shouting at you.

That's what a good framework does. It survives contact.

Where It Gets Criticised

I'd rather raise this than have someone else raise it for me.

The neuroscience underneath the model is a simplification, and parts of it are out of date. Mapping the Human to the frontal lobe, the Chimp to the limbic system and the Computer to the parietal lobe is a descendant of the triune brain model, which evolutionary neuroscientists largely abandoned decades ago. The brain does not work in three tidy layers with a reptile at the bottom.

Peters has never claimed otherwise. He has said directly that the Chimp Model is not a theory or a scientific hypothesis. It's a tool for helping people manage their own internal struggles, and it should be judged on whether it does that.

In my experience it does, and I'd judge any model the same way. Does it change behaviour under pressure? This one does.

There's a second example worth knowing about, because Peters uses it and the real story is better than the one he tells.

Phineas Gage. September 1848, railway construction in Vermont. A 25-year-old foreman tamping blasting powder when it went off. The iron rod, three feet seven inches long and thirteen and a half pounds, went in under his left cheekbone, up through the front of his brain, out of the top of his skull, and landed around 25 yards behind him. He survived, and he was talking within minutes.

Twenty years later his doctor published the account everyone remembers. Previously the most capable foreman his employers had. Afterwards fitful, irreverent, unable to hold to a plan. Gage was no longer Gage.

Peters uses it cleanly. Take out the frontal lobe and the Human goes quiet, and what's left running things is the Chimp.

What he doesn't mention is that the story has been inflated for over a century. Malcolm Macmillan went back to the primary sources and found the popular version, Gage as a ruined drifter, isn't supported. Gage spent around eighteen months driving a stagecoach in Chile. Routes, timings, money, passengers, horses. Nobody holds that job without planning and restraint. Macmillan's reading is that he substantially recovered, and that structured work was part of how.

So the man cited as proof that frontal damage finishes you is actually reasonable evidence that the brain adapts.

That's neuroplasticity. Which is what I was told in a room years after I should have been in one, and it's the reason any of this was worth reading.

There's a third criticism that matters far more than either, and it isn't about the science.

The model can be used as an excuse. "That was my Chimp" is a very convenient sentence. I've seen people read this book and come away with a licence rather than a tool, and it does real damage, because the people on the receiving end of someone's temper now have to argue with a framework as well as a person.

Peters closes that door himself with the dog. The Chimp is yours. You didn't choose it and you are responsible for it.

If you take one thing from this book, take that one. Not "my Chimp did it". "My Chimp went, and I didn't manage it, and that's on me."

Why This Matters For Every Leader

When someone on your team is late, or short with you, or off their usual standard, what is the first sentence out of your mouth?

When you last lost your temper, how long did it take you to notice? Not to apologise. To notice.

What's loaded into your Computer before the day starts, and did you choose it?

When you feel certain about something in a heated moment, are you reasoning towards a conclusion, or defending one you already reached?

Which of your own reactions are out of proportion to the event, and what are they actually about?

And whose Chimp are you managing all day without realising, and who is managing yours?

Who This Book Is For

Anyone who has ever behaved in a way they couldn't explain afterwards.

Anyone who leads people and keeps getting a different reaction than they intended.

Anyone at the start of their own self-development who wants a model they can actually use rather than a theory they can quote.

And anyone coming out of something difficult who needs an explanation before they're ready for a solution. That's what it was for me.

If you want to go further afterwards, The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor and The Molecule of More by Daniel Lieberman and Michael Long are good next steps, and Hostage at the Table by George Kohlrieser is the one I'd put next to it on the shelf. There is a lot of neuroscience out there now and most of it is better science than this book. Very little of it is better at changing what you do on a Tuesday morning.