The RAS and the Story thats shaping your leadership
Here is something I've observed after working with thousands of leaders across industries, cultures, and continents:
Most people are leading from a story they didn't choose.
It was written for them. By their first manager. By the organization that promoted them. By the feedback they received early in their career about who they were and what was expected of them. By the subtle, cumulative messages about whose leadership style was worth emulating and whose needed to be adjusted.
And they've been living that story out, often without knowing it, ever since.
The Reticular Activating System: A Brief Explanation
The Reticular Activating System, the RAS, is a network of neurons in the brainstem that functions as the filter between your subconscious and your conscious mind. Your brain processes approximately 11 million bits of information per second. The RAS determines which 40 bits make it through to conscious awareness.
Its selection criteria? Whatever you have decided is important. Whatever you have told yourself is true.
Tell yourself you are a leader who builds high-performing, inclusive teams? Your RAS starts scanning for evidence, opportunities to connect, moments of team excellence, feedback that confirms the narrative. Tell yourself your team is disengaged or your people "just don't get it?" Your RAS delivers evidence for that story too. Every missed deadline, every stumble, every gap.
The RAS does not evaluate the quality of the story it is confirming. It simply delivers more of what you are already focused on.
From Personal to Organizational: The Culture Implication
This is where the leadership application becomes urgent and where most leadership conversations about mindset fall short.
Your inner dialogue does not stay inner. It becomes your behavior. Your behavior shapes your culture. And your culture either expands or contracts what is possible for every person on your team.
A leader who walks into a one-on-one with the unconscious story that a particular employee is not leadership material will ask different questions, give different feedback, offer different opportunities than a leader who walks in believing that person has unrealized potential. The behavior that follows each story is different. The career trajectory that follows that behavior is different. Multiply that across a team, a department, an organization, and you begin to understand why culture is so hard to change without examining the stories underneath it.
This is also why equity in leadership cannot be reduced to policy and process alone. The stories leaders tell themselves about who is capable, who is a culture fit, who is ready, these are running below the level of policy. They have to be addressed at the level of belief and self-talk, or the policies don't stick.
Reprogramming the Story
The good news about the RAS is that it is not fixed. The story can be updated. But it requires intention, repetition, and a willingness to challenge the narratives that feel most comfortable, because comfortable narratives are often the ones doing the most damage.
Here is a practical approach:
Name the story you are currently running about your team, your organization's culture, and your own leadership. Write it down if you need to. Make it explicit.
Interrogate its origins. Is this story based on current evidence or on early impressions, accumulated biases, or messages you received about who succeeds?
Build a new, specific narrative. Not vague positivity a concrete, evidence-based story about what your team is capable of. Give the RAS a new target.
Act in alignment with the new story even before you fully believe it. Behavior shifts belief more reliably than belief shifts behavior.
You are not simply leading a team. You are leading from a story. And the people on your team, especially the ones whose potential has been historically undervalued, are deeply affected by which story you choose to tell.
The RAS will find the evidence for whatever story you commit to. Make sure you've chosen the right one.
WANT TO GO DEEPER?
The RAS and self-talk frameworks are core to the Potential Unleashed leadership programs and explored throughout IDEAL. Visit potential-unleashed.com to learn how we work with leaders and organizations or to book Jahmad for your next event.
Watch Jahmad talk about the RAS in the video below.