I want to share with you a simple yet powerful model to make sense of your life at work.

Does this sound too good to be true?

When no stranger to the system, you will see that it happens to be useful to understand your own property and others' allergic reactions to gatherings in the office or even give you types of dealing considerably better, notably when it concerns dealing with your side effects additional easily and in order to engaging with others better correctly and just, i rapport that.

The model I will tell you about is called SCARF and it is the brain child of David Rock, cofounder of the NeuroLeadership Institute and author of the "The Brain at Work." SCARF is anchored within the basic principle that our brain's purpose is to protect us: our brain continually seeks to identify potential threats how to threat model. This negative bias is at the root of our survival and we share it with all living beings gifted with a similar brains (e.g. our mammal brothers). When the coast is clear, our brain then seeks to optimise our sense of comfort and wellbeing (a reward state).

SCARF is really an acronym for the five words of Confidence, Fairness, Standing, Relatedness and Autonomy. Overall, SCARF says that, as our brain watches out for potential threats, it worries about Status, Fairness, Relatedness, Autonomy and Guarantee. These five words represent the five social domains against which every human experience is assessed. The brain's negative bias is very obvious when you consider that it ponders five kinds of potential threats. Only when all questions are answered positively does our brain (and us! ) relax.

The domains of Autonomy and Guarantee assess how we feel about any experience from the point of the self: it is the inner dimension of human experience. In Fairness, contrast, Rank and Relatedness assess how we feel about any experience from the point of view of our place in the environment in which the experience occurred: it is the external dimension of human experience.

Just how can Autonomy and Certainty help you make a feeling of your workplace issues?

Certainty is about the brain working in an associative way. In other words, the brain is a pattern-recognition machine. The first time you see a glass of water, the brain has to use a lot of energy to figure out what it is and what for. The next time around, even though the glass may be a different shape or colour, it is recognised as a glass by the brain and this takes no time at all for the brain to work out. See how effective this mode of operation is?

The brain wants to be able to recognise what's going on, moment to moment. When it is unsure of what is going on, it needs to allocate a lot of energy to solving that mystery. The principle of association does not just allow the brain to cope with the present but also, to some extent, predict what comes next. Certainty creates a sense of safety that the present is manageable and the future knowable to a good extent.

What can threaten Certainty in the workplace?

Let's see: how about a feedback meeting? Even though you may expect a good chat, do you feel a bit nervous anyway? That's your brain not having enough Certainty. Change is a huge threat to Certainty: suddenly what was known is potentially up for review. Not being clear about your work objectives threatens Certainty. Not knowing some of the people in that meeting or in that networking event can threaten Certainty. Not being sure you understood a request, a question or a statement can threaten Certainty. In short, Certainty is threatened whenever the brain cannot draw on the past to make sense of the present and thus cannot predict what the future could look like.