This article was a bit long to come as I was bouncing ideas on what to share with all my friends this month.

And then of course I looked at the news on CNN, BBC, Aljazeera… and everyone is talking of the “Road to Recovery”… Which in a sense makes me feel good, as probably 3,5 billion people in the earth. The rest of the Earth population wont see the difference as 1) they don’t have electricity, let alone a cable TV, and anyway, for them, the worry is not to know if the Nasdaq went up by 2 points or that the CAC 40 is recovering…2) that population is worried about living through he day…

However, I salute the change of direction of the wind of information hitting the public. In those few last month, the world economy was doomed…. And now by some miracle…. We are on the Road to Recovery.

At last somebody has understood that by systematically spreading bad news all the motivational structures, weather they be corporate or at individual level would shrink and go into hibernation, in mare survival mode, until the spring appears, and at last a few shrubs of green shows it’s shy bits through the heavy mantle of snow and ice… and all of a sudden we fall back to where we were before. And that is where the danger is….. We have not learnt the lesson…. We still hope that someone else is going to do the job for us of straightening up the economy and the global finance.

Reality check: it is not going to happen… We need to change at Culture level. Which entails that we need to change our behaviors and to do so, attack our habits.

It gives me a bit the impression we have when we go on a holiday, and meet new people with whom we realize we could not spend the rest of our life without, and then we become best friends, find a whole lot of common things that we like or know, and promise ourselves to stay in contact for the rest of our lives. And then, after 1 month back at work… the thrill is gone, the excitement is forgotten…. And so are they….

All our resolutions made in the vortex of this crisis are stored in exactly the same box in our brain. It’s some kind of big black box, where we stuff all our New Year Resolutions, new friendships, Crisis Management decisions etc…

We should pay more attention to that Bi Black Bag. It contains a lot of amazing ideas that could actually set us free for the rest of our life and protect us from many hurdles in the road. All those new ideas or concepts, whether they be our invention or someone else’s but we decided to adopt them, they have been elaborated in a stage of our brain where we receive the most irrigation in all it’s parts, where our creativity level is triggered by a sense of survival where we are goingt o go to all possible extents in order either to say alive or to please ourselves.

When I say to stay alive, we have to understand it in a very large sense of the term. We might not be at danger of life or death…. But life as we knew it might be compromised if nothing is done. And it is our individual responsibility to do something about it and to stick to our decisions and resolutions.

I had a feeling that during the black month of this crisis, we became a little bit more empathetic, listening and understanding other people’s issues, as they might be ours very soon… And yet, the second we realized that we are going to survive this, we are going to get out of that tunnel, all of sudden, we jumped the gun and became the individualistic monsters we were prior to the drop to f the bomb.

Bizarrely, I noticed that in a very strange environment: the driving arena…. For some month, I noticed less aggressivity, more courtesy, (although there is a lot to do there) But now that we are regaining our confidence, we fall back to where we were before, and sometimes we even fall back further. The feeling of “if I survived this, I must be invincible” so we look at the world with a certain type of arrogance.

Your brain is really playing amazing tricks on you. It takes you through all types of Psychological states, in which each state is accompanied by a score of physical reactions, and according to the environment, it will make you jump around and react according to what he thinks is appropriate. And yet we could do a lot to influence that and to actually take control of  our Brain.

I think that today is the good time to take charge and decide to make a difference. Look at yourself and look at what are the essential values that made you go through this difficult period and come out alive and kicking. Hone those values and share them with the people around you. You will realize that you are not the only one and that must of us have gone through this, alone. Now is time to get pay back. It is time for you to realize who has helped you, who needs help, and who you should delete from your Christmas Card list.

I can see around me a number of people who are going in directions that for some will take them right back to where they were… those usually complain a lot and are waiting for the others to do something about everything, and those whoa actually rode the wave and decide that those events would be a catalyzeur for their lives and successes and amazing levels of self and corporate leaderships qualities have spurred out of this,

Be one of them. Increase your level of influence over things. I cannot recommend enough to throw a positive and motivated outlook on all our hard times and decide to do something about it. We all now that etymologically, the word MOIVATION comes from MOTARE, which means to move in Latin. That is what we should do. Move, do new things, take strong resolutions and stick to them, do not store them in that big black box in your brain. Count on yourselves and help people to count on themselves and reach levels of motivational independence.

We should all make something out of this Global Crisis and make this Road to Recovery, your Road to Discovery and re-invent new things…

Dr. JP Bonnifay
CEO & Lead Consultant
HPI Sdn. Bhd.