I’ve been listening to Influence Is Your Superpower by Zoe Chance, and she has got me thinking about vertical development in a different and unique way.
And, I think it might impact, change, or elevate the development work that you do individually or with the leaders and people that you work with.
To set the stage, let me summarize a core idea from Chance’s book. It is that we operate with two brains:
- The Gator Brain (what psychologists often call System 1): fast, automatic, protective, reactive
- The Judge Brain (System 2): slow, reflective, values-based, thoughtful
While it is hard for us to see, 90%+ of all of our thinking, processing, and operation is driven by our Gator Brain. But, our best leadership comes from our Judge Brain.
And, vertical development is ultimately about doing the inner work to (1) upgrade our Gator Brain and (2) strengthen our ability to access and leverage our Judge Brain—particularly when it matters most.
If you aren’t familiar with System 1 or System 2 thinking, let’s break this down.
The Gator Brain: your default programming
(also referred to as System 1 thinking)
Your Gator Brain is your fast-acting, automatic, protective system. It’s scanning constantly for threat and opportunity. It’s not primarily concerned with being wise—it’s concerned with keeping you safe, keeping you in good standing, keeping you from getting hurt, and keeping you on track to fulfill your personal needs (socially, emotionally, professionally, physically).
The Gator Brain tends to show up as:
- Defensive when your competence is questioned
- Control when uncertainty rises
- Avoidance when conflict feels risky
- People-pleasing when belonging feels threatened
- Rigidity when complexity increases
- Reactiveness when the pace accelerates
And here’s the key: the Gator Brain isn’t “bad.” It’s adaptive. It’s doing what it was designed to do.
But it’s also often outdated, short-sighted, and leads to us operating in a manner that is protective in the moment, but hindering in the long-run.
In two sections below, I will go into detail on how our Gator Brain drives almost everything we do.
This is because our Gator Brain is our default operating system. It was built early in life—shaped by our experiences, identity, success strategies, and protective patterns. When discomfort or pressure hits, those defaults run automatically.
This is why you can have leaders who:
- know the “right” leadership behaviors,
- value growth,
- care deeply about people,
- and still become reactive, controlling, avoidant, or abrasive when stress rises.
It’s not because they’re hypocrites. It’s because their default programming takes over.
The Judge Brain: your best leadership
(also referred to as System 2 thinking)
Your Judge Brain is your reflective capacity. It’s slower, more resource-intensive, and more deliberate. It’s where you can hold nuance, think systemically, regulate emotion, and choose responses aligned with your values rather than your fears.
The Judge Brain is what can allow us to:
- listen beyond their assumptions
- stay curious under challenge
- see multiple perspectives without collapsing into certainty
- regulate emotions rather than transmit them
- respond with intention rather than impulse
- make meaning rather than merely react
And this line captures the leadership reality most of us know from experience:
Your best leadership lives in your Judge Brain. Your most common leadership lives in your Gator Brain.
It’s not that leaders don’t have good judgment. It’s that judgment is often the first thing that goes offline under stress or pressure.
Why the Gator Brain runs most of the show (and why that’s normal)
One of the most important takeaways from Chance’s framing is how normal it is that the Gator Brain does the majority of our mental work.
Most of your day is filled with routine decisions, familiar patterns, and automatic behaviors. If you had to “Judge Brain” every moment—every email tone, every choice, every social cue—you’d be mentally exhausted by lunch.
So the brain does what it’s designed to do: it automates.
That means the Gator Brain is running in the background constantly:
- predicting outcomes
- scanning for threat
- categorizing people/situations quickly
- triggering emotions before you “think”
- nudging you toward familiar protective behaviors
This is why telling leaders to “just be more emotionally intelligent” or “just be more strategic” often doesn’t work. Under stress, they don’t rise to their ideals—they return to their defaults.
And that brings us right back to vertical development.
Vertical development: upgrading default programming and expanding access to the Judge
When I talk about vertical development, I’m talking about elevating the internal operating system—your “Being Side”—so leaders can create more value, more consistently, across more situations.
Using Chance’s language, vertical development is about having an impact in two different ways:
1) Upgrading the Gator Brain
This is about improving the quality of the default programming.
Not by “thinking positive,” but by doing deeper work such as:
- recognizing the protective pattern that keeps showing up
- understanding what it’s trying to protect (status, control, belonging, certainty, identity)
- strengthening the leader’s capacity to tolerate discomfort without reverting to old strategies
- building more mature meaning-making so the leader interprets stress differently
When the Gator Brain upgrades, the leader’s default responses become more sophisticated:
- less reactive
- less brittle
- less ego-defensive
- more grounded
- more relationally effective
2) Strengthen access to the Judge Brain under pressure
This is about increasing the leader’s ability to keep the Judge Brain online when things get real.
Because the moments that define leadership aren’t the easy moments. They’re the moments of:
- stress
- pressure
- complexity
- conflict
- ambiguity
- high stakes
- emotional charge
Vertical development increases a leader’s ability to slow down internally, widen perspective, regulate emotion, and choose a values-based response—right in the moments when the Gator Brain wants to drive.
A 2026 call to action: the developmental impact you could have
As you envision 2026, I want to invite you to think about the developmental impact you want to have on the leaders and employees you work with and support.
Just imagine if you could help them:
- Upgrade their Gator Brain (improve their default programming, making it more sophisticated), and
- Strengthen their ability to leverage their Judge Brain—especially in times of stress, pressure, and complexity.
That would have a massive elevating impact on performance, culture, and well-being.
I would love to help you have this impact. If you’d like to partner together—through a keynote, workshop, leadership program, or ongoing development support—please reach out and let me know.
