Emotional intelligence – let go and move on…
- Image by tjriley82 via Flickr
I’ve not been blogging here for a little while with my focus on building the content over at The Success Zone. Thing is, I had a useful personal lesson today. About my past, my future, and the application of emotional wisdom, not just emotional intelligence.
As is the case with many of us, I have a past, that while providing me with absolute joy (i.e. my daughter) comes also, some baggage. Dare I call this my old wrinkly suitcase? Clearly, I am talking about a past relationship (indeed now long past) that did not manage to survive. When life moves on, and people don’t, vindictiveness and obsessing about new information are hallmarks of staying stuck. This week, on the 10 year anniversary of the cessation of that relationship, I have discovered again frenetic google searching, bogus client calls to access information about my business and who knows what else.
While this level of detail might seem indulgent, it does serve a purpose. You see, my first response was indignation, the second violation and the third sadness. My initial thoughts, I will admit, were to serve the same kind of behaviour in return. Clearly, a Red Zone response. It took some distance from the situation, some reframing, some labelling and permission to move on from these feelings. These four methods of thinking about your emotions have been shown to manage down unwanted emotions, and in my case allowed me to move on from staying stuck in around an hour. Not years, months, days even.
So if you in the middle of a strong Red Zone reaction, try:
- Being a fly on the wall to your thinking and emotions – distance gives clarity. Ask yourself – will I remember this in a year’s time? If not, move on…
- Give yourself permission – life has its ups and downs, and the downs are neither permanent, nor define you.
- Label how you feel – in my language, it is the Red Zone. Whatever language you use, make it symbolic (not detailed). Symbolism helps (hence the reference to the suitcase above), detail just re-triggers the emotion. Fun, but disabling language really helps. A friend of mine refers to the fruit salad in her head, symbolic for the confusion she often feels.
- Reframe: retell the situation in a way that reduces the impact for you. In this case it was “she just hasn’t found happiness yet”. This keeps you out of all of the accusatory self-talk that, again, just re-resonates all of the damaging thinking/feeling.
Practicing these cognitive tricks to manage your feelings builds your emotional intelligence and moves you towards being emotionally wise.
What if you are the one who is stuck? Magically, the same four strategies work for you too…
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More on this over at The Success Zone, blog and book…
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Enabler or Disabler? How calm are you under pressure?
When we detect a Red Zone trigger – usually unfairness, confusion, reduced choice or a threat to our safety (physical, social, emotional), the more primitive but exceedingly more efficient parts of our brain come into play. This efficiency means that being in the Red Zone is a relatively easy thing to do. Worse, the intrusion of the Red Zone competes with brain resources that might normally be used to, solve complex problems, pay attention and focus, and even manage emotional stages themselves. Ironically, the more we engage the Red Zone, the less we can manage the Red Zone, resulting in the downward spiral that we often see end in arguments, road rage and even violence. Not such an emotionally intelligent state.
Conversely, being in the Blue Zone takes some effort, but the rewards are worth it. We innately admire folk who can stay calm under pressure, against the odds and against circumstances. We often label such people as being emotionally intelligent. Indeed, staying cool under pressure keeps vital resources essential for the solution (or resolution) available to part of your brain that needs it most. As a bonus, your Blue Zone, your calm zone perhaps, also enables the same state to be replicated in those around you.
Staying calm is simple, but not easy. You can enhance your chances of managing down any Red Zone intrusion before, during and after any event or trigger.
Before: good sleep, good nutrition, fitness and good oxygenation all help the brain be at its best. Think of how you respond to triggers or crises when you are tired, hungry and run down… By the way, three deep breaths is more than just slowing your response down, it increases the oxygenation to the brain, resulting in better Blue Zone activation.
During: reframing, acceptance, distance, observation and labelling are all methods used by those who remain most calm. A worksheet on using and practicing these methods will shortly be in the resources section of this website.
After: reflection, observation, acknowledgement and a solutions focus all help the calm person move forward, even when they lapsed into a moment of not-so-calm.
Calm is a state that enables as much the opposite state disables.
Ten ways to kill a conversation …
There are many ways that we can disengage another buy applying conversation-killing habits. Oftentimes we don’t even know that we have reduced the engagement. The secret element of connection with another person is attention. Not just any attention – authentic attention on them for them.
Each of the conversation killers listed below act in some way to drain your available attention, or allow you to use the available attention for yourself, not the other person.
Killer #1: Distraction: attention on your own thinking, activities or needs.
Killer #2: Assumption: assuming where the conversation is going, what they need or finishing sentences for them.
Killer #3: Judgement: making value judgements on them, their thinking or actions
Killer #4: Interruption: not allowing them to finish
Killer #5: Not listening to them: listening for your chance to say something, listening to yourself
Killer #6: I have the answer: a common form of assumption
Killer #7: You must be wrong: a common form of judgement
Killer #8: Total Control: you need to steer where the conversation goes
Killer #9: Dominate: you do more talking than listening
Killer #10: Focus on yourself: you are more concerned for your outcomes than theirs
Ways to combat these conversation killers can be found in the book “The Success Zone“.
Love is blind, they say, but what about anger?
When were you last in your own “heat of the moment”? Take a minute to remember this state. Was your attention tightly focused on the object of your ‘heat’, or did you have wide peripheral vision? Was you thinking, similarly, broad or narrow?
For most people, their Red Zone causes a narrowing of awareness in more than one dimension. Think of being in your Red Zone as being in a small room. In a strong Red Zone state, you only experience the room, not you being in the room. Ironically, in this state, your awareness focuses increasingly on the ‘objects’ that keep you in the room, not those that can help you out of it.
Imagine, then, that while in this state you began ’scoping’ the room. Rotating slowly, seeing things you might have missed. This simple (but often not easy) shift in perspective allows you to both experience the room, and you in the room. Don’t be fooled – this is not a small shift, but a quantum change in perspective. It is the first and necessary step to creating an alternative outcome.
Amazingly, as you move more from being immersed in the Red Zone to observing yourself and your surrounds, your perception widens. The more you observe, the greater the distance you can observe from. To continue the metaphor, you now begin to see the room in house-plan view, along with other connecting rooms, even the whole building.
Observation is the key here: observation of yourself and of the ‘object’ or your Red Zone. the more you observe, the more you disengage your hard-wired habits of judging and emotional responses. The more you observe, the more you actually see (not what you were assuming you were seeing).
Try this with someone at work that you normally don’t have time for. In your next interaction with them, watch for expressions, inflections and emphases. Look for things that, until now, you had not seen before. Your old habitual thoughts and judgements might still be there, but let them come and go without ‘jumping on board’ with any of them.
Don’t be blinded by your emotions and habits. Think of an flight attendant saying “the exits are here, here and here”. Observation will illuminate your exits.
Further reading:http://healthmad.com/mental-health/physiology-of-anger/
Can’t decide?
Jonah Lehrer’s book the Decisive Moment gives strong insight into how we make decisions. Insight that helps to explain why we are at a turning point in human and societal development.
The instinctive decisions related to survival come out of our reptilian brain and are reasonably obvious. If we are about to be hit by a bus the decision to move out of the way is taken rapidly and instinctively. This part of our brain has had hundreds of millions of years of evolution and is very, very fast and efficient. From a conscious perspective these decisions just happen.
Our mammalian brain has had 65 million years to evolve an effective means of learning from experience. Many of our decisions come from this part of our brain and appear as feelings – something feels like the right thing to do (we also call this intuition). This covers a surprisingly large range of decisions. In effect, this part of our brain has a feel for anything we have experienced before and can synthesise a wide range of inputs into a single decision. It takes about 10,000 hours to become expert at something – typically taking ten years to accumulate so many hours – and once expert we “know” what the best course of action is. In a stable environment experts will provide the best decisions and we have relied heavily on experts in the past (and even now in many areas of life). A reliance on experts will show itself in a hierarchical model of organisation, the person higher up makes better decisions and thus should be deferred to, all the way up to the most powerful person at the pinnacle of the organisation or political system.
The neocortex is the third part of our decision-making apparatus that brings some very powerful tools including logic, calculation, extrapolation, modelling and metaphor. These are ideal for solving problems that we have not come across before. In effect, this allows us to create something, a solution, an idea, a process, a product that did not exist before. However, the neocortex is only about 100,000 years old – young in evolutionary terms – and remains energy intensive and not very efficient, for example we can only hold about four variables in memory at one time. Thus if we have a new, complex problem (i.e. with many more than four variables) the only way we can solve it is through a collaborative process involving diverse views – sufficiently diverse that all variables are held by someone – and an environment in which all views are properly aired and then synthesised into a solution that no individual would be likely to come to by themselves but is accepted by all participants as the best solution. This is a distinct departure from relying on experts and leads to organisational forms that are much more inclusive, collaborative and flatter – or networked – in structure.
One of the difficulties for the individual is to know when to use which decision-making process. Buying a house we should rely on feel (too many variables but a well known problem). Buying a corkscrew we should rely on logic (ease of use, look, price, perhaps being the variables you might use). From a societal point of view, when we move from a stable environment to one in which the problems we face are predominantly new, how do we change our organisational forms in a timely way?
As a world we now face issues and problems that we have not faced before: peak oil, aging populations, limits to growth, climate change and rapid technological change. To solve the problems that these issues create we need new organisational forms. These forms ARE struggling to emerge but are being limited by old organisational forms and their embodied decision-making processes trying to maintain the status quo, sometimes harshly. The best decision? Keep on plugging away building the new!
The Success Zone publishing updates
The Success Zone
Our new book, “The Success Zone” is in its final processes of publishing and should be available for sale later this month (Oct 09).
Pre orders are available at http://www.gr8education.com/book/thesuccesszone.html
Some thoughts about insights and visions
I am writing this on a plane between England and Australia. I have been in England doing a mix of work and marketing, essentially talking with a lot of people about our work and testing new ways of both articulating what we do and delivering it. As this was happening I began to get an inkling of some major new insights stirring in my mind. I emailed my partners and said what was happening and that I was confident that on the flight home these insights would crystallise. I wrote this because my experience over at least 15 such flights in the last 3 years is that this always happens, insights crystallise on long haul trips. I am writing this now after some of the biggest insights of the last 5 years have appeared, fully formed in my mind.
Coincidentally, before this flight I went into my daughter’s bedroom looking for a book to read on the flight and my daughter, like me, is an avid and wide reader. I picked up Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception” which contains two essays, one about Huxley’s experimentation with the mind altering drug mescalin and the second about how we open our minds to new thoughts or visions. At the risk of simplifying too much, he argues that our minds are open to new thoughts (amongst other conditions e.g. low sugar through fasting) when the oxygen level falls or the carbon dioxide level rises in our brains. This occurs, for example, through singing or chanting such as achieved in churches (when chanting we tend to breathe out more than we breathe in thus depleting our oxygen levels) or, as many traditions do, through meditating at the top of a mountain … or in a plane.
As a trade off between hull strength and human survivability, planes are designed to have an internal atmospheric pressure equivalent to being at about 8,000 feet above sea level once they are sealed and up in the air.
So, unbeknownst to me I have been putting myself 20 odd hours at a time in the perfect state to have new thoughts, visions and insights, just after I have had a range of new inputs, ideas and experiences. The perfect conditions to crystallise new thinking. On this particular flight everything has been enhanced as it is an old 747 with no backseat screens and, in any case, my whole audio/visual display controls are not working, including the overhead light! So I am sitting in the dark half dozing, half thinking as insights form in my head.
I wonder if this works for other people as well!
Attention Priority: your brain is like a lava lamp
Given the limits to our attention and the high competition for that attention by many things in our day to day life, the brain has a process whereby it cycles through high demand priorities. We call this attention priority, a mind process where the most pressing attentional needs rise to the top, much like the way blobs of lava rise and fall in a lava lamp. Once the demand decreases, that issue ‘cools’ and falls out of our attention awareness. If left to its own device, the mind will be cycling through a range of attention priorities depending on you habits, needs and desires.
There is a high energy cost to holding things out of this natural cycle – like paying attention to a speaker for more than thirty minutes – and the attention priority cycle will sneak back in whenever it can. We notice, in presenting workshops for instance, that if the temperature of the room becomes uncomfortably cool, the need of being comfortable rises above attending to us in terms of attention.
The thing is, while you remain unaware of this, you are largely unable to harness the incredible power of this process. You are slave to you habits, needs and desires. We even have our rational brain keep this state in play for us with justifying statements like “I don’t have the time to do this right now”. If fact, if you have ever stopped to think about this statement, a common one when we are faced with things we’d rather not do, why is it that some people find the time to do the tough things, and others do not? We all have the same amount of time – it is just that some of us do not prioritise in the same way.
There are a number of deliberate and intentional ‘tricks’ that are used to construct a different attention priority than our habits, needs and wants would have. Tricks such as affirmations and goals, for instance, allow us to hold at the top, in spite of the habituated priorities, new priorities that without effort would fall back to the bottom of the pile. Do this once – say by writing down your goals for the year – and for a while your brain can hold this as an attention priority. Soon, however, the energy cost of holding these goals at the ‘top of mind’ allows other needs, wants and habits to resume the cycle.
The best way that you can harness attention priority is to wire your preferred future into desires, needs and habits. Do this with intention by:
- Speaking to as many people as you can around your passion, goals and future
- Writing and reading your goals on a daily basis
- Affirming daily the future you wish to create
- Reading as much as you can in your niche or field …
- … then writing and speaking from your learning and perspective
- Increase your scope of absorption by being in the best mind state – the Blue Zone.
Next time you catch yourself saying “I don’t have the time to do that” reframe it into “it is not a priority for me right now” (because, simply, it is not). Check on your emotional energy when you reframe – things that should be a higher priority will let you know!
Decision-making and organisation
Jonah Lehrer’s book the Decisive Moment gives strong insight into how we make decisions. Insight that helps to explain why we are at a turning point in human and societal development.
The instinctive decisions related to survival come out of our reptilian brain and are reasonably obvious. If we are about to be hit by a bus the decision to move out of the way is taken rapidly and instinctively. This part of our brain has had hundreds of millions of years of evolution and is very, very fast and efficient. From a conscious perspective these decisions just happen.
Our mammalian brain has had 65 million years to evolve an effective means of learning from experience. Many of our decisions come from this part of our brain and appear as feelings – something feels like the right thing to do (we also call this intuition). This covers a surprisingly large range of decisions. In effect, this part of our brain has a feel for anything we have experienced before and can synthesise a wide range of inputs into a single decision. It takes about 10,000 hours to become expert at something – typically taking ten years to accumulate so many hours – and once expert we “know” what the best course of action is. In a stable environment experts will provide the best decisions and we have relied heavily on experts in the past (and even now in many areas of life). A reliance on experts will show itself in a hierarchical model of organisation, the person higher up makes better decisions and thus should be deferred to, all the way up to the most powerful person at the pinnacle of the organisation or political system.
The neocortex is the third part of our decision-making apparatus that brings some very powerful tools including logic, calculation, extrapolation, modelling and metaphor. These are ideal for solving problems that we have not come across before. In effect, this allows us to create something, a solution, an idea, a process, a product that did not exist before. However, the neocortex is only about 100,000 years old – young in evolutionary terms – and remains energy intensive and not very efficient, for example we can only hold about four variables in memory at one time. Thus if we have a new, complex problem (i.e. with many more than four variables) the only way we can solve it is through a collaborative process involving diverse views – sufficiently diverse that all variables are held by someone – and an environment in which all views are properly aired and then synthesised into a solution that no individual would be likely to come to by themselves but is accepted by all participants as the best solution. This is a distinct departure from relying on experts and leads to organisational forms that are much more inclusive, collaborative and flatter – or networked – in structure.
One of the difficulties for the individual is to know when to use which decision-making process. Buying a house we should rely on feel (too many variables but a well known problem). Buying a corkscrew we should rely on logic (ease of use, look, price, perhaps being the variables you might use). From a societal point of view, when we move from a stable environment to one in which the problems we face are predominantly new, how do we change our organisational forms in a timely way?
As a world we now face issues and problems that we have not faced before: peak oil, aging populations, limits to growth, climate change and rapid technological change. To solve the problems that these issues create we need new organisational forms. These forms ARE struggling to emerge but are being limited by old organisational forms and their embodied decision-making processes trying to maintain the status quo, sometimes harshly. The best decision? Keep on plugging away building the new!
Like/dislike and successful organisations
A successful leader creates the conditions for others to succeed. People are most able to succeed – and acquire the skills they need to succeed – when they are in a mind state of optimism, collaboration, creativity and growth. Of course, organisations can be successful with only a proportion of their people being successful (an 80:20 rule comes to mind – 20% of the people account for 80% of the success). Organisations are more successful, and perhaps more importantly, more resilient, the higher the proportion of people within them who are successful.
Leaders are critical in creating this successful mind state in their employees and they do so by how they engage with each one, some directly but most indirectly. An employee moves into this mind state when they are accepted, believed in and listened to by others, and critically by their leaders.
Acting against this are two interesting and well documented phenomena about positions of power. The first is that when people are in positions of power they find it hard to see the needs and actions of the people who are below them. The second is that people below them see with startling clarity everything that their leaders do and say, this is sometimes known as hyper vigilance.
This comes to the main point. Most leaders, like most adults, will have people they like, people they are indifferent to and people they dislike. Most effective leaders would say that they are polite and open to each group but spend more time with the people that they like. From the point of view of creating a successful organisation, it would make more sense for leaders to spend time with people who need their time (irrespective of whether they like them or not) but the first point above indicates that it is quite hard for a leader to know who needs their time. The second point above indicates that people below the leader will know with clarity who the leader cares about and who they don’t care about. Those the leader cares about will tend to be more successful, the others will be less successful or even fail.
It is worth exploring where like – and its opposite dislike – comes from. Essentially they come from three main sources: memories laid down in early childhood, projection of things we like/dislike about ourselves or associations with real experiences that we have had.
The first may need some explanation, explicit memory only begins after about 2 years old so we spend the first 2 years of our lives laying down emotional memories that are unlinked to explicit memories. What this means is that we can have a strong negative emotion because someone made a loud noise next to us as a baby. The fact that this person had certain facial characteristics can mean that thirty years later we can see similar facial characteristics and our memory triggers a negative emotion and we interpret this as dislike for the person.
In each of these cases the negative feeling that arises comes out of memory – not from the other person – and in certain mind states will trigger a cascade of further emotion. As people – and particularly as leaders – we can ignore the negative emotions and engage with a person completely as a person, and importantly, with practice we can learn to do this automatically, with little conscious effort. This allows us to engage with everyone on an even keel and determine whether they need our time or not. Thus we can extend the number of people we are helping to succeed.
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