Posted by Andrew on March 4, 2010 · 3 Comments
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…
More on this over at The Success Zone, blog and book…
Filed under Behaviour, Book, Brain, Emotions, Red Zone, Relationships, The Success Zone · Tagged with Business, Emotional intelligence, Intelligence, Psychology, Red Zone, Social Sciences, Wisdom
Posted by Andrew on November 4, 2009 · 1 Comment
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“.
Filed under Behaviour, Book, Brain, Emotions, Influence, Listening, The Success Zone · Tagged with Behaviour, conversation killers, conversation skills, engagement, Influence, success
Posted by Andrew on October 16, 2009 · 1 Comment
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
Filed under Blue Zone, Book, Brain, Change, Coaching, Emotions, Influence, Leadership, Listening, Questioning, Red Zone, Research, Teaching & Learning, The Success Zone · Tagged with Book, publishing, The Success Zone
Posted by Andrew on April 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Intuitively we all know that emotions are contagious. How else do evocative stories have impact on us? Neuroscience seems to have uncovered the biomechanism for the catching of another’s emotions: mirror neurons. These neurons allow us to understand the emotional state of others and to adopt to some degree those same emotions.
Interestingly, this can happen remotely. Remote in the sense that you may not know the person you are catching the emotions from – you need not have a pre-existing relationship with someone to have their emotions ‘infect’ you. Remote in the sense that you even need not be with them – you can simply observe emotions in two dimensions on a television or a computer screen. You may well have seen the YouTube phenomenon that is Christian the Lion; try watching it without feeling generosity, goodwill and affection.
So it seems that these positive ‘Blue Zone’ emotions are very contagious, particularly when we observe generosity or vulnerability. As it turns out, the negative emotions associated with our Red Zone states are far more contagious, more rapid in their adoption and more persistent after the event. Something like the above video may have a ‘contagion impact’ of minutes, but road rage, recalcitrant teenagers and angry customers can affect us for hours or longer.
Take something I witnessed last week whilst travelling by car and stopping for lunch. I was in a queue for one of the ‘healthy’ fast food chains that make your order in front of you. The first inkling of a problem behind the counter was the rather offhand impatience with my hesitation in making a choice. “The menu is there right in front of you” was inflected with enough emotion (frustration) for me to feel my feathers ruffled so to speak. While this was a minor incident, it led me to watch further as I ate my lunch nearby. Sure enough, a young man, unhappy with what had been made for him and, more to the point, the way he was treated around this, rather grumpily pushed back his food, and words were exchanged. Clearly, his choice was like it or lump it, and he lumped it asking for a refund.
What happened next is possibly the worst example of customer service that I have witnessed: the person serving him threw the refund back at the fellow, accompanied by “you shouldn’t have f****ng thrown your food at me”. The impact of this was immediate, not only on the customer – who responded by upending the contents of the counter on the floor – but on all who witnessed this. Anger, embarrassment and distress were rampant, and several people left the queue.
Research suggests that red zone emotions, such as those displayed in the above interaction, are more contagious than blue zone emotions. Further, the greater the energy in the exchange, the greater the ‘infection’. This would explain the contagiousness on one hand of Christian the Lion (with its attendant highly demonstrative affection) and, on the other, road rage.
To further add to the ‘hair trigger’ state that accompanies red zone emotions, it seems that leaders are more contagious than peers. Teachers in classrooms, bosses in boardrooms, parents with children: all are in the most infectious positions.
Knowing this, particularly if you depend on the provision of a service or product, is critical. In literal terms, injury is added to insult to a degree by the rapid hard-wiring of emotional memories in our limbic systems, particularly the amygdalae. In other words, highly charged red zone emotions that are caught from others are sticky and easily recalled. It is likely that I will take some time to forget what I witnessed in that food court.
The lessons then? Be remembered for infecting people with the blue zone emotions of generosity, goodwill and affiliation: “attitudes (and emotions) are contagious – are yours worth catching?”
Posted by Andrew on April 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Using our concept of Blue and Red Zones, take a moment to consider your default state. If the Red Zone is based on the limbic/reptilian part of your brain (reactive, threat aware, rapid, self-aligned) and the Blue Zone ‘points’ to your prefrontal cortex (compassionate, creative, collaborative, reflective, goal oriented, slow, socially-aligned), which of the two do you lean towards habitually?
If you are biased in the Red Zone, then you:
- react before you think
- think or say things like “I was here first”
- engage with impulses
- move from neutral to an energetic negative state (anger, disgust for instance) quickly
- easily adopt Red Zones belonging to others
- infect others with your own Red Zone
- feel anxious easily, particularly where you are lacking control or where there is some uncertainty
A metaphor here could be seeing a train on a platform about to depart and jumping on it before you see where it is going. In other words, people often engage with your Red Zone without cognitive choice.
Think of a person that you know that you would say is the most calm under high pressure. This person is very likely to be very heavily biased in the Blue Zone. In this state, they would
- be aware of their internal state and could label whether they are in the Blue or Red Zones
- seem to be always considering situations from a socially-oriented perspective (ie the needs of others)
- use a variety of strategies to manage down the impact of their Red Zone triggers
- be able to make clear thinking decisions in the face of pressure and stress
- are not overly impacted by a perceived lack of control or of uncertainty
- are not impacted by the Red Zone states of others
- do not act as a Red Zone contagion
In terms of a key measurement of EQ, the two dimensions of self awareness and self management are highly expressed by those biased toward the Blue Zone.
To compare these two zones to transactional analysis (TA), it would be easy to see that in their negative ego states Child and Parent are both Red Zone states, while the Adult is very in the Blue. Interestingly both Child and Parent have Blue Zone states too, and in these states they are growing (Child) or helping another grow (Parent).
One of the outcomes of TA is the concept of win-win through “I’m OK, you’re OK”. A closer look at this dynamic shows the four states possible:
Clearly, three of the four have the strong potential to create a Red Zone response in either ‘You’ or ‘I’. In our research, where we have looked at the dilemma of respect in organisations, we often find different internal maps of respect. For instance, teachers often express conditional respect (if you do what I ask then you will get what you need). Students, however, need unconditional respect to thrive. For them, this looks like “in spite of perhaps not knowing how to behave or how to do the work, I need you to listen to me, believe in me and to take me seriously. Indeed, only unconditional respect (or love) can trigger deep, higher-order change and growth. The only quadrant in the table above that describes unconditional respect is I’m OK, you’re OK. The only unquestionably blue quadrant.
Research has shown the contagious nature of emotions, with Red Zone emotions being more easily ‘caught’ than Blue. Given that emotions ‘leak’ (in other words, they are evident to others in spite of all of our efforts to contain them), any significant Red Zone emotions that you engage with will push an interaction with another into any of the quadrants above apart from the blue.
Part of the answer is to know which zone you are in. The rest of the solution lies with how you manage down your Red Zone, and how you can ramp up your Blue. Watch this space…
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=053033de-19f8-4bf7-bd1e-07db39af01d6)
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.
