Emotional intelligence – let go and move on…

Posted by Andrew on March 4, 2010 · 3 Comments 

Heathrow baggage handler strike
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:

  1. 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…
  2. Give yourself permission – life has its ups and downs, and the downs are neither permanent, nor define you.
  3. 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.
  4. 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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Filed under Behaviour, Book, Brain, Emotions, Red Zone, Relationships, The Success Zone · Tagged with , , , , , ,

Love is blind, they say, but what about anger?

Posted by Andrew on October 19, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

3407364408_4e5111a739When 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/

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The Success Zone publishing updates

Posted by Andrew on October 16, 2009 · 1 Comment 

The Success Zone

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 , ,

Emotional Contagion – Are Your Emotions Worth Catching?

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?”
Group 8 Education 2009

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