Influence in Action
Page 6
Mindsight
The ability to focus your beam on your internal world is a skill that the author and psychiatrist Dan Siegel refers to as “mindsight,” which he describes as “a kind of focused attention that allows us to see the internal workings of our own minds.”1 This is an important ability. High conversational capacity, remember, can be defined as the ability to keep your intentions and your behavior aligned under pressure. The ability to focus your beam of attention on what’s happening inside you allows you to see when this alignment is at risk and gives you more choices about how to act in the moment. Self-awareness “isn’t just navel-gazing,” Siegel says. “It’s the presence of mind to actually be flexible in how you respond.”2
To increase your ability to respond more flexibly you must strengthen your focus on four things:
• Your emotional reactions
• Your cognitive reactions
• Your bodily sensations
• Your predilections, tendencies, and habits
Awareness of Your Emotional Reactions
Remaining candid and curious under pressure is simple in concept but difficult in practice because the emotions that throw you off-kilter are intense and instinctive. Recall, for instance, situations in which you were triggered out of the sweet spot. There are probably times when you noticed it as it was happening. But there are many more times when you caught it only after you were highly triggered, at which point regaining balance was far more difficult—if not impossible. Increasing your ability to monitor your emotional reactions, therefore, is the first step in learning to manage them more effectively.
Space to Choose
“Between stimulus and response there is a space,” it’s been said. “In that space is our power to choose our response.” When your personal awareness is low you tend to react in more undisciplined and impulsive ways because there’s little or no space between a stimulus and your response. High awareness increases this gap, giving you more time to choose how to act. “Mindsight helps us to be aware of our mental processes without being swept away by them, enables us to get ourselves off the autopilot of ingrained behaviors and habitual responses, and moves us beyond the reactive emotional loops we all have a tendency to get trapped in,” says Siegel.3 With clear awareness of your emotions, you’re better at monitoring and managing your reactions in the moment—particularly your powerful min and “win” tendencies.
It’s hard to overstate how important this is. Your min and “win” reactions have a scary ability to separate your behavior from your intentions. But because they’re your emotional factory settings, so to speak, they’re exceptionally hard to recognize and rein in. Without a strong ability to monitor your emotions, you’re going to continually experience disturbing disconnects between how you want to behave and how you actually behave—especially in challenging circumstances.
Going back to my earlier book, for example, I intended to help my friend on the playground but instead I just stood there, watching him suffer. That’s a big disconnect. As a U.S. Air Force officer and future NASA astronaut, Mike Mullane intended to land on a runway in his F-111, but instead he floated below a parachute as his aircraft crashed to the ground. Here’s another big disconnect. I’ve talked to nurses who intended to speak up when they noticed a surgeon opening the wrong leg on a patient, but they stood there silently until the surgeon figured it out. In this book, I discussed how Phil wanted his executives to open up to him and tell it like it is, but his aggressive behavior encouraged people to do the opposite.
The more aware we are, the less likely any trigger, even in the most mundane circumstances, will prompt hasty unthinking behavior that leads to undesirable consequences. Rather than operate on autopilot, we’ll slow down time to think it over and make a more considered choice.
—MARSHALL GOLDSMITH
These examples all highlight the same problem: When you combine low personal awareness and a triggering event, you’re in big trouble. Your blindness makes you reactive, weak, and incompetent. Poorly managed emotions make smart people act stupid.
With high personal awareness, however, you can monitor what’s going on in your mind. This gives you what psychologists refer to as cognitive control, which results in greater mental strength and behavioral competence. The ability to recognize and manage emotions helps smart people act smart.
The ability to recognize and manage emotions helps smart people act smart.
Operationalized Emotional Intelligence
When it comes to keeping your actions and your intentions in sync, this ability to focus your beam of attention on your emotional reactions separates the wheat from the chaff. Contrast the executive who only noticed his “win” reaction on the drive home after his afternoon meeting, for instance, with Steve in his conversation with Phil. When Phil challenged him, Steve felt like running away, but his higher personal awareness allowed him to catch this defensive reaction and behave more consistently with his intentions.
Low personal awareness renders you chronically incompetent because you never recognize when or how you’re getting in your own way. You’re little more than a conversational crash test dummy repeatedly smashing into emotional walls of your own making. This explains why conversational capacity has been described as operationalized emotional intelligence. Noticing a feeling as it wells up, and then intentionally managing it, is a primary skill of someone with high emotional quotient (EQ). Conversational capacity, therefore, can be defined in another way: It is the ability to recognize and manage your emotional reactions under pressure.
The key to all this is cultivating your “observer self,” the part of your mind that is up on your mental balcony observing the part of your mind that is down on the dance floor doing its thing. The ability to focus your beam internally allows you to recognize when you’re leaving the sweet spot before you react like a conversational puppet, with your behavioral strings pulled by your defensive tendencies. With low personal awareness, you’re little more than a marionette behaving at the mercy of your puppet-master emotions.
With low personal awareness, you’re little more than a marionette behaving at the mercy of your puppet-master emotions.
Zoom In, Zoom Out
In her book, Insight, Tasha Eurich describes her experience of identifying an emotional reaction before she acted on it. She was dealing with an airline gate agent, Bob, after a frustrating day trying to get to Hong Kong. For hours, the airline kept boarding and deplaning the passengers until the flight was finally canceled. Furious, Tasha approached Bob, who had been catching flak from many of the flight’s unhappy passengers. She was ready to lay into him.
“Luckily I’d recently learned about a tool developed by psychologist Richard Weissbourd called ‘Zoom In, Zoom Out,’” she writes. “To successfully take others’ perspectives in highly charged situations, Weissbourd advises we should start by ‘zooming in’ on our perspective to better understand it. So, I zoomed in: I’m hungry, tired, and furious at the airline for its mechanical ineptitude. Next, we should ‘zoom out’ and consider the perspective of the other person. When I imagined what Bob was experiencing, I thought, Poor Bob. I wonder what his day has been like.” She then reflects on how she reacted:
“Were you scheduled to work this evening?” I asked. “No, ma’am,” he instantly responded, pointing to his colleagues, “All four of us were heading home for the evening but were called back in. I was supposed to pick up my kids from school because my wife is out of town. I’ll probably be here until ten p.m.” I’d been feeling pretty sorry for myself, but now I felt even worse for Bob.4
Tasha’s story is a perfect example of high emotional awareness—the power of having enough space between stimulus and response to choose your actions rather than letting your emotions make the choice for you.
Awareness of Your Cognitive Reactions
With high personal awareness you’re not just noticing your emotional reactions in the moment, you’re also scrutinizing your cognitive reactions
—how you’re making sense of what’s going on around you. This is important for two reasons:
• First, recognizing you are jumping to a conclusion makes it easier to hold your views of “reality” hypothetically, to question and test them, and to inquire into the views of others. Being conscious of the leaps of logic that your mind is making increases your intellectual agility and humility.
• Second, your cognitive and emotional reactions are interrelated. How you frame affects how you emote.
Take for example, Stephen R. Covey’s experience one morning on a New York City subway:
People were sitting quietly—some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene.
Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.
The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.
It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt like was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?”
The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”
Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. “Your wife just died? Oh I’m so sorry! Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?” Everything changed in an instant.5
Covey’s initial emotional reactions, irritation and anger, were the product of his cognitive reactions—how he was interpreting the situation: “This is an irresponsible father who obviously doesn’t care if his kids are bothering other people on the train.” But after his paradigm shift, his response changed to compassion and concern. His story is a great example of the classic observation by Epictetus: “People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.”
Framing also played a key role in Steve’s willingness to engage Phil. Steve framed the predicament, as risky, but he believed he could make a difference. This encouraged him to speak out. His colleagues, however, interpreted the same predicament very differently. They saw Steve’s willingness to engage the issue as “career suicide.”
With all this in mind, when you catch an emotional reaction, ask yourself this question: “What is it about the way I’m framing the situation that may be leading me to react this way?”
Awareness of Your Bodily Sensations
With high personal awareness, you’re also conscious of your physical condition. “Our first five senses allow us to perceive the outside world—to hear a bird’s song or a snake’s warning rattle, to make our way down a busy street or smell the warming earth of spring,” says Dan Siegel. “What has been called our sixth sense allows us to perceive our internal bodily states—the quickly beating heart that signals fear or excitement, the sensation of butterflies in our stomach, the pain that demands our attention.”6 When your sixth sense is strong you notice when you are hungry, weary, stressed, jet-lagged, tense, nauseous, or in pain. So you can take responsibility for mindfully managing these states rather than letting them mindlessly manage you.
What You Bring to the Table
You’re also taking into account the general predilections and habits you bring to any situation or conversation. So you’re able to manage them responsibly. These include:
• Your personality traits. Are you generally pessimistic or optimistic? Open to new and conflicting ideas? Or do you prefer the familiar? (“I’m low on openness to new experience, and pessimistic, so I need to monitor my negative reactions to different ideas. . . .” Or, “I’m a strong introvert so speaking up candidly is something on which I need to focus.”)
• Your habitual behaviors. You’re aware of your behavioral tendencies.(“I tend to acquiesce when someone disagrees with me.” Or, “I tend to get hostile when someone challenges my view.”)
• Your filters. You recognize how such factors as your training, education, or experience create a unique lens through which you tend to see the world. (“I’m a finance person so I tend to see decisions through a narrow finance lens.” Or, “I went through a calamitous merger once and that experience may cloud my judgment about this one.” Or “Trained as an engineer, I tend to bring a strongly risk-averse disposition to most problems and decisions.”)
• Key triggers. You’re conscious of the issues and situations that often provoke your min or “win” reactions. (“I hate to feel stupid, so I tend to react sharply when someone suggests I don’t know what I’m talking about.”)
The Basic Discipline: Catching, Naming, and Taming
Self-awareness, according to Tasha Eurich, the author of Insight, “is the meta-skill of the twenty-first century.”7 It’s certainly a meta-skill when it comes to staying in the sweet spot because it’s the key to the first three steps in the basic discipline of conversational capacity: catching, naming, and taming.
Catching
We have to beware the trapdoors of the self.
—WAYNE SHORTER
Catching your min and “win” reactions before they dictate how you think and how you act is the first step. You want to cultivate this ability because of a point I failed to stress in my first book: The distance from the sweet spot represents the intensity of the reaction. The further you get from the sweet spot, the more severely you’ve been triggered. So, the ability to catch a reaction quickly gives you greater control over your response. It’s easier to regain balance when you’ve just barely been triggered than when the sweet spot is a mere speck in the distance.
Catching it early is also vital because of what psychologists refer to as “emotional flooding.” When you’re emotionally flooded, your rational mind—based in the neocortex and the source of your good intentions—is inundated by intense feelings generated in a deeper and older part of your brain. “The difference between flooding and more manageable experiences of our emotions is one of magnitude,” says Stephanie Manes at the Gottman Institute. “You reach the point when your thinking brain . . . is shut out.”8
There’s little power in making the observation, “Well, it appears I’ve been triggered,” as you’re shrieking at your colleague across the conference table. You have far more power, on the other hand, when you’re able to catch the reaction quickly: “I can feel my ‘win’ tendency starting to tug at me. I need to keep an eye on that or I risk slipping out of the sweet spot.”
Emotional reactivity starts as a tightening. There’s the familiar tug and before we know it, we’re pulled along. In just a few seconds, we go from being slightly miffed to completely out of control. Nevertheless, we have the inherent wisdom and ability to halt this chain reaction early on. To the degree that we’re attentive, we can nip the addictive urge while it’s still manageable. Just as we’re about to step into the trap, we can at least pause and take some deep breaths before proceeding.
—PEMA CHÖDRÖN
Here is why all of this matters. With high internal awareness you’re consciously monitoring your emotional state so you quickly recognize when your defen
sive, anti-learning tendencies are triggered and you’re in danger of losing balance. This is simple to state but hard to do. These reactions are so automatic, and you’re so used to them, that you often don’t realize you’ve been triggered until it’s too late. Chris Argyris referred to this problem—where your habitual, practiced, automatic behaviors work against your genuine intentions—as “skilled incompetence.”9 Increasing your personal awareness, therefore, is the first step in moving from skillfully incompetent reactions to skillfully competent actions. Your goal is to catch it when you’re barely out of balance, or better still, to notice when you’re at risk of losing balance.
Naming and Taming
Noticing is only the first step. Once you catch the emotional cues that a tendency is being triggered, the next step is to label it, to give the reaction a name:
“Ah, there’s my need to minimize trying to shut me down,” or “There’s my craving to ‘win’ telling me what to do.”
This seemingly minor step yields major results. Research shows that labeling your tendency generates more self-control. That’s right, simply giving your reaction a name gives you more power over it. Psychologists refer to this as “naming and taming.”
We are not primitive sea slugs responding with twitchy movements whenever we’re poked with a needle. We have brain cells. We can think.
—MARSHALL GOLDSMITH