Archive for July, 2009
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
I could feel his presence even before he came into view. It was like a bow-wave of unthinking anxiety entering the plane.
I am currently in transit in Bahrain airport after a flight from London. I was in one of the little business class pod things waiting as the last passengers boarded our flight, when a chap boarded, came through the kitchen area and walked past me up the aisle. He was white, sweating slightly and walking just a little too fast with strides that were just a little too short. His dilated pupils darting around as he glanced at his ticket stub and up at the seat numbers.
“This man is in my seat” I heard from a few seats behind me.
“Sorry sir your seat is down there he is in the correct seat” came the calm reply from one of the number of stewardesses hovering around. The man appeared in my view again. The seat opposite must be his. He reached over me and opened the locker above my head. “Is that bag yours?” he enquired, talking just a little too fast.
“Er yes it is” I replied a little puzzled as to why he opened the locker above my seat and not the locker above his.
“Er oh dear” he continued and proceeded to open the next locker on my side.
“Hi, I think you have a locker too, above your seat”. I offered.
He stared at me for a second, expressionless.
“You have a locker above your seat” I said again.
“Er oh” he mumbled and jerked around to face his seat.
After stowing his hand luggage the man sat down and stood up countless times checking his pockets, going back to his luggage, sitting down, standing up and so forth until a stewardess approached. “Can I help sir?”
“I think I have left my passport in the lounge or dropped it somewhere” he replied patting his pockets.
“You have it in your hand sir”
He lifted his left hand to stare in disbelief at the passport that had (to him) miraculously appeared.
One of the things about fear is that as it increases so our rational thought decreases. The worse the fear the harder it is to see things and think straight. Decisions made when we are scared are notoriously poor. Unfortunately when we are scared we want to take action, to do something, anything as the energy is also increased at such times.
A piece of advice I often give on the course is ‘fine’ make a decision but don’t act on it until later. Until you are in a calm place the next day for example.
. . .
Foot note: I asked the man if he was Ok and he admitted he hated flying. I showed him a couple of techniques to overcome his fear and not long after we took off he fell asleep for the rest of the flight. He told me when we landed in Bahrain it was the first time he has ever slept on a flight. 
Posted in Decision making, Fear of flying | No Comments »
Monday, July 27th, 2009
Think about a person who is emotionally immature. What are they like?
Now think about a person who is emotionally mature. What are they like?
What is the difference between the two?
Chances are you will probably include some of the following attributes:
- Accurate self confidence
- A good level of self esteem
- The ability to express the full range of emotions appropriately - this includes anger, joy, love and fear
- Respect for your own and others emotional states
- The ability to experience and enjoy intimacy and solitude
- Be able to be emotionally balanced in emotionally charged situations
- The ability to make balanced decisions in difficult situations
- Can make independent decisions and not be swayed by group or peer pressure
- Able to work on your own and as a constructive part of a group
- Mood stability, not prone to ‘downers’, negative or overly positive or unrealistic pessimistic or optimistic thinking
- Seeks reality regardless of the personal consequences
- Ability to nurture others and self
- Ability to deal with own inappropriate fears and not catch those of others (emotional resilience)
- Not prone to panic / calm in the face of adversity
- Healthy self image
- Assertive as opposed to aggressive, submissive, passive aggressive or manipulative.
- Compassionate to self and others
- Seeks to understand own responses and those of others
- Accurately reflect on own performance - not prone to over or under estimating the situation
- Can give and actively seek accurate and honest feedback
- Can be honest even in situations where this might be challenged
- Aware of own biases and actively looks to find others.
All of the above are attributes of emotional maturity. Stay tuned for Emotional Maturity and Emotional Resilience questionnaires - coming soon to this site.
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Sunday, July 12th, 2009
In the last article, I concluded, or rather Bev concluded that emotional resilience was more like an internal suit of armour. As she put it:
“Emotional resilience is just about knowing where you are emotionally at any time, and then being able to deal with your emotions in a positive way, so they don’t adversely affect your actions, reactions, thinking and decisions. So that you do what you need to and perform like you can.”
I have placed the emphasis on the work adversely for two reasons:
Firstly our emotions are always part of our thinking, reactions, actions and decisions. It is a delusion to think we can do any of these without influence from our emotions. Our thinking and emotions are part of the same thing, they are not separate ‘things’. It is not a delusion to think we can affect how our emotions impact on our thinking, reactions, actions and decisions and that we can alter the outcomes of those emotions. We can, usually by altering how we think about the emotions; how we build habits or connections between our emotions and our reactions, either by strengthening the habits or weakening them. We can and do naturally control these daily. Emotional resilience is about doing this consciously.
Secondly it is a mistake to think that emotional resilience means without emotion. It does not. It actually means with full cognisance or awareness of our emotions with the ability to change our relationships to those emotions to enhance performance or prevent adverse outcomes from the feeling we naturally have. Just because you feel fear does not mean that you have to react to it in any particular way. It is also very possible to reduce or dishabituate fear. What I mean by this is the feeling of fear is connected to our reaction to the fear, be that wanting to run away, or whatever. The emotion and our reaction to the emotion are two connected but different things.
For example, two people are about to go on a flight. They both feel fear about flying. They both get similar initial symptoms; increased heart rate, dilated pupils, sweating, jumbly feeling in their stomach and they start easily at sudden noises or movements.
However one has built the habit of reacting to the feeling by becoming more and more focussed on the feeling, going inside and noticing every change in the feeling, particularly any increase in the feeling. They also have built a habit of a connection with these feelings to a thought pattern that might go something like this “I feel awful. I just know we are going to crash. This is it. Oh my god. I am going to die. I am dying. I can’t fly. I am not doing this any more. “ and so on. This person has a truly terrible experience on their flight as the feelings feed off the thoughts and steadily get so bad that they think, ney are convinced that they are about to drop off this mortal coil. This is a typical fear – thought – action negative downward spiral. So the next time this person goes on a flight the awful experience is remembered and repeated thus becoming a bigger habit. A habit of fear.
The second person however knows they are feeling fear. At this point this person has a habit of concentrating on things outside of their body. They don’t fall victim of their feelings, instead read a book or annoy the stewardess, watch a movie or anything rather than think about their feelings. As a result they don’t get the downward spiral, instead they find they start to feel a bit better and they notice this improvement in feelings. They think to themselves, oh it was only temporary and it is going now. And guess what happens. The feelings do indeed go.
The main points:
1. There are 3 things The stimulus (an aeroplane) → The Emotion (fear) → The Reaction (focus in / focus out)
2. Each of these 3 things get associated, linked, anchored, chained or connected together in our brains.
3. More or less of any of the elements in the chain increases or decreases the intensity of the connections with the other two components. The greater the emotion (fear) the greater the reaction. The greater reaction to the fear the stronger the association between the links of the chain gets. So eventually just the thought of a plane gets frightening. Now we are in the territory of an habituated pathological fear.
4. Conversely if the reaction to the emotion gets less, the links or associations in the chain weaken. If that happens then the link with the stimulus also weakens until eventually the links get broken. The habit of fear can then turn into either a habit of neutrality or even enjoyment.
5. Not everyone has the same reaction – some people love flying (honest!). This shows how the links between a stimulus, emotion and our subsequent reactions (which feed back to the emotion and strengthen or weaken this link or connection between the stimulus, the emotion and out reaction) change the affect from one adverse affect to neutral or even positive affect.
Emotional resilience is indeed the ability to change the direction of the spiral.
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Friday, July 10th, 2009
Jeremy was waiting to go up to the stage to do his presentation. He knew these feelings so well. They were like old friends, only the type of friends who you hide from when they turn up on your doorstep. Very familiar but unwelcome, especially when you need to impress.
The symptoms were so familiar. His hands were sweating, he was having problems hearing things, his stomach was tightening and his mouth and throat were dry. He was starting to feel sick as his moment got closer and closer.
How did the others manage to go up there without any nerves? They just looked so calm and composed, even laughing and joking. This was no joke. He hoped that someone would just call it all off, the roof to collapse, anything.
Bev, who was sat next to him on the front row could feel Jeremy’s discomfort. Not that Jeremy would have called it discomfort. Discomfort is like trapped wind or a sore elbow, this was more like total collapse, during an earthquake complete with falling masonry and trees.
“Jerry, You OK?” Bev whispered
“Yes” he managed weakly
“I can help” Bev offered
“It’s ok thanks”
“No really I can help – I will stand up and take off all my cloths then you won’t have to go on.”
Jeremy laughed.
“My nakedness isn’t that funny” she remonstrated in a playfully
“I didn’t mean…” Jeremy stammered
“Wow you have got this bad haven’t you?” She turned to look at her colleague. Jeremy turned to face her and she could see the look of someone who had just seen their first live nightmare.
“Listen” she said gently, try this…
A few moments later Jeremy’s face had gained colour, looked more animated and his posture was straighter and positive. “Wow that’s amazing, I feel a lot calmer. How did you do that?”
“Just a little trick I picked up on a course.” Bev replied. “When you go up try this. You’ll find it makes all the difference. All you need to do is…”
Jeremy calmed down and went up, not to his death but to deliver a calm and composed presentation.
Afterwards he saw Bev smiling at him. “What was that you do to me? It felt really odd being up there and being calm and able to think.”
“They are just a couple of tools I have learnt to help me be more emotionally resilient.”
“Emotionally resilient?”
“Yes it’s a bit like having your own internal suit of armour, you can put it on when you need it.”
“So does this mean that you never feel scared?” Jeremy asked
“Not at all, it just means that when you start to feel something you can control it rather than having you feelings and emotions control your mind and actions.”
Bev continued “You see we often end up just reacting to our fears, like you were just before you went up to speak. Emotional resilience is just about knowing where you are emotionally at any time, and then being able to deal with your emotions in a positive way, so they don’t adversely affect your actions, reactions, thinking and decisions. So that you do what you need to and perform like you can.”
“My anxiety was certainly changing the way I was thinking and reacting, that’s for sure. That is until you er… did what you did with me, it really helped me overcome my fear”
Bev smiled.
“So is that the same as emotional maturity?” Jeremy enquired
“No not all being emotionally resilient is just part of being emotionally mature. Being emotionally mature means you are resilient. Being emotionally resilient does not necessarily mean you are emotionally mature. Resilience is a subset of maturity.”
In the third article of this series I will look at just what the attributes of emotional maturity are, compared to emotional resilience.
Posted in Decision making, Definitions in Emotional Resilience, emotional maturity, overcome fear | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
Emotional maturity and emotional resilience are funny things. Spot the difference:
Jay (insert any other name here) wakes up and his (add your own gender) head starts to clear. Today is the day he has to xxxxx (fill in your own ugh thought here).
Breakfast is largely a silent affair. Jay’s wife, a financial consultant, and his three children know not to puncture into Jay’s world on mornings like this. They can just sense the tension and over the years they have learnt the consequences of trying to engage Jay when he is in one of his ‘moods’.
The last time Jay was in a ‘mood’ and his daughter tried to cheer him up xxxx (add your own observed response of a person in a mood when people were trying to reach out to them / you) happened. As a result they now know not to even try but to just stay quiet and make sure he doesn’t see the silent face pulling and eye rolling they amuse each other with at times like this. It is their way of breaking the tension without the consequences.
On the way to work another driver, Sally, miscalculates a junction. The Sally, who was hitherto quite happy going about her daily business ends up in one of those random events and accidentally pulls out in front of Jay, causing Jay to have to break sharply to avoid a collision. Jay swears at the other driver and blows his horn, keeping his fist on the horn for what appears to be ages. Other drivers start to look. Then the traffic slows. Jay is immediately behind the luckless Sally in the now stationary queue of traffic.
Jay cannot contain himself anymore. Sally glances in her mirror to see the tall man open his car door and stride towards her. Sally locks her doors as her pupils open wide as she looks too see if there is anyway she can move the car forward. She starts to shake. Jay reaches Sally’s door and motions for the window to be opened. Sally just stares ahead, wishing and praying for the traffic to move. She doesn’t acknowledge Jay’s gesticulations and shouting.
Suddenly there is a loud bang. Sally jumps but keeps looking ahead, her shaking becoming visible now. Keeping he head pointing forward she quickly glances sideways with just her eyes. Jay has kicked the door and is still shouting and gesticulating when finally the traffic moves forward. Sally pulls away.
It is Jay’s turn to have horns blown at him as he quickly walks back to his car.
Sally is quiet at work as she reflects on the events of the morning. She wonders what she did wrong to deserve this. As she sits in her office, Dan who has been a bit of a problem recently knocks on her door. “Sally can I just ask you about this account?”
Sally shouts back “No Dan you can’t. For crying out loud just get on with your work. Why are you only one in this office that has to keep asking stupid questions. Everyone else can do their job.” Sally is shocked at her outburst but feels justified. Dan does not appear able to learn. He keeps asking the same questions. Argh.
Dan sits quietly, aware of all the eyes in the open plan office boring into the back of his head. “What did I do to deserve that? he asks himself. He keeps himself quietly to himself for the rest of the day. When he gets home that evening, late because he had to finish his work without the help he needed, his dinner is somewhat cool. “Yuk this is cold I can’t eat cold dinner.” he complains to his partner Zoey.
“Listen buster your dinner will be warm next time alright because it will be in the dog.” Zoey marches into the kitchen muttering ‘ungrateful git’ under her breath just loud enough for Dan to hear, of course. “What did I do? I just made him dinner and he complains.” again with just enough voice that she hopes it will carry through to Dan. The dog is sleeping peacefully, curled up on the kitchen floor only. She kicks him “GETOUTOFTHEKITCHENYOUONESPOTTEDFREAK. YOUSHOULDN’TBEINHERE.” Spot yelps and runs thinking “What the hell did I do to deserve that?” when he sees a cat…
The endemic continues.
In my next post we will have a look at emotional maturity v’s emotional resilience. What they are and how they relate to each other.
Posted in Definitions in Emotional Resilience, emotional maturity | No Comments »
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
I get asked a lot about Emotional Resilience, what it is and how to do it. It is a frequently misunderstood concept.
Variously I hear Emotional Resilience (ER) being used to mean:
- Without emotion
- Emotionless
- The ability to cut off from your emotions
- Not being effected by your emotions, and several others.
People who are without any emotion are usually a) a liability to themselves and others, b) thankfully rare, c) boring and quite possibly d) dead.
Just think about what being without emotion would mean for a second or two. It would certainly mean that we would not get any feedback about what is dangerous in our environment. The emotion of fear is there to keep us safe, even if it does tend to overreact a bit. Fear is a really fast way of learning about the things that can hurt / eat us.
Just watch a child who gets burnt by something hot. You are unlikely to find that they need a formal lecture with PowerPoint slides, extra curricula classes, revision, months of study and an exam to learn not to touch it again. Just as well really as I don’t think the human race would have made it past 1st Grade. We would now probably only be found in the deep freeze section of a more emotionally intelligent dinosaur’s supermarket having been hunted and gathered ourselves.
Another thing to consider is Empathy, the ability to sense others emotions and ‘feel’ for them. Empathy and care also require some pretty decent emotions. Eating your young might prevent starvation but it is not exactly the best strategy for survival of the species (or staying out of jail) and that invitation around to a friends house for dinner could be final. Being without empathy is not a winner for deep relationships nor is it going to endear you to your friends - if you have any.
Being emotionless would also take all the fun out of…well everything actually. Imagine chocolate just being a way of not starving. It doesn’t bear thinking about really. Oh and sex would be for one purpose only. It’s not only useful for enjoying sex and chocolate. Taking an emotionless person or someone who doesn’t get affected by their emotions to share a movie, the ballet or theatre with is going to be a bit of a fruitless exercise really. They are not going to be a whole bag of laughs; weepy movies would just be stared at, horror movies wouldn’t raise their pulse one beat and even the thought of any similar event would not be seen as a treat. Without emotion the only fun will be in fundamentally boring.
You are walking down a dark lonely street at night and you start to get the feeling that something isn’t quite right … or you meet someone for the first time and you get that sense that you have known them before. Or you just ‘know’ you are about to get ‘lucky’ with the stunning chap or gal who has just walked into the room. All of these would just not be possible to ‘feel’ without emotion. Yes our intuition is also part of our emotional system.
So just say yes to emotions and yes to the causes of emotion.
OK so what is emotional resilience and why bother with it if our emotions are so damn useful and at times enjoyable?
Well sometimes we find that emotions kind of take over running our bodies and our minds just at the moment we want to be in control. I would much rather be cool, calm and collected and have my sense of humor when I am chatting someone up or doing a speech rather than being a shaking humorless geek who can’t get his words out properly and keeps missing his mouth with his food and drink. I don’t know about you but calm wins at moments like this.
Emotional resilience really comprises of two elements:
- The ability of an individual to register and accurately identify our own, and often other people’s emotions in the moment (Emotional Intelligence), and
- The ability and skill to change our emotional state, or reduce (or heighten) the effect of our emotions at will, if so desired.
Basically emotional resilience is the ability to be able to control our emotions rather than having them control us, or allowing them to sweep over us when we want, so let’s here it for Emotional Resilience. Rah!
Credit where credit is due. Play fair and acknowledge the authors’ work and expertise.
This article is protected by worldwide Copyright © David Wilkinson / Remarkable Performance Ltd. 2009: you may link to this article but copying it or re-posting / embedding is a breach of copyright.
Tags: emotional intelligence, emotional resilience
Posted in Decision making, Definitions in Emotional Resilience | No Comments »
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
 Pathological We use the term ‘pathological’ quite a lot. We talk about pathological liars and pathological fears for example. But what does pathological mean in these contexts?
Pathological comes from the English word pathology which is derived from the latin pathologia & the Middle French pathologie both of which, in-turn have their origins in the Greek word pathologia which originally meant the study of the emotions. Patho having a combined meaning of emotions, suffering and disease and logy meaning to study. To the ancient Greeks emotional suffering and disease (dis-ease or not being at ease) were considered to be deviations from normal good health.
Pathological therefore means anything that deviates from the normal or healthy and these days tends to mean extreme deviations, hence the connection with disease and pathology (the study of disease). So a pathological fear really means a fear that is not the norm and is considered to be unhealthy for the individual with the fear.
Tags: Pathological fear
Posted in Definitions in Emotional Resilience | No Comments »
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
Welcome to the fear blog. I won’t bother filling this post with a lot of introductory gumph. Just to say please join in. Comments are very welcome.
 Dave Wilkinson
Posted in Fear Course News | No Comments »
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