The Emotional Resilience Blog

As mentioned in my previous blog, it transpires that 66% of grooms felt that trying to memorise their speech made their fears worse. But why?
When I interviewed the grooms concerned about their wedding day nerves I discovered that the pressure of trying to remember everything, especially on a day as big as your wedding enhances fear and paricularly anxiety. In effect fear of forgetting or going blank during the speech adds to all the other things that grooms get anxious about on their wedding day, enhansing their fear and the pressure of the day.

So what should you do if you don’t memorise your speech? In my next blog I will give you some tips on how to do a cracking speech without memorising the whole thing.

As mentioned in my previous blog, it transpires that 66% of grooms felt that trying to memorise their speech made their fears worse. But why?
When I interviewed the grooms concerned about their wedding day nerves I discovered that the pressure of trying to remember everything, especially on a day as big as your wedding enhances fear and paricularly anxiety. In effect fear of forgetting or going blank during the speech adds to all the other things that grooms get anxious about on their wedding day, enhansing their fear and the pressure of the day.

So what should you do if you don’t memorise your speech? In my next blog I will give you some tips on how to do a cracking speech without memorising the whole thing.

“I have a phobia about peanut butter. I hate the way it sticks to the roof of my mouth” Jenny stated. “Ugh” she added, shuddering and shaking her head at the thought.

“A phobia?” Claire asked

“Oh yes an absolute phobia. I really hate it. Even just the thought of eating peanut butter and getting it stuck … ugh!” Jenny replied as she shook her head again making a disgusted face as she did so.

“Wow you hate it that much?” Claire enquired smiling warmly at her friend.

“Yes that much” as she pulled a face again.

“Do you find that you think about it much, Jenny?” Claire asked

“No not really. Unless of course someone offered me a peanut butter sandwich, then I might.”

“Oh ok and if you saw a peanut butter sandwich” Claire paused “what would you do?”

Jenny looked puzzled “Not much as long as no one forced it on me”.

“Ok and how does this affect your life?”

“Claire you are teasing me. It doesn’t really affect my life at all. I just don’t want to eat peanut butter as I don’t like the sensation.”

“Then my dear, you do not have a phobia. You might not like it, but not liking peanut butter is not the same as having a phobia you know.” Claire stated.

“Oh, er so what is a phobia if that isn’t one then?” Jenny asked.

“Well you know Karen from number 43?”

“Yes what about her?” Jenny replied, eagerly. Delighted that she might be about to get some juicy gossip about the odd woman across the road.

“Well have you seen her in her garage?”

“No why”

“You watch next time she goes into her garage. Just see what happens.”

“Claire!” Jenny exclaimed “I can’t wait that long. Tell me. Now or I’ll explode!”

“Ok firstly their garage isn’t like yours or mine – it’s spotless and there is absolutely no junk and cleaner than out kitchens!”

“Oooo. Yes and?”

“She has a small piece of rope that she pulls the car out with. She never ever drives it out. You will never see her actually in the garage.”

“How does she keep it spotless then?” Jenny asked

“Her son has to keep it clean”

“But why? That’s really odd”

Claire look directly at her friend “Spiders. She is a total arachnophobic.”

“Arachnophobic?”

“Yes a phobia of spiders. The main thing about a phobia that make them different from just a fear or a dislike is how intense the reaction is to the feared object or situation. A phobia means that the individual has an irrational, intense obsessive and excessive desire to avoid the object. In Karen’s case, spiders; she won’t even go in her own garage and makes her son keep it spotless just in case there is a spider there.”

“Oh I had no idea” Jenny replied, clearly shocked.

“Yes a phobia rules your entire life and controls what you will and wont do; all the time.”

“How awful”

“Exactly. So whilst you might not like peanut butter I don’t think it’s a phobia for you.”

Jenny looked at Claire. “When you put it like that…”

A story about the US military providing $117 million worth of emotional resilience training for the troops on active service ostensibly has been doing the rounds in a number of news agencies around the world. Combat stress in the UK has called for a similar effort in the UK.

I have been doing some work with the UK Ministry of Defence in this area, but I have to agree with Combat Stress. More could and should be done and not just to reduce post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), although this is an excellent reason for helping people develop emotional resilience. Emotional Resilience also helps people perform better in stressful situations, make better decisions in those situations and keep relationships healthy both at work and home to name but a few.

You really don’t need to go as extreme as the military to capitalise on the advantages of investing in developing better emotional resilience in a work force. In the organisations I work with (from the emergency services to postal workers, academic staff to admin workers) they have all seen benefits not only in reduced absences from work for stress related reasons, but also pulse surveys showing

• increased satisfaction at work,
• better working relationships,
• better decision making at all levels,
• people being more prepared to make decisions and
• people more able to deal positively with change, and
• greater levels of involvement in business innovation.

Emotional resilience is finally finding it’s feet and organisations and their people are benefiting from a real win / win. Unfortunately the levels of expertise in this area are still pretty rudimentary with consultants using inappropriate approaches in organisational settings, basically just transferring basic counselling and coaching techniques to wider settings. I am not questioning the value of these approaches on an one-on-one individual basis. Developing emotional resilience across entire organisations requires a bit more of a strategic approach than just scaling up individual personal development tools and techniques.

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.

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