Archive for the ‘Fear’ Category
Friday, June 25th, 2010
The fourth factor of emotional intelligence is where emotional resilience and emotional regulation feature. Emotionally intelligent or individuals with a high level of emotional maturity are able to manage their own and other peoples emotional states.
The ability to effectively manage emotions requires the abilities to be able to:
- Monitor your own and others emotions on a continual basis,
- Differentiate between emotions,
- Identify emotions accurately,
- Have agency - the belief that you can change feelings or emotional states,
- Use strategies to change emotions, both in yourself and others,
- Assess the effectiveness of the strategies employed,
- Change strategies (if necessary) to effect the desired outcome.
The Fear Course equips people to be able to do all of these particularly in high anxiety / fear situations.
Tags: emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, emotional resilience, Fear, manage emotion, The Fear Course
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Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
Further from my last blog yesterday on the skills needed to be able to use emotions, the next factor of emotional intelligence is the ability to be able to understand emotions. Our emotions convey a lot of information about ourselves, others and the situations we find ourselves in. The ability and skill with which we can think about and decode the messages our emotions convey are vital in our day-to-day lives.
Understanding emotions require a 6 core attributes:
- Emotional Literacy - having the ability to be able to decode, think and talk about our emotions,
- Understand how emotions can combine to form other internal outcomes,
- Know how our emotions can progress from one emotion to another,
- Understand how both yourself and others are behaving due to emotional reactions,
- Predict how people are likely to feel and act in different situations,
- The ability to be able analyse emotions and their causes both in ourselves and others.
As you can see these are quite a complex series of abilities. Emotional resilience and the ability to overcome fear often relies on these skills, particularly the ability to be able to predict and decode our emotions.
Tags: emotional intelligence, emotional literacy, emotional resilience, overcome fear
Posted in Emotional Resilience Research, Fear, emotion regulation, emotional intelligence, emotional literacy, emotional resilience, empathy | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
The second skill set required for emotional intelligence and emotional resilience is the ability to be able to use or facilitate our emotions. Our emotions change the way we think. Conversely how we think can change how we feel. What this means is that we can use our thinking and our emotions to effect the outcomes we want. This often requires a reasonably high level of skill especially when fear or anxiety are involved. Fear and anxiety based emotions often short circuit and take over our cognitive (thinking) processes. On The Fear Course we show you how to regain control quickly and easily and stop the emotion taking over.
It is an important skill to be able to change (use) both your thinking and emotions to regain control to develop emotional resilience.
Tags: emotional intelligence, emotional resilience, The Fear Course
Posted in Fear, Fear Course News, emotional intelligence, emotional resilience | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 21st, 2010
The first factor of emotional intelligence (EQ) is Emotion Perception which is probably the most basic of the skills involved in EQ.
Put simply emotion perception is the ability to recognise or identify emotions as they occur in both yourself and others. As you can probably well imagine an inability to be able to recognise emotions or confusing them is often a recipe for all sorts of problems. Being oblivious to something like fear can be somewhat dangerous especially in potentially hazardous situations. On the other hand mis-diagnosing emotions can be equally troublesome. On the live Fear Course we often explore the differences between fear, panic, worry, anxiety and nervousness. There is a fair percentage of the population who struggle with this and cannot distinguish between emotions for themselves or are unable to recognise them in others. Not being able to recognise fear, panic or anxiety in others, particularly in work and management situations frequently leads to a lack of empathy and a whole series of relationship issues.
Tags: emotional resilience
Posted in Emotional Resilience Research, Fear, emotion regulation, emotional intelligence, emotional resilience | 1 Comment »
Thursday, June 17th, 2010
I am often asked about emotional resilience (ER) and what it is. My quick explanation is that emotional resilience is the ability to be able to bounce back quickly when we take an emotional ‘knock’. I am then asked if this is the same as emotional intelligence (EQ). My personal view is yes and no. The father of EQ, Daniel Goldman would say ER is part of EQ. I would agree and disagree!
The reason I say this is that quite a few very resilient people who are not very emotionally intelligent. There is a Scottish saying, “where there’s no sense there’s no feeling!” But is this really resilience or just plain stupidity? If you don’t feel anything thing are you being resilient? It’s a bit like the notion of bravery. If you are not scared the action taken can’t be considered to be brave even if other people would have be scared in that situation. So resilience would normally require the intelligence. However it appears to me that resilience goes beyond intelligence in that it is very possible to have someone who is considered to be emotionally intelligent, (understands their own and others emotions, are empathetic, etc.) and yet struggles with controlling their own heightened difficult emotions.
I suppose the question is; would you normally consider a person to be emotionally intelligent who:
- understood and was in touch with their own emotions,
- could read other people’s emotional state and
- could respond accordingly with empathy to others, and
- were normally in control of their emotions
BUT when an unusual event occurred got frightened for example or suffered from nerves before a job interview?
Tags: emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, emotional resilience
Posted in Fear, emotion regulation, emotional intelligence, emotional resilience | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
In this, the second in the series of 8 articles aimed at helping you to choose a safe service to help you deal with your fears, nerves, anxiety and even panic attacks, I will be looking at probably one of the most telling signs as to whether you can trust a service or not. In this day and age it is very easy to produce a website that looks professional, glossy and convincing. However when you analyse the content of the website you quite often find that behind the clever marketing and glossy graphics there is nothing else but clever tactics to get people to buy their product.
Probably the biggest clue that the individual or individuals responsible for the site are not suitably qualified, experienced or doing anything more than just selling a product is the fact that the website concerned only contains sales messages. If you feel across a site that is only geared towards selling a product and has no useful content, articles, blogs or preferably research then it is quite likely that at best the product is based on one solution, or at worst is a scam.
If the service being offered was produced by a professional and an expert you would expect to find considerable evidence of professional activity, and sharing that expertise freely with the community. Rather than simply showing their expertise in selling and marketing.
So if the site concerned is just about sell and there is no evidence of professional and expert activity I would suggest you look elsewhere.
Tags: Fear, safe service
Posted in Buying a service, Fear, Staying safe | No Comments »
Thursday, March 4th, 2010
I was asked yesterday what emotional resilience has got to do with honesty. Try this…
You know when you have said something in the privacy of your own home about someone and the kids have overheard you? For example you say that Mrs. Goggins from No 43 is a mean old git or something similar.
Then when you are with your young child in the street and you meet Mrs. Goggins, What is the one thing you pray your child doesn’t do right now?
Yeah that’s right be honest! You may recognise the feeling of the moment your child pipes up “Hi mrs. Goggins my Mum / Dad thinks (as you leap for their mouth) you are a mean old git” and you lie by saying something like, “Oh no I think she/he must have got confused we were talking about another Mrs. Goggins.”
Then in all cringe making innocence daughter or son pipes up “No Mum/Dad you said it was her, you know, this Mrs. Goggins, from number 43, you said mum/dad, you said.” as you start to die inside, “Oh look at the time, must dash, lovely to see you Mrs. Goggins, as always.” and under your breath, just loud enough for you your son/daughter to hear, “Wait till I get you home. you really embarrassed me”.
Now we all have opinions of people that we don’t tell people. We often rationalise it as ‘Not wishing to be hurtful’ or ‘I don’t want to cause trouble’, or ‘better let sleeping dogs lye’. What we actually mean (because we are often not being honest with ourselves) is “I don’t like the feelings and don’t want the consequences of being that honest.”
Fear usually drives our lack of total honesty. It takes courage and emotional resilience to really say what we really think and face up to the fact that it is often our lack of courage (not the other excuses) that prevents us from voicing our opinions.
The other side of this coin is people being totally honest with us; being told something (feedback) about ourselves that we don’t like and we don’t want to hear, no matter how true it might be. Something that ‘hurts us’. Often we rationalise this by deflection by saying something like ‘Oh it’s ok they are just in a mood’ or something like that to shift the blame and the emotional consequences. It takes real emotional resilience to firstly hear what people are saying about us, often with their body language and then face up to it and truly and openly explore the feedback for what we can learn and change about our attitudes and behaviours.
Just a thought.
Dave
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Monday, February 22nd, 2010
On the Fear Course we often get people who find it difficult to identify and articulate the range of emotions they feel. As a result when it comes to being able to deal with their emotions and being emotionally resilient they find it a tough job. They know something is causing problems and they know it’s a fear or anxiety, but they struggle to describe what the feeling is. We do a little exercise at the start of the day where we get people to start to articulate what they are feeling and when they feel it. We ask them to decide on the level of fear or anxiety they have in certain situations. A proportion of people struggle with this task.
Often in family, schooling and work systems emotions are not discussed, identified and recognised. In fact often people are told “not to be emotional”. Frequently we find that displays of emotion are considered to the the cause of ‘discomfort’ (another emotion) and therefore need to be removed from the situation as they are ‘unhelpful’.
The reason people have such problems with emotions is that they have not been shown how to be comfortable with them. I frequently find in my research that the most emotionally resilient people are those who recognise and accept their and other people’s emotions (emotional intelligence). As a result they find it fairly easy to then regulate their emotions (emotional resilience), even in really difficult situations.
The process of getting people, particularly children comfortable with something as natural and human as emotions has become known as emotional literacy. Usually the process of developing emotional literacy has a number of elements:
- Learning to recognise an emotion as it happens,
- Being able to label and identify our emotions and the difference between them,
- Being able to express or articulate our emotions in a healthy way,
- Recognising emotions as they occur in others (empathy)
- The ability to regulate our emotions (emotional resilience) rather than our emotions driving our behaviour and thinking.
However many people have not developed these abilities and are in actual fact uncomfortable or even scared of their own emotions find it difficult to cope when others are displaying their emotions.
Some schools and parents recognise the importance of emotional resilience and have started to develop emotional literacy programmes. In the mean time what about the adults who haven’t had the benefit of developing emotional resilience? The foundation of the Fear Course is exactly that. To help people get comfortable with their emotions and learn to regulate them quickly and easily. More about emotional literacy soon…
Posted in Emotional Resilience Research, Fear, emotion regulation, emotional literacy, emotional resilience | No Comments »
Friday, February 12th, 2010
One of the things we show people on the Fear Course is the research into the connection between the food they eat and feelings of anxiety, including a couple of case studies we talk about on the course. Recently we have been doing some experiments with clients on diet and cooking methods. Here is a very brief summary of what we found. I will prepare a full paper and download it to the articles and notes area soon.
When we started the test the participants had a Fear Factor (FF) average score of 8.2 with a range of 7.7 to 9.6
The group who ate normally (No dietry change) had an average FF of 8 before the test and 8.1 afterwards.
The group who cut out all fried foods had an average FF of 8.1 before the test and 7.8 afterwards
The group who stopped eating refined sugar products, sweets, chocolate and other sugary foods AND drinks went from a FF of 8.2 to 6.4
The group who only stopped fizzy drinks reduced their FF 8.1 to 7.1
The group who cut out salty snacks, crisps, slated nuts etc. had an average FF of 8.2 before the test and 7.4 afterwards
Who ate raw vegetables only went from a FF of 8 to 5.9.
There were some other conditions (like stopping alcohol, caffeine, meat etc.) in the experiment which I will cover in the paper.
You can see our up to date Fear Course dates and locations here: http://www.fearcourse.com/
Posted in Emotional Resilience Research, Fear, diet and anxiety, emotional resilience, overcome fear | No Comments »
Sunday, February 7th, 2010
I was recently sent an article that was distributed to advertising copywriters. The article starts out by giving advice on how advertisers can use benefits in their advertising copy. And then it moves on to explicit instructions of how to use fear to get people to buy products. Her is the advice advertisers are given:
“Every benefit is just one side of a coin; the other side is a fear.
Because while prospects desire all these things, they also fear NOT having them in their lives. They fear poverty and dependence … illness and pain … being abandoned and left alone, and being thought little of.
And so sales copy that promises to deliver a much-desired benefit and alleviate a nagging fear can be twice as effective as copy that focuses on benefits alone.”
The article, by an advertising consultancy company then go on to give explicit instructions on how to use fear to get us to buy their products. Here are some lowlights of advice given to professional advertising copy writiers:
“If you’re going to invoke fear in your sales copy, make sure it’s a fear that’s already waking your prospects at 2:30 AM in a cold sweat.” - This advice is given so advertisers don’t waste their time and copy on trying to instill new fears. It’s easier and cheaper to use fears we already have apparently.
“If you’re going to use fear in your copy, make sure it’s an imminent fear. Something that is likely to happen in the very near future – or better yet, at virtually any moment.” it then goes on to state that people don’t act on distant fears, ‘you have to make them imminent and gives many advertising examples including “In other words, someone near you was a victim of a violent crime in his or her home yesterday. If it was your next-door neighbor, you’re many times more likely to be buy a burglar alarm today than if the victim was a mile or ten miles away.”
“Using a fear that paralyzes prospects won’t do you any good and it sure won’t help your prospects.”. The moral for advertisers here is that “I do not want him frozen into inaction by the fear”.
“Pushing your prospects’ panic buttons is pointless unless you can show how your product eliminates the cause of his fear.” - The advice here is that advertisers don’t waste time and money “invoking a fear that isn’t actionable”. In other words the fear you use must drive ‘prospects’ to a sale, “it must be actionable.”
Lastly the guide ends on a cheery little piece of advice to advertisers:
“A little fear goes a long way. It’s a powerful attention-getter. Used correctly, it can add dimension to your product’s benefits and motivate prospects to order now.”
We all know advertisers often use fear to sell. I just wasn’t aware how cynical, clinical and purposeful the practice was.
Advice: If you are about to buy anything just question your motivations for doing so and make sure you aren’t being manipulated. The more emotionally resilient you are the less likely advertisers fear inducing tactics are likely to work.
Posted in Fear, Fear Course News, emotional resilience, impulse control | No Comments »
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