As they old saying goes, “cooler heads will prevail”. It’s easy to say, but the real challenge becomes maintaining a cool head when a situation starts heating up. As we discussed in an earlier edition, when someone is very angry or very afraid they are simply unable to use the very faculty that might save their day: their ability to reason.
So, before we focus on helping someone else regain their composure, we had best train and learn to maintain our own composure. A fair question is: “CAN we learn to keep our cool?”. Experience has proven to me that we can learn, but if we intend to become more successful in our professional and personal lives we must learn the techniques necessary to “keep our wits about us”. Social conditioning can alter our instincts and program our body and mind to work in a different fashion. Extensive training and repeated inoculation to stressful situations can prepare us to more effectively deal with the heat of humanity.
Like most acquired skills two essential components are necessary to change our behavior: effort and repetition. Without either we simply end up giving mental assent. Mental assent can best be understood as having heard a wonderfully motivating presentation on a Sunday evening and getting up Monday morning with the message replaying in our mind and motivating us like a house afire. By Wednesday we’re still grateful for having heard such a moving message, but by Friday we can’t recall the specifics, and by the following Sunday we’re back in the same old rut. The message hasn’t been internalized and become not just part of what we do but who we are. Mental assent just doesn’t cut it when one wants to create positive life changes like learning to keep a cooler head.
To me, the godfather of motivational speakers is the late, Earl Nightingale, whose “The Strangest Secret” is a timeless presentation on how to improve one’s performance. In a nutshell, it outlines several simple steps which, to be effective, require effort and repetition. In order for us to maintain our composure when dealing with conflict or confrontation we must learn new skills and, more important, practice them. That means repeating some key vocal responses and physical actions and repeating them until they just become what we do and say without having to think about them. (That, by the way, means we’ve achieved the highest level of competence, “unconscious competence”.)
Our first and most important task is to deal with how WE respond instead of trying to influence or control another’s behavior. It is definitely “Job One” in the game of dealing with difficult people. “Self Awareness” is the first skill necessary for playing our best game. That means paying close attention to the signals our body sends as it naturally shifts into “FFFS” mode: “Fight, Flight, Freeze, Submit”, and if we’re paying attention the signals will quickly become obvious to us. From our mid-brain, the primordial aspect of our consciousness, come the physical responses which can increase our heart rate, tense our muscles, dilate our pupils, increase our breathing rate and oxygen levels, and flood our systems with adrenaline and norepinephrine, instantly making us ready to rumble. And we, therefore, must be aware and quickly recognize how we are responding to the present conflict or the potential for conflict. Our bodes become like a neon sign blinking brightly and shouting, “Danger Will Robinson!”. Before we can shift into “problem solving” mode, we must realize while the mind might be plotting strategy, the body has already shifting into high gear believing the game is on! In our next edition I’ll offer ideas on how having realized our bodies are ready to fight, our mind can quickly tame the savage beast and get back in the driver’s seat.
Originally published in Beaumont Business Journal, Heat And Humanity Column
