When we come across a challenge in life, or go through a bad patch, it’s usually not the events themselves that cause the most trouble – it’s our emotions. When it comes to pursuing and trying to build resilience, emotions are like our Achilles heel. Let’s face it, if it weren’t for those pesky feelings getting in the way, colouring our decisions and provoking reactions, things would be a hell of a lot easier! If you’ve ever stormed out of a difficult meeting because you’re filled with rage, or sent an email you regret because you’re so consumed with jealousy, you’ll know what we mean. In short: you can have all the determination and good intentions in the world, but when strong emotions take over, it can feel so very hard to stay strong.
The good news is there is plenty you can do to learn to regulate and manage your emotions better so that they work for, not against, you, meaning you feel in control and, ultimately, stronger.
“In terms of building the best possible platform to bounce back to, it really is important first of all, to know and understand who you really are.”
Liggy Webb, consultant in behavioural skills and author of Resilience
In Part 1, we touched upon self-awareness and how it was the first step in the journey towards real strength. Managing your emotions is a vital part of building real strength, and so it would follow that self-awareness is the first step in that journey too. Think about it: how can you begin to tackle and regulate your emotions without first of all becoming aware of them? This means recognizing them and getting curious about them; watching how they shift and change and, crucially, how they affect your behaviour and ability to tackle whatever struggle you come up against.
“Resilience is more available to people curious about their own line of thinking and behaving.”
Brené Brown, research professor, University of Houston and author of Rising Strong
In Brené Brown’s book Rising Strong, she talks about being ‘triggered’. This is the first stage of the rising-after-adversity process, which she has coined as the ‘Rising Strong’ process. Being triggered refers to that moment where something happens which sets your emotions off. You know that moment where you feel emotionally wobbly? This might be due to something relatively minor, such as an argument with a colleague, or finding out you’ve been overlooked for a promotion, or something more serious, like finding out your partner has been unfaithful.
In Rising Strong, Brown likens our struggles to being ‘in an arena’ and our ‘trigger’ as that ‘face down moment’. In other words, that moment when you have been knocked to the floor. A trigger is anything that creates emotional conflict and it’s when we’re in emotional conflict that our feelings can get the better of us. The result of this might be that we tell ourselves unhelpful narratives about ourselves and other people: They’re all getting at me, I can’t do this, it’s my fault etc. Or that we begin to engage in behaviours or coping strategies which only rob us of our strength. The ‘Rising Strong’ process that Brown sets out is an alternative to this.
The question that you’re probably asking now though is: if the first stage of that process is being face down in the arena, how do I get back up? Well it’s here that ‘know yourself’ comes into its own, since the most important thing is to recognize you have been knocked down – ‘triggered’ – in the first place. Once you know you’ve been emotionally triggered, you can begin to look at those emotions, and possibly see patterns: Oh, so I tend to feel angry when someone accuses me of not doing my best, or, I feel a lot of guilt around parenting.
We can then hold those emotions under our metaphorical microscope and get curious about them, learn from them: what are these emotions really about and where do they come from? How are they stopping me from being strong? And, perhaps more importantly, how can I better use them to help me be strong?
We are all emotional beings – admittedly, some more than others! Either way, we can’t stop emotions happening. Like birds on a feeding table, they’re constantly flying in, some staying (longer if we feed them) and some flying off again almost as soon as they arrived. The question is: how do you experience emotions – especially the tricky ones – in a way that does not compromise your ability to be strong, and enables you to uphold your values?
This is where ‘emotional agility’ comes in. Just like resilience, stamina, perseverance and real strength, there are a gazillion interpretations of emotional agility. If we break it right down, however, to those two words, it is basically the ability to be agile with our emotions. That is, to be able to understand, harness them and use them to the best of our ability, in order to be more in control of them (not them of us!). In a nutshell, emotional agility enables us to take control of our feelings.
In her book, Emotional Agility, and the TED talk of the same name, psychologist and author Susan David describes that moment when your emotion(s) is triggered as getting ‘hooked’.
“When we are hooked we only see one perspective, one line of thought.”
Susan David, psychologist and author of Emotional Agility
It’s important to remember that it doesn’t just have to be reacting strongly in an overt way to an emotion that proves that we’re hooked. Brooding (ruminating) is another way of showing we’re hooked, as well as bottling up emotions and suppressing them. In all of these hooked states, there is no space between the stimulus to what we’re feeling and the way we’re dealing with it. We have – in other words – pushed ourselves into an emotional corner and left ourselves no choice, no other available decisions and no alternative behaviours. When we’re hooked like this, we’re rigid in our thinking – the opposite of emotional agility. However, if we can learn to create a gap between feeling the emotion and reacting to it, we can tackle adversity much better, even overcome it. The ability to do this is at the very core of emotional agility.
At its core, real strength is how we deal with the everyday challenges that life throws at us and deal with the situations and thoughts that we have. Learning how to ‘unhook’ from negative thoughts and emotions is an extremely useful and important skill. Sometimes, it is actual emotions that we are hooked by, but sometimes it’s the ideas about how we want our lives to be (even – and especially – if they’re not like that). An example of this might be not being able to afford to move house and then hearing of a friend, who seems to have it very easy, buying the house of their dreams! If we’re not careful, envy and bitterness can eat us up, even if, when we think about it, their house purchase bears no relation to our life. Emotions then start to dominate our actions, rather than our values, and we can slide very easily from fact to opinion to judgement. So ‘my friend has bought a house she loves and our time will come’ turns to, ‘it’s not fair! How come they can afford just to buy a house and we have to struggle (cue more brooding). What wrong choices have I made in life/what have I done to deserve this?’
If we can become aware of and open up that space between the fact and the judgement, however, we can become ‘unhooked’ and more emotionally agile.
By this we mean recognize your thoughts and emotions for what they are – thoughts and emotions. If you are in a meeting and you notice you are being undermined, it’s about having the thought: ‘I’m being undermined – I’m having the thought that I’m being undermined. I’m having the emotion that I’m being undermined.’ This is opposed to the alternative thought of, ‘How dare they undermine me, I’m going to storm out!’
Stop fighting against them, or ‘drop the rope’ as Susan David says. ‘Don’t treat emotions as facts, but understand they can be guides’ she says in the talk. ‘See that gnaw you have in your chest? That’s a beacon – a guide to what’s important to you, but it’s still not a fact.’ For example, feeling guilty that you don’t spend enough time with your kids does not mean you don’t spend enough time with your kids. However, that feeling is a good indicator of what you want and what matters to you right now – you want to spend more time with your kids.
In Chapter 9 we will be looking in a little more depth at ways in which you can separate yourself from your thoughts and emotions, so that you can look at them objectively. But for now, all you need to know is that creating a ‘metaview’ is a psychological term for being able to rise above your thoughts and feelings, like a helicopter. It means being able to step above the emotion and realize that a purely emotional, rather than cognitive, response is not helpful. It’s realizing you need to respond in line with your values. The ability to do this is vital to our wellbeing. It’s why, explains David, when a child comes home from school and says they’re being bullied, it’s important not to simply try and take their pain away from them by treating them to ice-cream or playing with them. Instead, ask a child what’s important to them – how they want to ‘be’ in this difficult situation. This will help them to do what they want to do, even if their peers say and do something else. This of course goes for grown-ups too! The habits that we create which are imbued with our values make the most difference to our lives and our happiness. So next time you have a thought or emotion and are reacting to it, ask yourself the following questions.
Not all ‘hooks’ are bad ones, but there are some that we really need to let go of (for example, the narrative ‘I’ll always be the fat one’ or ‘I’m no good at dating’). These hooks are keeping us ‘unagile’ and so ‘stepping out’ is just another way of letting go of them. An important part of the ‘letting go’ part of emotional agility is (and we’ve touched on this before) knowing which hooks to let go of, and which to hold onto. The response to that is very simple: those that are imbued with our values we should hold onto, because we are much more mentally strong if we cultivate deep values and do things that are in line with them. It makes being emotionally agile a whole lot easier.
This stage is all about making tiny changes. It’s the small changes, after all, the tiny shifts in our habits, which make an overall difference to our life. The important thing to remember if we want to remain strong and also to build strength, is that those changes need to be deeply linked to our ‘want to’ goals and our values.
At the core of our brainstem, we have a bundle of nerve cells called the ‘reticular activating system’ or RAS for short. The RAS contains 70% of the brain’s nerve cells, and has a few extremely important functions:
In his book, Getting Things Done, productivity consultant Dave Allen explains the function and potential of the reticular activating system further:
‘Just like a computer, your brain has a search function – but it’s even more phenomenal than a computer’s as it seems to be programmed by what we focus on, and more primarily, what we identify with.’
By ‘what we identify with’, Allen means the specific things that we, as individuals, hone in on due to our past experiences, our jobs, our cultural references – and all the things that make us who we are. For example, an optician will notice people wearing glasses more than your average person; a pregnant woman will suddenly notice other pregnant women.
Taking Allen’s description of the RAS as our brain’s ‘search function’, we can understand that if we can programme it to ‘search’ for and pay attention to the things we want to achieve, then it can help us to achieve them. Basically, the RAS has the power to bring to your attention all the necessary information to help you achieve your goal. It can identify resources that would otherwise have gone unnoticed and drive your attention towards positive outcomes.
The RAS also has a part to play in managing our emotions. This is because we feed it with thoughts and internal self-talk all the time. And so it follows that if we make these thoughts and self-talk positive, our RAS will latch onto those and use them to achieve positive outcomes.
“With the power of positive attention we can programme our minds to produce new outcomes.”
Liggy Webb, consultant in behavioural skills and author of Resilience
One great way of making the most of your RAS and building your inner strength and confidence is to visualize outcomes that you want to achieve. Visualization is basically the act of creating vivid and compelling images in your mind which emulate, as closely as possible, the real thing. The interesting thing about your RAS is that it can’t tell the difference between visualizing a task and actually doing it – it uses the same processes. In other words it tends to believe whatever message you give it. Therefore, if you were to practise/visualize feeling supremely confident as you give a speech, this would improve your ability to confidently give the actual speech.
In this chapter, we have explored the part our emotions play in our behaviours, the decisions we make and our ability to be strong. Hopefully, you have learned strategies and tips to help you to first of all recognize the emotions you are feeling and then regulate and manage them better. One of the main points was creating that all-important space between the trigger for our emotion and how we react to it. We talked about creating a ‘metaview’, which is one great way to do this, but in Chapter 9 we will be discussing further how we can create a space between ourselves and our thoughts. It’s worth noting that these techniques can be used to create a space from our emotions, too, so take extra notice when you come to that part. And above all, remember, you control your emotions – they don’t control you!