LESSON: Being aware of what you’re feeling – and why – will stop you being driven by buried emotions from the past and allow you to create the space to live fully in the here and now.
NICK IS THE NEWLY PROMOTED MD of a division of a big UK manufacturing company. He has hitherto been a high-flyer but people are now experiencing him as abrasive, moody and over-demanding. His boss is beginning to question whether he’s been over-promoted and whether he has the maturity for this bigger job.
In our first session Nick was surly and dismissive. Whatever he may have been feeling, he looked pretty miserable and, I am afraid, that rubbed off on the people he was with, including me. He sat forward on his chair and seemed tense, as if he was containing a lot of repressed energy, his shirt straining across his biceps. I felt ever so slightly intimidated. Straight away I suspected that he had a problem both with ‘authority figures’ and also with asking for help. I felt he didn’t trust me and wanted me to know it.
Nick had a pretty deprived upbringing. Brought up on a rough council estate, he’d been picked on as a ‘swat’. His dad had been a drunk and had left home when Nick was very young. His mum had brought him and his younger brother up on her own until she remarried when he was about ten. His stepdad was a decent bloke but never really bonded with Nick (who admitted he hadn’t made it easy) and was the sort of guy never to show emotion. He’d also been super critical of Nick, and seemed more jealous than proud of his academic and sporting achievements. Nick’s cocky guardedness began to crack when he’d told me that he’d never had a hug from his stepdad but that was OK, he hadn’t minded.
‘So you don’t hug your kids?’ I asked with mock naiveté.
‘Of course I do,’ he shot back.
‘Why bother, when they wouldn’t mind if you didn’t?’ I retorted. This exchange triggered a real change in our relationship. He began to open up.
When he began to get a fix on what he was feeling and, crucially, felt safe enough to express it, he could admit to me that he felt scared and unappreciated. It was this that made him appear defensive and brittle. It became clear that underneath his tough-guy bravado he yearned for someone to tell him he was doing well, and this was where the problem lay. For Nick’s boss was an ex-consultant whose sky-high IQ sadly wasn’t matched by his EQ (emotional intelligence). He was distant, uncommunicative and unempathic. He would withdraw from Nick and let him fend for himself, and even when he did pay him attention there was never any praise, just criticism and a push for more.
In a not untypical twist, these unhelpful dynamics played out between Nick and his team too, where he, unconsciously, treated them as he had been treated. There was another breakthrough moment when I read to him some of the feedback I’d gleaned from his team in a series of phone calls. As I read their anonymous responses he stared at me. ‘Fucking hell,’ he said, ‘that’s Ron, my stepdad, isn’t it? Word for word.’
Nick’s core pathogenic belief was that he was unworthy and unlovable. When his colleagues experienced him as a truculent eight-year-old, that is because, at that moment, that was exactly who he psychically was. Breaking these toxic patterns required Nick to work on his self-esteem. He had to accept the aching need he had for praise and affirmation and stop pretending these things were beneath him. He also had to face the sadness and anger that resulted. Most critically, he had to accept that the love he needed (for that is what it really was) was clearly not going to come from either of his two ‘dads’ and certainly not from his rather cold boss. It could only come from himself.
We worked through a programme I call ‘Break Free from the Past’ (available at www.derekdraper.net). It helps people identify their core pathogenic belief and then to work on replacing the harsh voice of their internal critic with the supportive voice of their internal ally. We looked at how Nick could allow himself to feel more vulnerable, watching the Brené Brown TED Talk as I had with Rachel.
We spent some time exploring how he could change his relationships with his team, using the idea of ‘Professional Intimacy’ that I developed and often use with clients.
The Relationship Ladder
The first step on the ladder is to be together, which involves honesty, reciprocity and boundaries. The next level (‘connected’) adds in presence, openness and authenticity. The next (‘caring’) adds in respect, acceptance and empathy. The next (‘rely’) adds in trust, forgiveness and resilience. To reach the top of the ladder, Level 5 – Professional Intimacy – there needs to be a real sense of psycho-logical safety (a concept we explore in the next chapter), alongside a willingness to be vulnerable and a comfort with real challenge. It is worth noting that Nick and his manager had never even achieved Level 1! This is not unusual. When I run this diagnostic with coachees and teams, even those who think they have got really good relationships at work realise that they are stuck at one of the first three levels. They often stumble around the trust and forgiveness required to reach level 4 and/or the vulnerability and challenge needed to reach true Professional Intimacy at Level 5 (as we will see was the case with Beata’s team in the next story).
Achieving Level 5 isn’t always possible, the model is meant to be descriptive not prescriptive, opening out the idea of what a relationship is so that we can approach the ones we have with more awareness and challenge.
In Nick’s case, he was able to do some stakeholder mapping (see Chapter 6) using the Relationship Ladder to help analyse how strong his relationships were. Like many people, he found that they were not as strong as he might have assumed, and he was able to work out which needed work.
It takes two to tango, and it was pretty obvious that Nick’s boss was unlikely to leap up the ladder with Nick. Nonetheless, the next step in his coaching was to sit down with his boss and share what he had learnt. How open would he be able to be? How vulnerable? How well would he cope if his boss failed to respond empathically?
In the event, he did brilliantly and I felt very proud of him, as I told him afterwards. He was able to tell his manager how he had got into a vicious spiral through projecting his issues with fathers on to both him and his team, and show how he was going to change that. The most poignant moment came when he told his boss how upset he had been by the way he’d been treated, but that he knew that he wasn’t going to get what he needed from him.
His boss found all this excruciating, avoiding eye contact, wriggling in his chair and bringing the meeting to an early close. Now there’s a guy who needs some coaching, I thought as we left. Funny thing is, he has never asked for it and, indeed, has never asked me to coach any of his people since.
‘People will forget what you said, and they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.’
attributed to Maya Angelou
Our professional lives are relentlessly personal and intensely emotional – even if we consciously resist or deny this. In any given week we might be forced to deal with issues of greed, success, failure, resources, security, accomplishment, praise, authority, power, belonging, conforming, individuality, identity, competition, secrecy, pressure, expectation and status. Because our base survival needs depend to a large extent on work, our most primitive emotions and fears can easily be provoked and that doesn’t always feel good.
We cannot, however, divorce ourselves from our feelings, even though at times we might really wish we could. We humans have an incredible ability for rational, intelligent, logical thought processes, but we are first and foremost emotional beings. At best we can numb out, act out or avoid them, but the fact is that we were emotional beings long before we were rational and logical – the limbic brain, often called the emotional brain by scientists, is the first part of an infant’s brain to get ‘wired’, and the quality of that wiring varies based on our genetics, and our environment. It is also the second oldest part of the brain (after the reptilian, primitive region) predating, in evolutionary terms, the more ‘advanced’ pre-frontal cortex by a few million years, hence its other name – the ‘old mammalian’ brain.
Human beings have just a few basic emotions: fear, anger, disgust, shame, loneliness, sadness, surprise/startle, excitement/joy, trust/love. This idea is adapted from Paul Brown, Joan Kingsley and Sue Paterson, authors of The Fear-Free Organisation, in which they suggest that emotions are ‘…real, physiological events and they exist whether we recognise them or not in conscious awareness. Emotions happen whether we like them or not.’ So we can either choose to pay attention to our emotions, or we can ignore them and live our lives at the mercy of their undeniable, unavoidable influence on us.
The study of the impact of emotions on business was popularised by the work of Daniel Goleman on EQ (Emotional Quotient). Your EQ is the level of your ability to understand other people, what motivates them and how to work cooperatively with them. It is made up of five areas, which Goleman describes in his book Emotional Intelligence as knowing one’s emotions (emotional awareness); managing emotions (your ability to respond rather than react – what you do with emotions when they arise); motivating oneself; recognising emotion in others (empathy); and handling relationships (such as conflict management, collaboration, the ability to influence and inspire, and bonding). The great news is that our EQ can be developed. Your level of emotional intelligence is not fixed and immovable, even though some people are more predisposed to higher emotional intelligence than others. According to John Cooper, co-founder of consultants JCA Global, people who work diligently on improving their EQ will typically have their levels improved by around 20 per cent. Echoing the ideas on Reflection in Chapter 1, EQ involves knowing what we are feeling and thinking, and also knowing what we feel and what we think about those thoughts and feelings.
By far the biggest factor influencing our interpretation of events is our inner world (which I discuss more in Part 5): our internal, psychological landscape made up of conscious, semi-conscious and decidedly unconscious associations, memories, beliefs, relationships and stories that we’ve collected over our lifetimes. Our brains store all of these up in our long-term memory, and when ‘something happens’ in our daily lives, the brain filters the present moment through the lens of the past, quickly flipping through its thousands of reference files until it finds a match. This is why a child who got barked at once by a dog can easily turn into an adult who feels nervous, and even afraid, of dogs. They are not actually fully present to the dog in front of them, or to the reality that they are adult and that the scary moment from their childhood is long gone and forgotten. In that moment, the adult has left the building and the memory – the childlike sense of smallness, powerlessness and fear – takes over.
Many psychologists refer to this as projection: our past psychological and emotional experience is played out not as belonging to the past but as if it applies only to the present moment. Very often this is a result of interacting with other people, as Nick found with his boss, who unconsciously fitted the mould of his dad(s). In the moments when he was making himself and others feel bad, Nick wasn’t a psychological grown-up. Emotionally and psychologically he was the little boy being neglected by his dad or stepdad. His mind automatically overlooked the reality – that he was a kind, generous, imperfect human being – and the old script played itself out over and over like a broken record. Such is the power of projection.
Nick and all of us who are affected by projection are not weak; projection is a universal process. I’ve yet to meet anyone who is immune to it. The simple truth is that we are often unable to fully metabolise and understand significant parts of our early life experience, and so we carry it with us into adulthood where it can wreak its havoc, as we saw with Nick. The present becomes the landscape where our unfinished business from the past expresses itself. If we are brave enough this offers us a profound opportunity to increase our self-knowledge, self-compassion and sense of true authority, as we disentangle the ‘there and then’ from the ‘here and now’.
A final note about projection: it is incredibly tempting, as we saw with Nick, to make the issue about ‘them’ – the boss, colleague or client. This dynamic is underpinned by a concept introduced by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein – that of splitting. This involves an attempt to get rid of an unwanted, intolerable or otherwise undesirable characteristics or emotion by ‘planting’ it outside of oneself, not unlike the way a criminal might plant false evidence to implicate someone else. We may use other people to stand for different parts of ourselves – obstinate, rude, bossy and controlling parts, greedy and destructive parts, passive, acquiescent parts – those parts of the self that we fear and have disowned, which we then ‘see’ in other people at work. Rivalry with colleagues or other organisations might be a psychological re-enactment of our sibling or peer relationships; our boss(es) may represent one or more parents; clients may conjure psychological echoes of people who have been dependent on us, or on whom we are dependent. Millions of us convince ourselves, and anyone who will listen, that what is upsetting or annoying us involves that person or event ‘out there’, but this can often evade the real issue, which is inside us.
Nick’s story proved that actually, the external circumstances do not need to change and the people who populate our lives do not need to behave differently. Nick’s manager continued to relate poorly to people, but that didn’t matter once Nick had fully accepted that he didn’t actually need his boss to meet his needs. Now he was more of a true ‘grown-up’ he could acknowledge them, own them, and start to meet them himself.
People vary in their ability to feel and connect to their feelings. Some people are highly sensitive and can easily become flooded by their emotions; others are very disconnected from them and may not have ‘felt’ any strong emotion for years, almost as if they were switched off. If you’re more like the former, learn to step back, observe and notice your feelings rather than being completely caught up in them. For those of us who are less aware of our feelings, we often have to work backwards to get to this point, starting initially with noticing our reactive, automatic behaviours, then getting curious about what we might be feeling underneath it. Then we can begin to practise observing the emotions rather than being driven by them.
Here are three practices that you could consider adopting to help you create more space for greater self-awareness about what you are feeling and why:
The feeling and number check-in
The blue sky visualisation
Not being as young as you feel
We will then look at how you can vanquish your internal critic and strengthen your internal ally.
A simple yet effective way of checking in with yourself is the ‘feeling and number’ method. Take a couple of breaths and ask yourself how you are feeling, and how intense that feeling is on a scale of one to ten. You can focus on emotions (such as sad or anxious) or physical sensations (such as tightness, tension, a burning tummy or fluttering chest). Sometimes, feelings are hard to identify because there is so much head noise; if this is the case, imagine dropping below the mind chatter and noticing what feelings might be present underneath the thoughts. If you notice multiple feelings at the same time, ask yourself which one is front and centre. The deceptively simple act of naming and numbering an emotion can be enormously effective in creating enough psychological space for you to experience feelings without being controlled by them.
I suggest using this technique at the beginning and end of your day, before or after a big meeting, or even in the middle of a task or meeting – if you start to notice yourself being overwhelmed on the one hand, or distracted, disengaged or not fully present on the other. If you struggle to identify a feeling (many of us are so practised at numbing or being disconnected from our feelings that it can be difficult to know what we are feeling), take a few seconds to breathe deeply and allow your attention to turn inward. Instead of focusing on the sights, sounds and smells around you, focus on your body. Ask yourself, ‘how do I feel right now?’ and see if any images come to mind. An image can convey a lot of information, and from there we can gain insight into how we are feeling. An image of a hurricane might indicate that you are feeling angry or perhaps even scared; an image of a brick wall could represent feeling stuck or frustrated; an image of a person crouched in a box could show you that you feel trapped or ‘boxed in’. There are no right or wrong answers here; the point is to allow yourself to join the dots between any images that come to mind and the underlying feelings associated with those images.
This technique is an integral part of the training of consultants and leaders at the Tavistock Clinic, where I serve as a governor. The feeling and number check-in helps you take your own emotional temperature, and best of all, no one needs to know you’re doing it.
Checking in need not be just an individual practice, you can also use this exercise with a check-in partner, or even at team meetings, as a very effective way to get a sense of where people are at. It gives you a sneak peek into at least a part of everyone’s inner world. Many of the world’s most innovative and forward thinking companies are already weaving it into their culture, including giants such as Google and LinkedIn – acknowledging and welcoming ‘the whole person’ to the table is becoming increasingly common. Bear in mind that if your workplace culture has not typically involved this, it might seem a bit strange at first.
Another way of tuning into your feelings involves using the metaphor of ‘being the sky’. A quick ‘glance’ at your ‘inner sky’ can give you a lot of information about what might be happening for you. Is the sky clear? Stormy? Cloudy, with patches of blue peeking through? Is it daytime or night? Another option is to envision your mind as a road and imagine that you’re sitting at the side of it ‘watching’ the traffic – the thoughts and feelings – pass by. Many Zen practitioners imagine their mind as a lake. As thoughts come, they cause ripples on the water, but the ripples are just that, they’re not tidal waves. Allow the ripples to happen – in other words accept your thoughts and feelings – and they should soon pass.
A favourite tool of mine for helping clients (and indeed myself) figure out whether projection is active or not is this simple question: How old do I feel right now? Taking a moment to ‘tune in’ and get a sense of how old we feel can be very illuminating because of the simple yet powerful realisation that we often don’t feel our age. Instead of 24 or 60, we feel 6 or 17. This alone can be enormously enlightening. We might not know why we feel that age or what it means, but even if we go no further, getting a sense of our emotional age in the here-and-now can help bring us fully back to the present.
If you want to go a little deeper, you can ask a follow up question: What happened back then at that age that I might be emotionally re-experiencing or even re-creating in the present? In Nick’s case, he was acting like an eight-year-old at work because, psychologically, the situation mirrored his life at that age, when his male authority figure left him to fend for himself without any praise, appreciation or support – just like his boss was doing in the here-and-now. Nick’s boss provided a pretty solid match for Nick’s memories of his dad and stepdad, and bingo! Nick’s mind conveniently ignored anything that didn’t quite correlate (such as the fact that he was now a grown man). Nick, like most of us, got so caught up in the drama that was unfolding (the mind does love a bit of drama) that he failed to see that what was happening was projection – he bought into the story as if it were fact.
So next time you are triggered (annoyed, angry or upset in any way) by another person or something that happens, try using this technique; ask yourself how old you feel in that moment. As uncomfortable as it is to admit to the truth that we don’t always function as psychological adults, as soon as we own up to it, we take responsibility for ourselves, and that shifts us back into being the adult we are today. Anytime you feel younger than you actually are, it is worth questioning what unfinished business or dynamic you might be playing out from the past in the present.
ASK YOURSELF: What am I feeling right now? How old am I feeling right now?
As well as checking in to find out more about what you are feeling and why, a key part of creating more space to better identify and manage your emotions involves identifying and strengthening your internal ally. Part of Nick’s work involved this – getting to know his internal critic and internal ally, recognising when the shaming, self-destructive voice of his internal critic was present so that he could consciously employ the constructive voice of his internal ally instead.
Before any of us are leaders, executives, employees or entrepreneurs, we are first and foremost human beings – and all human beings have to wrestle from day one with primal emotions like envy, greed, fear, hatred, need and love. All human beings grapple with their own worthiness. Regardless of whether we were the apple of our mother’s eye, or the bane of our father’s life, or whatever, we were all born into relationships – the effects of which are lifelong. Consequently, we all have fears, shame and insecurities. As we grow up, perhaps experiencing moments of profound belonging and moments of terrifying abandonment, isolation or shame, we internalise and absorb the messages we hear from the world around us. These include societal messages about our gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and so on, and intensely personal messages about our worthiness and lovability, given to us by our parents, grandparents, siblings and friends. Most children’s sense of self is easily affected and influenced by the way they are spoken to and treated by the people that matter, and how we interpret and process the events of our lives – what we make them mean about us – shapes our internal dialogue. If our core needs are not met, or if we are spoken to like shit, told that we’re ugly or that we’ll never make the grade or – more positively but still invidiously – that we are extra special, this tends to be the narrative that we internalise. Our thoughts begin to replicate those of the people we grew up with – sometimes we’ll even hear ‘their’ voice in our head saying the exact words that they said to us ten, twenty, thirty or more years ago. We supposedly think 60,000 thoughts a day, and unfortunately for many people, if left to its own devices that internal voice tends to default to criticism, shame, blame and attack, constantly on the lookout for external threats and turning on itself and becoming its own worst enemy. Also, as Nick found, the way we treat ourselves often unconsciously spills over into the way we treat others
Dr Kristin Neff, an associate professor of human development and culture at the University of Texas, conducted pioneering research into self-compassion, which is the hallmark of the inner ally. Her excellent quiz on self-compassion (which you can easily find online) highlights the contrast between the messages of the internal critic and those of our internal ally. Where the internal critic is disapproving and judgemental about our flaws and inadequacies, the internal ally reminds us that most people have feelings of inadequacy. When feeling emotional pain, the internal critic tends to blow things out of proportion, while our internal ally takes a balanced view of the situation and tries to be loving towards us. When feeling down or going through a rough patch the internal critic is cold-hearted, snide and even cruel; the internal ally, on the other hand, reminds us that we deserve support especially when times are tough. The internal critic is intolerant of vulnerability; the internal ally embraces it.
The seeds of the internal critic are planted in childhood and we spend many of our days watering them. For those of us who recognise this, the task in adulthood is to consciously develop a sense of our internal ally and to make its presence strong enough to combat the often relentless nagging of the internal critic. We often fail to realise that we actually have a huge amount of creative control over that voice.
Cultivating a conscious sense of connection to one’s internal ally can bolster you from the inside out. Your internal ally is what it sounds like: an inner resource that will stand by you no matter what challenge you’re facing or what mistake you’ve made, holding your feet to the fire, challenging you to embody your values and live, work and lead with integrity. Your internal ally helps you to create – and keep open – the space to operate in the world as the best you, not the one bedevilled by negative thinking and past trauma.
Developing an internal ally is often an awkward and uncomfortable process. Saying or thinking nice things about oneself can feel arrogant, silly or just plain wrong. It’s not necessary to become ultra-perky cheerleaders patting ourselves on the back every time we send an email, or high-fiving our colleagues when we get anything done, but we could all afford to turn up the volume a bit on the voice of our internal ally. Doing this can bring up old messages from the past that we have internalised so deeply that we don’t stop to question whether they are true or not. It shows us the ways in which we have agreed to undermine ourselves. You can have fun with this, perhaps giving your internal critic and ally names. One of my colleagues calls her internal critic ‘Nasty Nina’ and thinks of her internal ally as herself, twenty years from now.
In the book Playing Big, author Tara Mohr suggests a number of simple, practical techniques for how to bring your internal ally closer. ‘Sometime today,’ she writes, ‘ask yourself, “What would my inner mentor [Mohr’s name for the internal ally] do in this situation? What would she say?” Check in with her and see what the answer is. Do or say that.’ Mohr invites you to relate to your internal ally as you might to an actual mentor. Imagine how they would act in the world, and emulate that. Before composing a difficult email or engaging in a challenging conversation, ask yourself how your internal ally would approach it. You could even practise writing the email in the voice of your internal ally or do some stream-of-consciousness writing, perhaps writing back and forth between you and the internal ally, or simply allowing ‘their voice’ to speak to any challenges or opportunities you might be facing.
If you are a visual learner, you could use a powerful technique used by top athletes and do a visualisation in which you ‘meet’ your internal ally, noticing how she holds herself, how she interacts with other people, how she dresses and what her environment – both professional and personal – looks like. These techniques might seem fluffy but they are not; they are ‘right-brained’ activities, which help us tap into our creativity and emotional intelligence, enabling us to respond in more creative, mature or constructive ways.
It’s a bit like having a coach you can call on at any moment to help you figure out how to deal with the challenges that are part of daily life in the twenty-first century. Instead of calling or emailing this coach, all you need to do is tune into him or her, finding their presence within you. Your internal ally is the wisest version of your-self that you can conceive of: unflappable, principled and calm in the face of any crisis. Who would you rather have on your team during a challenging time – someone who believes in you, motivates you and gives you pep talks and reality checks when your motivation or confidence start to wane, or someone who is constantly criticising you and telling you what a piece of shit you are? There’s only one sane answer to that question, and anyone who’d rather be talked to like shit probably needs to address where they learned that.
ASK YOURSELF: What is my internal critic telling me? What about my internal ally? How can I strengthen the latter at the expense of the former?