In my last two articles I looked at why some of us are more anxious and emotionally vulnerable than others, how these characteristics result from a combination of our genes and upbringing, and how they play out in the workplace.  In this piece I want to consider some practical measures you can take to mitigate these issues in yourself and deal with them more intelligently in your colleagues.

I can only give you pointers in a short article. I’m hoping that by providing a high-level route map, I can help you navigate to the sources which will be of most use to you. At the end I’ve provided some basic practical exercises to give you a flavour of some of the relevant techniques.

The emotional glitches from which many of us suffer

As I said in my last article, many of us have emotional ‘buttons’ left over from our childhood. Our parents may, for example, have discounted our feelings, so that we react particularly strongly if we feel we’ve been ignored, or convinced us that we were only worthy of their love if we were unquestioningly obedient, so that we become over-compliant ‘people pleasers’.

In my coaching practice I’ve come across one group in particular - insecure high achievers, people whose parents instilled in them the belief that they were worthy of parental notice and love only if they excelled. These people are skilful and driven and excellent at their jobs. But self-esteem – the confidence that you are worthy and loveable – doesn’t come from the mastery of your profession. People with this pattern can never do enough to assuage that parental voice within.

If you have this makeup, you take any setback– a critique of your work, a failure to get a commission or a promotion – very personally. It awakens echoes of your childhood fear of rejection by your all-powerful parent – genuinely life-threatening for a small child - and your conviction that you must be seriously at fault for failing to live up to the blueprint.

But you’re the victim of imperfect pattern recognition. Your unconscious mind is telling you that you face an existential threat when in fact you’re  just dealing with the normal vicissitudes of working life. This distorted lens may drive you to achieve, but it also makes you unhappy, prevents you from being your true self and from fulfilling your potential. If the distortion is serious, it will damage your relationships and undermine your performance and that of the group.

Using your mind to change your brain

The principle underlying the techniques I will describe – drawn from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) - is that we can change our emotional reactions by applying our conscious minds to them. They rely on the role that our prefrontal cortex – the rational part of our brains - plays in regulating the behaviour of our emotional limbic systems, including the amygdala which governs our fight and flight reactions.

We’re all familiar with the symptoms of an emotional hijack. We feel a physical shock and our hearts race – they’re preparing our bodies for fight or flight. But the effect of the adrenaline rush is also to narrow our mental focus to dealing with the immediate threat, blocking out all other thoughts. We know that if we press pause, stop and breathe (count to 10 as our parents tell us when we’re children), it allows our rational minds back in, and we can reflect on whether, for example, an angry riposte is the best response to a colleague with whom we will have to work in future.

In the longer term, we may be able to loosen the hold of the distorted model which is triggering our emotional reaction, and correct the faulty pattern recognition. We may, by a process of conscious reflection and practice be able actually to change our neural circuits so that we recognise that things previously perceived as threats are not as dangerous as we thought.

The first stage in this process of re-education is to make the issue conscious: recognise it’s there and try and understand  its roots. If your childhood has left you with a conviction that you are in some way inadequate, you are likely to be very highly defended against confronting it. My client Zac (Article 10), was unusual in being so clear that his sensitivity to criticism could be traced back to his critical father. More often we have no, or only a glimmer of, awareness that our reactions are disproportionate to events, but are adept at rationalising them and convincing ourselves they’re perfectly appropriate. The first of the exercises below focuses on this diagnostic stage

Understanding the origins of your emotional models is not enough in itself to shift them. But it gives you a certain objectivity and distance from them, which helps you not to become the unwitting victim of your emotions. You develop an ability to predict when they will occur and to ‘press pause’, to stand back a bit from them when they do – to think about them rather than think with them – which enables you to choose not to act on them, even though they may still be very powerful.

The next stage is to challenge the distortion, by trying to describe consciously in words the bad feelings about yourself that certain situations arouse, and evaluating them rationally to see whether they are true or reasonable; then to try and formulate a more accurate and realistic description of what’s going on. In the second exercise I work through some questions to help you do this, using an example which I come across a lot – taking criticism of one’s work personally and finding it very difficult to deal with emotionally. I also suggest a quick self-mocking hack which can be very useful when you know you’ve over-reacted and need to recover quickly.

Both of these exercises focus on specific vulnerabilities, but we’re emotionally complex creatures and if we have a negative view of ourselves it’s likely to apply in a number of areas. These localised issues distort large parts of the lens through which we see ourselves, and the accompanying anxiety leads us to focus on the negative and discount the positive.

When I meet people in my work who are psychologically solid I recognise them immediately. They are realistic about their own abilities – and weaknesses -  and don’t feel a need to prove anything. They are straightforward; there is an almost palpable lack of vulnerability, defensiveness or emotional complexity about them. We all  need to create a similarly authentic sense of ourselves: one which recognises and appreciates our true worthiness, but is also realistic, and acknowledges our deficiencies rather than attempting to deny or conceal them in the interests of self-protection. The third exercise suggests some ways in which you might start to build such a sense of self.

The role of coaches and therapists

You can do some of this work yourself using exercises such as those I propose below. But the process is much easier in a relationship with a professional – a coach if they have the right training or a therapist who uses Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) as part of their armoury. A series of 1:1 conversations with the right person (the personal relationship is the key determinant of success) can be enormously powerful in achieving change.

Coaches and therapists are trained to be fully present - really to listen to the client and to tune in to the underlying emotions –and to provide unconditional positive regard. This support creates an environment in which the therapist can challenge the client’s current way of seeing things without arousing their defences. Indeed the literature suggests that the therapy relationship mimics the relationship between a young child and its mother or carer, as the mother encourages the child to learn and explore the world.  The mother’s emotional attunement stimulates the child’s brain to produce the ‘reward chemical’, dopamine and other endogenous endorphins, which provide the right environment for maximum neural growth and plasticity. Once a new insight has been sealed in place with dopamine, we can’t go back to our previous way of seeing things.

Dealing with these issues in your colleagues

Understanding your own psychological makeup is the first step to understanding that of your colleagues. This is particularly useful for people who work with creative colleagues who are especially likely to suffer from emotional complexities. In my piece for Broadcast magazine I described how a producer succeeded in establishing harmonious relations and getting the best from a notoriously ‘difficult’ presenter by tuning into and soothing his insecurities and avoiding arousing his defences.

The effect of this was not just to create a more congenial working environment -  though it did so.  The presenter had a reputation for tantrums, even disappearing off set for days at a time. Handling him sensibly meant that he did his best work and the production was delivered to time and budget. The strategy saved the production company hundreds of thousand of pounds. A bit of psychological awareness and emotional intelligence are not just ‘nice to have’. They make commercial sense.

And they’re relevant to all our workplace interactions, not just those involving particularly high stakes relationships. We all encounter unexpectedly strong emotional reactions in our colleagues from time to time. And we’re often bad at dealing with them.

Be alert to colleagues’ vulnerabilities: does someone lack confidence, need affirmation, find criticism difficult to handle? Are they reluctant to say what they think? If you lead a team, you’re in a uniquely strong position to help them because you represent the parent or authority figure. Try to give them what they need, avoid unnecessarily arousing their defences and protect them from other people who may do so. The behaviour of a leader has a very powerful effect on the psychological well-being of the team and that feeds into their performance.

Work by two McKinsey partners, Katzenbach and Smith, on teams, found that this sort of mutual concern and care, described by one team leader as ‘a form of love’, was a characteristic of high performing teams. Another leader said ‘Not only did we trust each other, not only did we respect each other, but we gave a damn about the rest of the people on this team. If we saw somebody vulnerable, we were there to help’. The best teams are also characterised by their ability to discuss issues frankly, and indeed have fun together.  If everyone in a team feels understood and valued, then, whatever their individual issues, they’re less likely to take disagreement and constructive criticism personally but see them as a means of getting to the best outcome. The team will be a high dopamine, neurally plastic environment open to creativity and change.

A leader’s ability to lead will be seriously compromised if their energy is focused on protecting a fragile self from threat rather than getting on with the job and nurturing their team. I mentioned in this context Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and one of my readers, a historian, delicately pointed out that Hitler and Stalin might have been even better examples. Fortunately, few of us have to work for people quite this flawed, but if you do have an insecure boss, you still need to manage those vulnerabilities as you would in another colleague; we find this more difficult to accept because at some level we believe our bosses – parent figures - should be psychologically solid.

You may have to go out of your way to show that you respect them, that you recognise their authority, and that you are not seeking to undermine them. This is a very difficult balancing act when you don’t in fact believe your boss to be completely competent. But it is a fact of working life that if you arouse their defences and polarise them against you, it may compromise the effectiveness of the team, permanently damage your relationship with them, and in the worst case, could have a negative impact on your career.

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 Exercises

 

1. Diagnosing the root of the problem

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you think you may be finding things more upsetting than is reasonable:

• Do I react very emotionally to some things that happen at work, which other people would deal with better?
• Is there a pattern? What are the things which really get to me?
• When I think about how my parents treated me, or events more generally in my childhood and adolescence, can I see any reason why I should be emotionally sensitive to this sort of event?

 

2. Challenging your distorted beliefs

 The next stage is to try to reprogramme yourself by thinking rationally about the situations which provoke your reaction. Key questions here are:

• Can I put my emotional reaction into words? What is the script that runs in my head when (to use the same example) someone criticises my work.  It can be very difficult to put the feeling into words; after all we acquire many of these patterns before we have language. You might find that criticism makes you feel useless or incompetent or unappreciated or not valued. At the deepest level, you may also fear that there will be catastrophic consequences – eg that you will lose your job

 

• What is the reality of the situation? Is my evaluation of it accurate and reasonable? (Is there any evidence that I am useless? What good things have I achieved recently? Do people generally appreciate my work etc?)

 

• How might I evaluate it differently? How would I like to react? How would I counsel a friend who came to me with the same problem? (Is any of the criticism justified? Could I act on this and improve my work, while rejecting the parts which are not merited? How important is this criticism within the general scheme of things? Was the critic having a bad day? Is it really worth getting upset about?)

 

• Write down a more realistic description of the problem and how you will react to it in future in a more appropriate way. Imagine yourself doing so; next time something similar arises, practise being the new you. (There was some substance in the criticism, and I will act on that, so it has been a useful learning exercise. The critic was just doing their job, and this sort of thing is a normal part of working life, and not a personal threat.}

 

• Some people find it helpful to mock the undermining thought which comes to them when something difficult happens. In my first career my particular version of this is to say ‘nobody appreciates me, nobody listens to my opinions’ in a high-pitched, Monty Python voice. (My mother had a habit of saying, ‘don’t be so ridiculous, Janet’ when I was trying to tell her something I thought was important.) The ridicule definitely takes the sting out: it’s hard to feel upset and aggrieved when you’re mimicking your own inner voice. (I had to give up this useful crutch when we were all forcibly removed to open plan.)

3. Self affirmation

Here are some questions to help you create an authentic sense of yourself. Notice that the more you value your strengths the easier it is to own up to your weaknesses.

 

• What are your most deeply held values?

 

• What is most important to you in life?

 

• What do you do really well without thinking about it?

 

• What do you do less well?

 

• Suppose you identified that your relationships with your family and friends are the most important part of your life and that your most deeply held values relate to caring for and supporting them. Visualise in detail a recent situation that captured why these things are so important to you and how you embodied your values – eg listening to and comforting friend in need of support. Try and remember how you felt – the empathy and maybe a sense that you had provided some much-needed help. Think about how much you enjoy time with your friends and family and how you might show your appreciation for them, or them for you, in future.

 

If you’re insecure or anxious then you’re on the look out for threats and programmed to focus on the negative things which happen to you. You tend to discount achievements and successes.

 

• Keep a diary of the good things that happen at work, and what you’ve achieved: new ideas you’ve had, people you’ve persuaded, projects which have come to fruition, positive feedback you’ve received, team members you’ve developed, obstacles you’ve navigated.

 

 

Sources

 

Jon R Katzenbach and Douglas K Smith, The Wisdom of Teams – Creating the High-Performance Organisation, Harvard Business School Press.