by James Brooke
Summary
Asking, ‘What am I making this mean?’ helps us to challenge our distortions and understand our thinking errors
Bulletproof people are able to reframe their thoughts and take out the inevitable distortions
Positive self-talk
Telling ourselves that we can’t cope decreases our ability to cope, and it is remarkable how readily we slip into this cycle. But we can do something about it.
Case Study 2.2
Gemma was facing a tough board meeting at 8am in the morning. She fully expected a grilling over her department’s sales figures during an unexpectedly tough trading period. She’d discovered that a colleague on whom she was relying had let her down, absenting himself at the last minute on a flimsy premise. Gemma would now also have to take care of his part of the presentation. She worked late. Her partner was away on business, and when she eventually got home her two young children had come down with a stomach bug that would keep them and her awake all night. She needed to be up at 6am. As she tended to sick children and changed bed linen throughout the night, what did she tell herself?
If she is similar to most of us, her self-talk will instinctively be of the ‘I can’t do this’ variety. ‘I can’t’ self-talk is very common. It goes hand in hand with a low-tolerance threshold. There are many variations on this theme:
• ‘I can’t possibly …’
• ‘Nobody could be expected to …’
• ‘This is intolerable …’
When a situation is far from ideal – when it is stressful, tiring or uncomfortable – another thinking error is at risk of taking over our thinking: we start to see the situation as intolerable, unbearable and insufferable.
The key is to recognise that difficult-to-cope is not the same as impossible-to-cope. Hard-to-tolerate is not the same as intolerable. Questioning the sort of language that we use about a situation is an important step in reframing our view of the situation in a way that is more helpful.
Sports psychologist Julie Douglas uses this technique with the young athletes with whom she works. She feels that self-talk is important and that it helps to take people through a process of developing more positive self-talk. The first step is to encourage them simply to become aware of self-talk, and then to take them through a method that she calls ‘Thought Stopping’. When they notice unhelpful thoughts, she encourages them to stop those thoughts and come back with more positive ones.
Bulletproof Gemma understands that her situation is far from ideal, but that, at the same time, it is far from impossible. When she finds herself slipping into ‘I can’t’ self-talk, she stops and replaces it with ‘I can’ self-talk. She recognises that, in reality, she can actually cope. As she changes one more sheet on the bed, she takes a breath and says to herself, ‘I can do it. I’ll be okay.’
Many self-help books will exhort you to love and relish whatever adversity will come your way. Some even ask people to love and welcome their malignant tumour as a friend. We feel this isn’t helpful. To maintain pretence takes considerable energy. It wears you down until the reality seeps through. What Gemma is doing is something quite different. She doesn’t make herself gush with enthusiasm about the hardship. She does not pretend that the situation is something that it isn’t. It’s far from ideal, but in spite of this she reminds herself that she can cope and that she can do it.
Become aware of your self-talk. Is it helping? Is it strengthening you or is it draining you? Simply saying to yourself ‘I can’ seems to work like magic in its ability to give you strength and increase your tolerance and ability to cope.
Summary
Accept that you’re facing a challenge – don’t deny it
Become aware of draining, weakening self-talk (‘I can’t’) – and drop it
Find a phrase that is honest but positive, such as ‘I can’, and say it to yourself
Acknowledging thoughts and letting go
Stepping back and understanding what you’re feeling is one good way to get an insight into the thought that is governing those feelings.
The more aware you are of your thoughts and feelings, the more you can influence them. And when we say aware, we mean ‘actively aware’. Most of us are driven by our thoughts and emotions, but we don’t take the time to pause, take a look at them and reflect on them.
A useful technique for you to employ is to take a moment and try to step out of your thoughts, in order to gain an ‘observer perspective’ on your thinking. Then, in a more detached way, you can effectively examine the evidence for, and the evidence against, your thoughts.
The mind does not respond to the command: do not think about something. Most of us recognise those negative thoughts, memories or associations that get in the way of our performance. If you have ever tried to push these negative thoughts out of your mind, you will have noticed how they tend to keep springing back bigger and bolder than before. Jennifer Borton and Elizabeth Casey of Hamilton College in New York sought to test this idea with an experiment. People were asked about the most upsetting incident in their lives, and the group was then split in half, with half of the participants asked actively to push thoughts of this incident out of their minds. The remaining half were given no such brief and asked to carry on life as normal. At the end of each day, participants were required to assess their mood. At the end of the eleven-day period when the results were assessed, the difference between the two groups was clear. The group that had been briefed actively to suppress their negative thoughts were significantly more depressed and anxious than the other group.6
By using mindfulness and letting go, you observe this thought. It’s about not telling yourself off. Not only does this give you a calm spot in your mind, the sense of calm allows you to make better choices rationally rather than irrationally, giving our guide more control over the cave dweller.
Stepping outside of yourself is an important part of becoming bulletproof. It creates an awareness that will allow you to manage your emotions calmly and effectively. Imagine a calm and clear-thinking friend alongside yourself: a ‘meta-you’. This friend is supportive but is not afraid to challenge the clarity of your thinking and to ask you about the balance of evidence. For simplicity, let’s refer to the meta-you as the ‘wiser-you’.
This is a simple exercise you can do when an event that you experience troubles you, or you sense yourself feeling tense or not functioning well. Imagine the calmer and ‘wiser-you’ simply stepping to one side and describing what has happened and how you feel.
As we’ll explore throughout this book, the ability to develop awareness in a calm and detached way is a life skill that you can learn, and once you learn it you will wonder how you ever functioned without it.
Summary
Don’t try to fight against negative or unhelpful thoughts; let them drift into your mind. Practise becoming aware of them in a more detached way
Stepping outside yourself is important in becoming bulletproof
Developing a calm self-awareness is an essential life skill for bulletproof people
Imagine the ‘wiser-you’, standing alongside yourself and seeing your thoughts and feelings with a bit of objective distance
Recognising negative thoughts – becoming ‘mindful’
When we suffer stress at work, or feel that we’re suffering because of the actions of others – perhaps because we believe people are being unfair to us or have rejected us – mindfulness can help. It offers a new way of being aware of our experience and a way of noticing our negative emotions coming and going, rather than maintaining them with justification, judgement or the desire to ‘solve’ them. This can help prevent them from overwhelming us as they can so very easily do – and usually without our realising.
Professor Mark Williams, of the Oxford Centre for Mindfulness, argues that our state of mind is closely connected to our memories. ‘Whenever something goes wrong or we feel depressed, our minds naturally refer back to find times at which we’ve had similar experienc
es,’ he says. ‘For instance, if you feel rejected or ignored, your mind will start to bring up other instances when you felt like this so that it can find similarities and see how you handled the situation then.’ It’s a technique that has developed over millions of years of evolution. Our cave dweller is looking for patterns and meaning.
The same process can be triggered by almost any negative thought, including anxiety, fear and stress. The danger is that these thoughts, emotions and damning judgements snowball and make us feel unhappy, threatened and fearful.
Context and location have a powerful effect on memory. If you’ve ever gone back to your old school, or visited a town in which you used to live, you’ll suddenly find all kinds of memories flooding unexpectedly into your mind – memories that you’d never have recalled otherwise.
Mood can act as a context in the same way as a particular location, says Mark Williams. A feeling of being threatened or of being rejected can stimulate memories. Soon you can be lost in gloomy thoughts and negative emotions, and often you don’t know where they came from – they just suddenly arrived. Suddenly you’re miserable and bad tempered and you don’t even know why.
It’s impossible to stop these memories but you can learn how to prevent such memories from spiralling out of control. You can learn to see them for what they are: propaganda. They’re just one way of looking at the world; they’re not you as a person. They’re a point of view, not some objective truth. Once you’ve understood that, you can then observe them dispassionately and watch them float past you. Now, when people learn to do this, we find that they experience something else instead – and that’s a profound sense of contentment. Recognise these thoughts as they float into your mind. Remind yourself that they are just propaganda, and not truth.
Much of the time we’re thinking, planning and referring back to past experiences to find comparisons in an effort to find solutions for life’s challenges. But we can also be aware of the fact that we are doing this; we can be aware of our mind and its habit of thinking, planning and judging. When you feel that spiral of negative feelings, remind yourself of your cave dweller seeking out pattern and meaning – and name that feeling for what it is: propaganda.
This is something that you can readily try out. Become more aware of your thoughts and feelings as they come into your mind. Feelings might be anxious or comforting, happy or melancholy, light or dark. The important point is not to judge them, fight them or suppress them. A useful technique is to view each thought as if it were a cloud drifting across the sky. Become aware of its size, colour and shape; appreciate the way it looks against the backcloth of the sky. Become aware of how it drifts and changes shape. The thought may drift away again, but the important point is that you do not need it to do so. You are now both detached from it and comfortable with its presence.
Summary
Identify memories and thoughts as they enter your mind
See them for what they are: a point of view, and not some objective truth
Observe them dispassionately and watch them float past you
Stop mind reading
Our minds have evolved to interpret things. If they didn’t we couldn’t function. Unfortunately our interpretations often go too far, make leaps of logic or become hard baked. There are common thinking distortions that weaken us and make us less effective. The more aware we are of these, the better equipped we are to avoid slipping into their trap, and the more bulletproof we can make ourselves.
One of the most common thinking traps is ‘mind reading’. We once worked with a project team leader who was convinced that a team member did not respect his authority and was looking to usurp him. When we worked with him to examine the evidence, we discovered that this thought was triggered by an incident where the team member had arrived late at the first project meeting. Once mind reading started, based on this one small incident, the situation spiralled. We encouraged the team leader to keep separating the facts from his ‘story’ (his interpretation). We also encouraged him to try out the Buddhist practice of meeting his colleague ‘anew’ (meeting a familiar person as if we had never met them before, i.e. leaving the baggage at the door). Following this, the relationship thawed. We do not know what was really in the mind of his colleague. What we do know is that once the project leader stopped acting as if he knew, the situation improved.
An example that psychologists often use is this: a colleague walks past you in the corridor and does not greet you as you expect. If you are mind reading, you might feel that it is because the colleague is clearly harbouring feelings of resentment over some past incident and acting accordingly. It may simply be that the colleague was distracted. Mind reading makes you less effective. There is little benefit, and the risk is that you create problems by increasing your own stress.
Mind reading is not the same as putting yourself in other people’s shoes or seeing things from their point of view. These exercises are useful, and bulletproof people make a point of doing them, but they remain aware that they never actually know what the other person is thinking. When we introduce you to Bob in chapter five you will see how his decision to stop mind reading helped with a severe dose of office politics.
Don’t waste time and energy mind reading. If you do so, you are likely to exacerbate any potential problems. Remind yourself that you do not know what other people are thinking and you will be at your best when you keep an open mind.
Summary
One of the most common thinking traps is mind reading
Even when we are convinced that we know what is in another’s mind, we are often wrong
Mind reading is not the same as putting yourself in other people’s shoes
Don’t waste time and energy mind reading
Banish self-scrutiny
If you’ve made a mistake and you think that everyone has noticed, the chances are that they probably haven’t. If you have made a fool of yourself and think everyone is talking about it, they’re probably not. If there is something that you are embarrassed or self-conscious about, the chances are that nobody pays it anything like the amount of attention that you pay to it.
Case Study 2.3
Charles had to give a tough presentation about his divisional performance to the executive board of his company. Charles was very anxious that, as a relatively young senior officer, he should come across with a gravitas and confidence that would build confidence in his newly formed division. We coached Charles and he gave an excellent presentation.
Straight after he said to a colleague who had been in the meeting: ‘I know what you were thinking: everyone was distracted by that tick in my left eye.’
‘Sorry?’ said his colleague.
‘That twitch … I couldn’t stop the eye twitching … it always does that at the most crucial moments.’
‘Charles,’ said his colleague, ‘we couldn’t see it. The board didn’t notice. Nobody cares. Forget about it.’
Good advice.
Bulletproof people remind themselves that nobody is paying them nearly as much attention as they at first assume. ‘Nobody is looking at me.’ In fact, it is a very liberating thing to remember. We tend to overestimate the extent to which people notice our blunders or shortcomings. Researchers at Cornell University designed an experiment to test this (also known as the ‘spotlight effect’7.) They gathered a sample of students in a room under the pretext of doing a written memory test. The experimenters created a ruse to cause one of the participants (known as the ‘target participant’) to be late. The target participant was informed that the rest of the group had already started. He was then asked to put on an article of clothing before entering the room to join the group.
Here’s the rub. The article of clothing was a T-shirt emblazoned with a large picture of Barry Manilow (previous research indicated that Barry Manilow is considered about as embarrassing as it gets at Cornell University). The room was arranged so that all of the seats were facing the entrance. The target participant entered the room late
and sporting the Barry Manilow T-shirt. After a couple of minutes, he was told that the other participants were already too far ahead and he was escorted out of the room. The target participant was then asked to estimate the proportion of participants in the room whom he believed noticed the Barry Manilow T-shirt. This was compared to the number of participants who actually noticed the T-shirt. Consistently the target participant overestimated the proportion of participants who noticed the T-shirt, generally estimating the figure at roughly a half, whereas in reality only about a fifth noticed the T-shirt. The exercise was repeated several times to ensure that there was a robust sample size of participants. There was no discernible difference in the finding between men and women.
If you find yourself worrying that people are noticing something embarrassing about you, perhaps a blush or a tic, or if you stumble, knock something over or have any other kind of mishap, here is a very useful tip: think Barry Manilow.
Summary
Bulletproof people know that when they make a mistake, most people don’t notice
Bulletproof people liberate themselves from potentially embarrassing situations: ‘Hey! No one is looking at me’
Remember, even a Barry Manilow T-shirt flies under most people’s radar
Flexible is stronger than rigid
Another thinking trap is the rigid rule. We lose effectiveness in a situation when our attitude is too rigid. Being rigid is very different to being bulletproof. Rigid structures appear hard on the outside but can easily snap, whereas flexible structures can more readily absorb the momentum of all that life throws at them. When we are in rigid rule mode of thinking, we are tough on the outside but easily crushed when things become too much. When we are in flexible mode, we are like a tree: we can sway and flex in the harshest wind but never lose our firm rooting.