Be Bulletproof

by James Brooke

  Stepping back from a situation and re-describing it in a factual and neutral way is something that bulletproof people make a habit of doing. Using the idea of the ‘wiser-you’, who is able to see things more clearly, free from the feelings that arise in the heat of the moment, is a good way to do this. Next time an incident happens that really plays on your mind, try the FaN description. Feel your thinking become calmer and clearer.

  Many of us, without realising it, live our lives at the whim of our thoughts and their ensuing emotions. We act accordingly. People who take a moment to reflect on their thoughts and emotions make better choices. They recover from setbacks quicker and better. And they exercise greater control over their lives.

  Again, putting your mistake into context by thinking of it as part of your story and writing it down is useful. Keep the description as factual and dispassionate as possible. Stick to what happened. (By the way, avoid using the passive tense, such as ‘a collision took place’. People use this sort of language when they try to exculpate themselves. Simply stick to the facts.38

  Summary

  Learn to imagine the objective ‘wiser-you’

  Work with the ‘wiser-you’ to remove the heat and toxicity from difficult situations

  Describe what happened in purely factual and neutral terms

  Name the emotion. This is what happened. This is how I feel about it

  Our emotions drive our behaviour. If they didn’t we wouldn’t function. People who have undergone brain damage that inhibits the emotional function of the brain do not suddenly turn into clinical, highly rational calculating machines in the mode of Star Trek’s Mr Spock. In fact, neurologists who treat such patients notice something quite different. They become incapable of making straightforward decisions. They might, for example, find it very difficult simply to choose a time for their next appointment. They lack the facility for a shortcut to give them a ready sense of the best option.39

  It may seem like an advantage to be unencumbered by emotion. However, evidence clearly shows that people who have limited emotional functioning make worse decisions, not better ones. After all, aren’t global corporations forever stating that they want their leaders to be ‘visionary’? What is ‘vision’ if not a product of the emotions?

  Emotions guide and propel us. Greater awareness of our emotions allows us to steward them to our advantage. But lack of awareness of our emotions leaves us at their mercy. Many people spend their lives as if they are tied to a wild and capricious horse, and in many ways the metaphorical horse is invisible to them. They suffer its jolts and vicissitudes without being aware of it. Continuing with the metaphor, the first step is to ‘know’ the horse, become aware of it, starting by simply observing it, and being interested in it. Mindfulness teaches us to do this with our emotions.

  The legacy of being human is to have a rich repertoire of emotions. Most of the time we do what feels right. Our emotions drive us. When an event that is important to you happens, it gives rise to a thought, and then a feeling. And it is the feeling that is keeping it in your mind.

  Here is the key: describe the feeling without judging; imagine you could put it on the table in front of you; focus on the accuracy of the description, as if it were being experienced by someone else; focus on accurate language, not heated or loaded terms. This is not about feeling it or amplifying.

  A good way to take some of the heat out of your description, but keep the accuracy, is to add in phrases that place a little distance between you and the feeling. A good one is: I notice myself feeling … or I noticed I started to feel … Then put it together with your FaN description. For example, let’s put ourselves is the shoes of Gloria. Imagine that she recently did an important client presentation, and that she has just taken a call from her colleague Jose with some news that has taken her aback.

  So, X happened – e.g. Jose telephoned to say that the client team had said that they were very unhappy with the presentation that I gave this morning – and Gloria then names the emotion: I notice myself feeling …

  Once you have named the emotion, we suggest that you add in a couple of modifying statements which will reduce any thinking distortions and provide more accurate perspective on the situation. The first one is to remind yourself that the feeling is transient. You are feeling it right now, but not for ever. So add in the modifier ‘right now’, or similar. The second one is to remind yourself that the feeling is particular to the incident and not universal, so qualify the statement with ‘about this situation’, or similar. Phrases like ‘relatively’ will also remind you to keep it in perspective.

  And finally, the icing on the cake of all modifying statements: finish with the phrase, ‘but I am okay’ (because realistically, you know that you are).

  Gloria had taken the call from Jose. Right afterwards she felt and acted like someone who had been hit by a metaphorical freight train and her mind had gone into ‘under-attack’ mode. Her self-talk centred on phrases like ‘humiliated’, ‘nightmare’ and ‘shattered’.

  By reframing, using the methods that we talk about in this section, Gloria took the heat (but not the weight) out of the way she was feeling: ‘I feel relatively despondent and crestfallen about this situation right now, but I am okay.’

  Summary

  Bulletproof people can influence their thoughts and feelings by being actively aware of them

  Bulletproof people know how to train their cave dweller by putting their emotions into words

  Bulletproof people can describe what they feel in a clear, accurate and balanced way

  Learn from your mistakes

  Case Study 7.3

  ‘I’ll be known for ever as the guy who lost the big one. That was all I could think of while I was watching my colleagues clear their desks.’ For years, Robin had looked forward to becoming a partner at the very traditional engineering and construction firm at which he worked.

  ‘I had big plans,’ he went on, staring at his shoes as he talked. ‘I was going to make some big changes, bring us up-to-the-minute … consolidate what we’ve got and then target some sexy new contracts.’

  The prospect of losing the company’s bread-and-butter maintenance contract had not even crossed his mind until the unusually cold and stilted telephone call came through to inform him that his company had been unsuccessful in its tender. The client in question had been the organisation’s first major maintenance contract. It had formed the basis of the firm’s gradual and cautious growth. Its renewal had been taken for granted.

  ‘After the phone call, I called the whole team together and gave a stirring speech about how we were going to bounce back stronger and better than before,’ Robin continued. ‘It seemed to go down pretty well. But when I drew up to the car park each morning, I literally couldn’t get out of my car. I just sat and stared, kind of paralysed. I felt like a fraud. I was the guy who was all talk, but couldn’t hold it together when the moment came. I felt myself starting to blame everybody in my mind: colleagues, bosses, and even my family.’

  Evidence from the field of sports psychology suggests that those who forensically seek to understand why they failed tend to bounce back better from failure. This seems to be at odds with the evidence from the field of medicine that suggested that those who perform best were those who deploy the ‘defensive externalism’ when things go wrong. Defensive externalism is the process of attributing successes to what you do, and yet attributing your failures to factors that are entirely outside of your control. In other words, the view that ‘When I do well, it’s down to me; when I don’t, it is down to other things or other people.’ People who do this tend to be more successful than average.

  How can both findings be true? Well, to understand we need to look at what both the successful sports people and the successful medical graduates are not doing. They both use strategies to protect themselves from viewing failure as something that is due to inherent factors over which they have little influence. If something cannot be readily changed its eff
ect is likely to be repeated. This is why many of us go on to unwittingly encompass failure in the life-story that we tell ourselves.

  We suggest that successful sports people take things a step further than defensive externalism. Defensive externalism protects us from destructive thoughts, but it’s less effective at creating momentum to reverse a situation of failure.

  The challenge to top performers is how to think about failures enough to take steps to reverse them, but without the toxic thoughts. This is why sports psychologists understand the principle of waiting to give feedback when the emotions are stable.

  Trophy-winning soccer coach, Carlo Ancelotti, understood this. Working with sports psychologist Bruno Demichelis, they together created the idea of the MilanLab at AC Milan, and imported a similar idea to Chelsea. The principle is to find a space that is so conducive to a relaxed state of mind that a player can view previous performances, and understand errors and steps required to improve them, but in a way that removes the rawness of feeling so there is no element of self-judgement. It is the ability to view self-improvement simply as a project with a series of requisite steps that marks out winners.40

  Athletes in this relaxed state of mind match the same patterns as those who are in a state of mindfulness. This brings us back to one of the main theses in this book: mindfulness enables us to think clearly and reduce emotional distortions to our thinking, which in turn allows us to improve.41

  Is this a mistake, failure or setback that you can learn from? If I lose a major contract or lose at a game of tennis, there is a fair chance that I can learn from the incident. If it is a one-off unusual error, like Malcolm’s, the chances of learning will be less (but the likelihood of repeating it will be smaller). If you want to learn from your mistakes, mindfulness helps. Relax and become aware of the emotion that you associate with the mistake. Imagine you can see that mistake in front of you, like a cloud drifting across the sky. Don’t judge it or react to it: just be comfortable letting it drift. Imagine now that you are switching on a small black and white TV set. Imagine that you are watching solely to learn. Enjoy the process of learning from your mistake and praise yourself for any useful insights that you garner. If you feel the emotion returning, that’s okay. Remember to let it drift like a cloud.

  Summary

  Bulletproof people set aside the emotional story that seems to want to accompany any failure or setback

  They view bouncing back as a project, and simply identify the things that they can improve upon. They then set about planning those improvements, one step at a time

  Focus on what you can change

  People who most readily bounce back from failure are those who focus on things that they can change: things that are within their direct sphere of control, about which they can start making systematic changes, no matter how small. Think of a tennis player who has just suffered a humiliating defeat on the tennis court. It may seem that the most obvious goal to set oneself to recover is to trounce one’s next opponent (better still if it’s the opponent who has just handed out the humiliating defeat). This, however, may be counterproductive. Sure it may be a worthwhile goal, but it is an external or result-based goal. There are too many elements that are outside of our tennis player’s direct control. Our tennis player gets little rewarding sense of progress until the next match. Even at the next match he has no control over how his opponent plays, so much of whether he achieves this goal or not is outside of his control. It would be far better for him to focus on perfecting his backhand or serve, or another relevant aspect of his game.

  Sports psychologists would encourage the tennis player to focus on ‘process goals’. These are goals that are not result areas, but which lead towards results, in a way that can readily be identified and measured and most crucially over which our tennis player has complete control. For example, if our tennis player recognises that it was his serve or his backhand that let him down, he may set goals around improving the speed or accuracy of his backhand or serve.

  Julie Douglas is a top sports psychologist and ex-international swimmer from Loughborough University. She explains how she works with a swimmer who has just suffered a real slump in performance: ‘It’s really important to highlight the importance of focusing on their own personal improvement. We encourage athletes to focus on their own goals – process goals – and this gives them something to work on that they can control.’

  Bulletproof people work hard at improvement but they are also clear about what they can control. When Robin first heard that his team had failed to retain the bread-and-butter account, he may have felt that the biggest and boldest way to bounce back would have been to win the next big tender. It would certainly be stretching and focus the mind, but this is what we call an ‘outcome goal’ rather than a ‘process goal’. Robin would be overestimating the extent to which he controlled the outcome. The goal may fail due to reasons out of his control or because the stretch was too great. The result: another punch in the solar plexus and an increased risk of failure contamination.

  Bulletproof people recognise that some things will always be outside their control. Broadly speaking, effort leads to improvement, but the actual results cannot be guaranteed. Bulletproof people focus on ‘process goals’. Set yourself goals related to the effort and input that you can control, praise yourself for achieving these goals, and give yourself plenty of small rewards along the way. It would be more effective for Robin to focus, for example, on delivering the perfect sales presentation, or writing the perfect project proposal. These are process goals; they are entirely within his control.

  Misha Botting, a sports psychologist working with Sportscotland Institute of Sport, also finds that the best way to help an athlete to recover from setbacks is to focus on process goals. ‘After a competition,’ he says, ‘we specifically review the performance in relation to process goals. We break down the processes to identify the things that are in the athlete’s control to work on and improve. That way we can control their focus, moving from dwelling on the sense of setback or failure to thinking about what can be controlled and what can be improved.’

  To recover from setback and failure, focus on the process goals – the goals you influence directly – and make them challenging, but go for one small step at a time and take pleasure in noticing your improvements. Enjoy improving simply for the pleasure of improving. Identify an aspect of performance in your role, no matter how seemingly small, over which you have control, and take pleasure in working on improvement. Set yourself the goal of becoming as good as possible.

  Have a recovery plan

  Case Study 7.4

  As a medical man, Louis recognised the signs of panic in his own body. As he looked down at the invoice, his sight and vision seemed to go fuzzy as his heart palpitated. The invoice showed that (while tired and overworked) he had over-prescribed a powerful drug by a factor of ten. Louis had worked hard to qualify as a pharmacist and he knew this could be the end of the road. He telephoned the retirement community where the elderly patient resided to find out how much trouble he was in, and he discovered that he was unlucky. The patient had been rushed to hospital in the night and died – the overdose was almost certainly a major contributing factor. Some weeks later, Louis was contacted by the local police. They wanted to interview him in connection with a possible manslaughter charge. Louis faced a possible custodial sentence. What was significant is what Louis did between identifying the mistake and the call from the police: he did nothing.

  Just as many of us find after making a big mistake, Louis was caught in a stasis between debilitating fear and delusional hope that it would somehow go away. Had he taken decisive action and informed his employer (and received legal and medical council), Louis would not have saved the gentleman, he may not even have saved his career in pharmacy, but he would have avoided criminal charges, recovered his self-esteem and lived to fight another day.

  You will make mistakes. When you do so, you need a recovery plan. You need to ask yours
elf: Are you avoiding the issue? Are you somehow hoping that it will go away? Because it won’t! Instead, when you make a mistake, follow the three ‘C’s of control, challenge and commitment:

  1. In fixing the situation or improving it as much as possible, what elements are within your control?

  2. How can you frame the process of fixing or improving the session in terms of a challenge?

  3. Once you have defined the elements that you can control and set the challenge, go about it with the greatest commitment.

  Summary

  Differentiate realistically between what you can affect and what you can’t when it comes to achieving success

  Set yourself process goals – goals related to the effort and input that you can control – rather than outcome goals – results which you can’t

  Praise yourself for achieving these goals, and give yourself plenty of small rewards along the way

  Achieve something small in order to achieve something big

  If you take some relatively small steps, focusing on things that are within your control, and you achieve some small successes, you will increase your sense of personal effectiveness and subsequently your confidence and energy. Initially termed by the eminent psychologist Albert Bandura, this is what psychologists now call ‘learnt self-efficacy’. The idea is a vital one for anyone looking to bounce back from a slump in confidence and performance.

  Bandura set about helping people to overcome phobias, such as a phobia of snakes, which can often be debilitating: even for people who live where snakes don’t exist, the mere thought of them can take over their lives. By working closely with the subject on a one-to-one basis and encouraging the client to push himself further step by step, exposing himself to the source of his phobia, Bandura could enable subjects, who had previously been incapacitated by the mere thought of a snake, to comfortably handle live snakes within a few hours.42