by Craig Weber
The increase in self-discipline you gain from labeling your emotions comes from a specific part of your brain, which Dr. Matthew Lieberman, a neuroscientist at UCLA, describes as the “brain’s braking system.”10 He explains why affect labeling—giving your emotional reactions a name—helps you manage them more effectively.
“In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light,” Lieberman says, “when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses.” Labeling a reaction activates your brain’s braking system, giving you more emotional control. “Putting feelings into words,” says Lieberman, “is a form of emotion regulation.”
The brain’s braking system—based in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex—helps you remain on track in pursuit of a goal even when you’re tempted to stray off-path. It’s a critical discipline. “Self-control allows us to persist in the face of other appealing options,” Lieberman explains, “and to adapt rather than being slaves to our impulses.”
This is not a big secret. “Parents and teachers have long told children to ‘use your words’ because it is assumed to help calm the children down when they are overly emotional or over-aroused. It turns out this is surprisingly good advice,” Lieberman argues, “. . . putting feelings into words serves as an unexpected gateway into the brain’s braking system, setting self-control processes in motion without the individual intentionally trying to engage in self-control.”
Your braking system is responsible for all aspects of self–control, from eating the carrot sticks rather than the glazed donut, to running on a cold morning rather than staying in your warm bed, to listening to someone with a view that clashes with your own view rather than arguing with them, to reining in your emotional reactions when you feel like letting them loose. Your emotional reactions work like an accelerator. Without brakes, you’re going to careen out of control. It is your brain’s braking system that enables you to wait for that second marshmallow in tough conversations.
Your emotional reactions work like an accelerator. Without brakes, you’re going to careen out of control.
There’s yet another reason that naming and taming helps you stay out of your own way: Labeling your emotional reactions actually makes them less intense.11 It turns out that naming an emotional reaction has a dampening effect, which makes the reaction easier to control, and control is the essence of discipline. This explains why mindfulness is so essential; you won’t know to hit the brakes if you can’t see the need. And without the ability to brake when appropriate your emotional reactions will continue to accelerate and drive you further away from your effectiveness.
Here’s even more good news. Just by building your disciplined awareness you bolster your ability to brake. It appears, says Lieberman, that you can “strengthen the impact of putting feelings into words through mindful meditative practice.” How does this work? “Mindfulness involves a non-judgmental awareness of what one is thinking, feeling, and experiencing, which bears some strong resemblances to affect labeling.”12
This is particularly true with your min and “win” reactions because, due to their limbic, fight-or-flight origins, they’re extra hard to restrain. “When we are in the grip of craving or fury, . . . or recoiling in dread,” says Daniel Goleman, it is the limbic system that has us in its grip.”13 So it’s best to brake early—by catching, naming, and taming—before your limbic reactions hijack your good intentions.
How Catching, Naming, and Taming All Work Together
Imagine that you are in a meeting at the end of a long, stressful week, when a colleague attacks your idea in a snide and pompous way. If you lack the ability to focus your beam internally, your mind shifts into a reactive gear. Insulted and incensed, you adopt a venomous, victim-minded focus on the injustice.
“Who does this guy think he is? That was totally out of line. What a jerk,” you say to yourself. “He did this three weeks ago to Hiromi, too. Cretins like this should be fired. And why doesn’t our spineless manager step in and say something? I’m so sick of this nonsense I could just explode.”
With each thought, a tsunami of negative sentiment grows, moving you from a deliberate and focused state of mind to a highly reactive and ego-driven state. You’re increasingly out of control. You lose power. (Remember the old Lexus commercial: “The ultimate expression of power is control.”) Simply stated, you don’t have your emotions; your emotions have you.
Finally, it all comes bursting out in a stream of ugliness. “You self-centered jerk! Keep your bonehead opinions to yourself. No one on this team gives a flying fox what you think.”
But now imagine you’ve built up your ability to focus your beam of attention on your inner world. The comment and your initial reaction are the same, but you respond differently. First, you catch your initial reaction—that burst of negative feelings after the comment telling you to attack back. You then name the reaction you’re having—“There’s my ‘win’ tendency telling me to attack this guy.” The mere process of seeing and labeling eases the tension you’re feeling, and as the tension dissipates, you’re able to refocus on your real objective: participating productively in the meeting. As your emotional reactions accelerate, your mind sees the crash coming and pumps the brakes.
This is how catching, naming, and taming all work together. You don’t allow your thoughts and behaviors to take off down the track like a runaway train on a downhill slope, hauling your effectiveness off with it. By exercising your ability to pull back to your deliberate focus of attention, you’re expressing the power to recognize and control your emotional reactions. You have your emotions; your emotions don’t have you.
Proactive Trigger Scanning
It gets better. With clear mindsight, you’re not only more conscious of your tendencies, you’re better at spotting the situations, people, issues, and behaviors that set them off in the first place. Like a trail runner scanning for roots, rocks, and rattlesnakes on the unfolding trail ahead, you’re better equipped to recognize and avoid your defensive triggers and ego traps before you trip over them. You’re proactively scanning for potential pitfalls because you can only avoid an obstacle if you can first see it. This means that while proactive trigger scanning requires high personal awareness, it also requires high situational awareness, something we’ll talk about in the next chapter.
The Why
Learning to focus your beam of attention on your internal world is hard work that many people would rather avoid. “For most people, it’s easier to choose self-delusion—the antithesis of self-awareness—over the cold, hard truth,” says Tasha Eurich. But she goes on to explain why it’s worth the effort:
There is strong scientific evidence that people who know themselves and how others see them are happier. They make smarter decisions. They have better personal and professional relationships. They raise more mature children. They’re smarter, superior students who choose better careers. They’re more creative, more confident, and better communicators. They’re less aggressive and less likely to lie, cheat, and steal. They’re better performers at work who get more promotions. They’re more effective leaders with more enthusiastic employees. They even lead more profitable companies.14
They also have higher conversational capacity. So, if you want to build your ability to stay in the sweet spot—and then use that ability to wield greater influence and make a bigger difference—you’ll need to make the deliberate choice of self-awareness over self-delusion.
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
Paying Attention to People, Patterns, and Purpose
Situational Awareness is the ability to identify, process, and comprehend the critical elements of information about what is happening to the team with regards to the mission. More simply, it’s knowing what is going on around you.
—U.S. COAST GUARD TRAINING MANUAL
In the last two chapters, we explored the importance of disciplined awareness and personal awareness. But if you’re to act e
ffectively under pressure you must also cultivate your situational awareness, the ability to direct your beam of attention on what’s happening around you. You’re not improving your conversational capacity just for the fun of it, after all. You’re building it to expand your ability to respond to difficult people, issues, and circumstances in a more disciplined, learning-focused way. To do this well, you not only need to be focused on your own internal machinations; you also need to be aware of the behavior of others and the larger context in which it’s all unfolding.
To show why this matters, let me repeat the brilliant line from the jazz percussionist Airto Moreira that I shared in my first book: when it comes to playing jazz, he said, “I listen to what’s being played, and then I play what’s missing.”1 When you are trying to make a constructive difference in a meeting or conversation, you’re doing the same thing—watching what’s being played and playing what’s missing. And there’s no way to do this well if you’re not sure of what’s going on in the first place.
“I listen to what’s being played, and then I play what’s missing.”
Becoming more contextually conscious requires that you learn to focus on two things:
1. People. Focus on how others are participating (or not participating) in a conversation—on their behavior, goals, concerns, thoughts, and feelings.
2. The fit between patterns and purpose. Focus on the alignment (or the lack of it) between the patterns of behavior in a situation and the purpose of that situation.
For a commanding example of the importance of paying attention to people, patterns, and purpose, consider the story of Lt. Col. Chris Hughes:
In April 2003, Lt. Col. Hughes led soldiers from the 101st Airborne toward Najaf, one of the holy cities in Iraq, to secure the town and protect two things: the Ali Shrine, the purported burial site for Noah and Adam; and the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, a Shia cleric who had been put under house arrest by Saddam Hussein.
As he and 200 of his men approached the ayatollah’s home, conditions were perfect. The ayatollah knew they were coming, and the crowd was friendly.
But suddenly everything changed. Unknown to him, Baathist agitators had begun to circulate the claim that the Americans weren’t there to protect their religious leader; they there were there to invade the mosque. In a matter of seconds, the friendly crowd became angry, shouting, “In city ‘yes.’ In city ‘OK.’ Mosque ‘NO!’”
More people gathered. The crowd began to surge toward the troops. Rocks began to fly. Hughes’s troops, who hadn’t slept in two or three days, were tense and armed to the teeth. A bloodbath seemed imminent.
Everyone knew that Hughes’s response would color the way the Iraqis would view the American forces from that day on.
It’s hard to imagine a situation with graver stakes and higher stress than this. It could turn deadly in a flash. With such an elevated level of misunderstanding and agitation, in fact, there was probably a greater likelihood of violence than not. But in this intense, high-stakes moment, Lt. Col. Hughes responded in a remarkable way:
In the midst of all the agitation, he raised his rifle upside down, to indicate that he had no intention of firing it.
Then, he told his men to take a knee. They must have wondered what in the world he was doing, but they trusted him. And 200 soldiers took a knee.
Then he told them to lower their weapons and SMILE. And they did. The crowd quieted, and some began to smile back.
Finally, he told his warriors to back up, turn around, and walk away. As a last gesture, he placed his flat hand against his heart in the traditional Islamic gesture meaning “peace be with you.” He said, “Have a nice day,” and walked away . . .
Later on, once the confusion was cleared up and the agitators were removed, they entered Najaf peacefully. Mission accomplished.2
The actions of Lt. Col. Hughes provide a stellar example of why situational awareness is so essential. Even under withering pressure Lt. Col. Hughes focused his beam of attention on how both the villagers and his troops were responding to the situation—their behavior, tone, and mood—and, at the same time, on the goals of the overall mission. The ability to see the relationship among people, patterns, and purpose allowed him to think smarter and act faster in an explosive setting.
The ability to see the relationship among people, patterns, and purpose allows you to think smarter and act faster in an explosive setting.
This example also illustrates how personal awareness and situational awareness are interrelated. While Lt. Col. Hughes was focused on context, he was also managing his own reactions carefully to ensure that they fit the purpose of the situation. Imagine if Lt. Col. Hughes had cowered. His display of weakness might have encouraged more aggression. Or imagine if he’d been triggered to “win” and asserted his dominance to demonstrate he was in charge. Or what if he just wasn’t paying attention to the situation and assumed that the villagers would acquiesce to the presence of his troops. In each case, he could have thrown gasoline on the fire by reinforcing the fears of the crowd.
But instead of letting his primal reactions take charge, he remained in control of his actions and tightly focused on the mission. Even under extreme pressure, Lt. Col. Hughes was able to focus on a number of important factors:
• His own internal state. (His cognitive and emotional reactions to the predicament.)
• The state of his troops. (They’re tired, stressed out, and in a more reactionary state of mind.)
• The thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the crowd. (People were primed to assume the worst about the motives of U.S. troops and were increasingly angry and aggressive.)
• The purpose of the situation. (Their mission, remember, was to connect with the local imam to help protect the mosque and the community.)
• The lack of fit between patterns and purpose. (The troops were entering the town to help make the community more stable, but the reaction of the crowd was having the opposite effect.)
Lt. Col. Hughes and Steve
Lt. Col. Hughes’s predicament in Iraq and Steve’s situation with his boss are both instructive examples of the value of disciplined awareness and the ability to focus it on your internal and external circumstances in tough moments. The situation in Iraq is more dangerous, but the situation in Phil’s office is more common. (You are probably less likely to lead troops into a hostile environment than you are to give tough feedback to someone who is difficult to approach.) But while their situations differ, the response of both is similar. Both men maintain a sharp focus on their own reactions, the reactions of others, and the purpose of the encounter, and then respond accordingly.
Even in a life-threatening situation, Lt. Col. Hughes was able to look inward to monitor his own reactions, look outward at his soldiers and the people of Najaf, and at the same time keep an eye on the overall mission: to coordinate with local leaders and protect the villagers. In a similar way, Steve juggled multiple subjects of focus in his conversation with Phil—Steve’s own tendencies and behavior; the issue he’s trying to address with Phil; how he wants to frame it; and Phil’s reactions—while remaining focused on the overarching purpose of the encounter: to improve how Phil and his management team work together when the pressure is on.
Learning to deliberately focus your beam of attention on people, patterns, and purpose will keep you in tune with what’s going on in the moment on multiple fronts. This will help you make better choices about how to participate in a meeting or conversation where something important is at stake. You’ll be better equipped, in other words, to listen to what’s being played and to play what’s missing.
Focus on People
You’re paying close, curious attention to other people in multiple ways. You’re employing cognitive empathy—“the ability to understand another person’s ways of seeing and thinking.”3 You’re curious about how others have gone up the ladder of inference, their point of view, their goals and agendas, and how they’re making sense of an issue or problem. You’re
not doing this in the quest for agreement, but for learning. You want to see what their views might teach you about the issue you’re facing.
You’re exercising emotional empathy—the ability to notice how others are feeling. You’re dialed into the emotional reactions they’re having to the issue or the situation. Do they feel strongly about what they’re saying or tentative? Do they seem apathetic? Worried? Angry? Excited? Confused? Hesitant?4
At the same time, you’re attuned to the behavior of other people—their volume, body language, tone of voice, and the words they’re saying. You take note when others are interrupting, shutting down, rolling their eyes, grinning, sighing, and glancing at others across the table. What’s more, you’re not just noticing the behavior of others, you’re evaluating it. You’re constantly assessing behaviors in the meeting—your own and those of others—and asking whether they align with or work against the purpose of the meeting.
You’re constantly assessing behaviors in the meeting—your own and those of others—and asking whether they align with or work against the purpose of the meeting.
Does the behavior, for example, encourage balanced dialogue, or deter it? Does it help people get their views into the conversation, or hinder it? Are people managing their emotional reactions effectively or poorly? Given the purpose of the meeting or conversation, is their behavior constructive or destructive? Helpful or hurtful?
Focus on Patterns and Purpose
As if focusing on self and others isn’t challenging enough, to be effective in important conversations you must also direct your beam to the fit between patterns and purpose. What does this mean?