Shifting Your Behaviour

SUMMARY

Are you calm and collected in emotionally charged situations, or do you react like most people? Well, stick with me because this week I will show you how to do the former.

Emotions are those physiological signs, cues, and clues that you experience in your body and then make mean something about us, about the situation, etc. That then determines what you think about and this in turn forms thinking patterns. Then, it takes you towards a particular behaviour. So, you've gone from the physiological to the psychological, and what you want to do is manage what goes on in that psychological process.

Today, we will look at a process I teach to help my clients pull the reins on that unresourceful behaviour. Instead of going from an initial emotion to thoughts that lead to that behaviour you don't want, I will show you exactly what you need to do to harness that gap between the physical and the psychological.

Well, that's it for me for another week. We've had a great conversation this month around our emotional intelligence and there's far more competencies to work on. And if you're interested in working on your emotional intelligence, make sure that you get in touch and I can make some resources available to you or even see if we're a good fit to work together with your team or with you One-on-one.

Next week, we're going to start the third shift in these nine crucial shifts, and that's in the area of your intention: This is going to help you go from being all scattered to being more planned.

I'll see you then.

TRANSCRIPT

Are you calm and collected in emotionally charged situations, or do you react like most people? Well, stick with me because this week I will show you how to do the former.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I'm going to continue our conversation around this wonderful thing called Emotional Intelligence by helping you to Shift Your Behaviour.

We've been talking about our emotions and the fact that we're emotional beings. Over the last few weeks, we've been recognising why we do what we do.

Emotions are those physiological signs, cues, and clues that you experience in your body and then make mean something about us, about the situation, etc. That then determines what you think about and this in turn forms thinking patterns. Then, it takes you towards a particular behaviour. So, you've gone from the physiological to the psychological, and what you want to do is manage what goes on in that psychological process.

So, you're not managing the emotion because that's there for a reason. You're an emotional being so you don't want to suppress or ignore your emotions. You want to notice them, to name them, and then navigate them.

Today, we will look at a process I teach to help my clients pull the reins on that unresourceful behaviour. Instead of going from an initial emotion to thoughts that lead to that behaviour you don't want, I will show you exactly what you need to do to harness that gap between the physical and the psychological.

The first thing that you want to do is name the emotion. We've talked about that.

You need to recognise the emotion you're experiencing and name it. You want to do that so that you can then employ the strategies we've developed for that particular emotion.

Now, not everyone handles particular emotions in the same way. They don't even experience them in the same way. We're not all hardwired with a set of emotions that everybody reacts and responds to in the same way. Therefore, you need to name the experience that you are going through.

Name the emotion. That's the first step.

The second step is to ask yourself another ‘what’ question:

“What am I thinking right now?”

The power of asking these ‘what’ questions is that they are logical questions. You’re not asking: “Why am I feeling this way?” or “Why am I thinking this?”

You’re asking yourself what so you are just collecting data and not going deep into the emotion of what's going on. You are asking a simple question:

“What am I thinking?"

The reason that you want to ask what you are thinking is so you can challenge any thinking that is illogical and feeding any of those three universal fears of not being enough, not belonging, or not being loved and anything that is something that you are making up in your own internal dialogue, which may or may not be true because those things will lead to the unresourceful behaviour.

So now that you’ve checked in and know what the emotion is, you now know how you are experiencing that emotion through your thinking.

The next thing you can do, now that you’ve harnessed some of that emotion in terms of where it's going with our thinking, is ask yourself the question:

“What do I want to happen here?”

Because you are now de-escalating and going away from that normal reaction to the emotion, you can ask a question where you can actually plan where you want your behaviour to take you. Instead of going to where it normally goes, you can decide where you want it to go, and that new behaviour is obviously resourceful.

Now that you know the emotion you are experiencing, what's going on in your thinking, and you're challenging that, you know where you want to end up. So, the fourth part of the process is to ask yourself a question

“What could I do or say right now that would sabotage me from getting to the outcome I want?”

We all do things because we're emotional beings. We respond or react in certain ways, and we've built up internal conditioning around that, so it can go from that initial emotion to that learned behaviour very quickly.

Ask yourself the following question: What do you normally do? Or what could you do right now to sabotage that result?

You are checking in with your mini-me; with that internal dialogue, you're looking at your past patterns so that you can decide to go somewhere else instead. For example, you could be in a situation with another person, and you could ask yourself that question, and the answer might be:

“Well, I could answer them back right now and tell them exactly what I think.”

Now, that may or may not bring you the result that you said that you want.

So, you decide where you want to go.

The fifth part of the process, now that we've got all that set up in place and you are thinking in a more resourceful way and you know where you want to go, is to ask yourself the question:

“What could I do right now that would actually take me towards that outcome?”

And in that, what you're doing is you're recognising the need for a strategy. Some strategies for me (in situations when I might be in conflict) are the answer to that question could be:

“Well, I think you could take a break right now.”

You could disassociate yourself from that person and that situation so that you can calm down, or whatever it is. Or I could say to myself: “Well, I could thank that person for giving me that feedback.”

Whatever that is, this is resourceful behaviour. This is what you want to get to, which is going to give you the results that you want.

So, the process has taken you from an initial experience of an emotion, a sensation in your body, to a behaviour that is good for you, others, and the greater good.

You can be in control of your own behaviour. It's not about managing the emotion, but what it is, and what we all take responsibility for, is managing the response to the emotion.

Well, that's it for me for another week. We've had a great conversation this month around our emotional intelligence and there's far more competencies to work on. And if you're interested in working on your emotional intelligence, make sure that you get in touch and I can make some resources available to you or even see if we're a good fit to work together with your team or with you One-on-one.

Next week, we're going to start the third shift in these nine crucial shifts, and that's in the area of your intention: This is going to help you go from being all scattered to being more planned.

I'll see you then.