SUBCONSCIOUS SCRIPTS SINK SHIPS
I’ve heard it said that to make God laugh, announce your intentions. I’m sure roars of laughter rolled throughout the heavens the day I declared that the passing down of anxiety from one generation to the next was going to end with me. It seemed pretty reasonable at the time though.
As a developer in the software industry, I found myself at the forefront of leading technological advancements early in my career. As the scale of the changes that I was driving grew, the number of people that I had to interact with to implement the work and the number of people impacted by it, grew as well. Often, and to my unseasoned eyes’ surprise, these people did not always agree with how we were implementing the change or that it was even needed. There were times when some of the resistant individuals would become, to use a polite term, uncooperative. I found that often my frustrations with their lack of cooperation were turning into anger that resulted in me saying things in a manner that I knew would lead to trouble.
Around the same time that my career was progressing, and the complexity of my challenges were growing, the size of our young family doubled within the span of 22 months. We had two daughters. I had begun familiarizing myself with the practices of the major religions of the world in an attempt to learn to channel my energies in a more positive manner that I could teach to our children. In this quest, I learned that throughout all of these religions there was a common message, a person has to look within themselves to find the answers to their troubles.
On one particular day, after one particularly exasperating meeting, I recognized that my frustrations had indeed blossomed into a considerable amount of anger. I decided to go walk these unwanted feelings off. When I returned though, I began what I would call cathartic writing in the hopes that I could get to the bottom of these unsettling feelings. I realized that as long as others could create frustrating conditions, that I was vulnerable to their attempts to derail the work that I was asked to accomplish.
I had long known that the source of my disturbances was related to the passing of my dad when he was 33 and I was 12. I just never knew what to do about it. As I continued the cathartic writing as a technique, I wrote down the circumstance of the particular exchange that had triggered my anger and how this had made me feel. I came back to the handwritten pages I had scratched out a day or two later after I had settled down.
I found that my calm self was able to provide guidance to the unsettled version that I had been a few days earlier. Through continuing to write, I developed a much clearer picture of the particular details relating to the passing of my father that had provided such an incendiary ignition point.
My father was a kind and charismatic man. He worked second-shift at the General Electric Appliance Park as a forklift driver. He also ran a downtown mission that held services three nights a week and twice on Sunday. I recall someone asking him why his mission was in downtown, a long drive from where we lived, and in the worst part of town and he said, "that is where people need help the most.”
These things I knew. When I thought about them, I could easily become very unsettled. I decided to continue my writing to see where it would take me. What I discovered led to quite a breakthrough. I asked myself, “why did this bother me to the point that I became so unsettled and angry?” The answer was simple, I could not make sense of a world in which a man like this was taken instead of so many others that displayed no compassion or kindness at all. As I continued, I realized that I felt that providence had singled my brother, my sister and me out for some reason to drive some dastardly point home.
As I wrote, I realized that it bothered me to no end to think of the difference between my dad and his older bully of a brother, my dad’s diabolical opposite. I didn’t understand a world in which such a cruel person would still be living and my dad was taken. It made no sense. I didn’t know how to navigate this. As I continued my writing and reflecting over the next several days, powerful questions began to emerge, primary of which was “what does it really mean to be alive and what does it really mean to be dead?”
Eventually, I began to realize that my dad could not be more alive. Even though he was only on Earth for 33 years, his powerful example of how to live compassionately toward others, was still alive and radiated through my brother, my sister, me and everyone else that he interacted with. His life’s echo was eternal. I realized that though his brother still had a pulse, and was walking around decades after my father had passed, that in many ways he was already dead and perhaps had never really lived at all.
Perhaps most importantly, I realized that instead of being cursed, we were far luckier to have had our dad, even if it was for a short time, than those who had fathers that were still alive, unkind to them and did not provide the example of how a decent person should live in this world. This realization brought profound change. I think some might call it both an awakening and closure. Since then, I have had no trouble preventing my frustrations from turning into anger. The repeating open emotional loop, that others could occasionally tip into unsettling anger, had finally closed.
It was around this time that I announced my intentions and the sounds of hysterical laughter thundered from Mount Olympus, to Valhalla to the Pearly Gates of Heaven. I had little idea of what fate had in store. To manage to persevere in the face of life’s difficulties, I began reading biographies of famous leaders and, a little later, developed a keen interest in the emerging field of Emotional Intelligence. I developed my ability to teach principles based on bringing these two areas together and founded EQ Leadership Seminars, LLC in 2006.
I have had many opportunities in my professional and personal life to practice the principles that I teach. Some of these challenges took a few days to figure out and others a few years. To further illustrate how I have used the principles to break these inner problems down, I would like to offer one of the less complex learning experiences.
A number of years after my breakthrough, described above, I had taken many opportunities to enhance my ability to calmly communicate from the inside out. I had begun to feel that that I might have some talent in this regard. I was working for a different company and was now a lead Program Manager and Process Engineer for the company’s Web and e-commerce area. One morning, my manager asked that I provide an update on a large conference call that was taking place a few hours later. I was excited to be asked. Our team had made considerable progress in addressing many of the problems that prevented individuals’ from using the Web for self-service. We had the statistics to prove that our efforts were turning this around.
As the time came for the conference call, I sat in my office, alone, staring at my cinder block of a conference phone, eagerly awaiting my turn to share the good news. My chance finally arrived and I gave a fairly decent 15-minute update. I was feeling pretty good when immediately after the call ended, one of my counterparts walked over and informed me, “You said ‘ah’ or ‘um’ 54 times.” I was stunned. Worse yet, this was coming from a friend. I knew he wasn’t trying to belittle me. He was a Six-Sigma Black Belt, well credentialed in statistical analysis, and he likely just started tracking these verbal miscues because he was bored on the call.
I tried to play off how deeply this bothered me. It was all I could think about that night and the next day though. I decided to confront these painful feelings instead of trying to avoid them. I realized this was an opportunity to get to the bottom of the inner turmoil. I took account of my loaded emotional reaction by starting a round of targeted writing. I quickly realized that I found this incident so upsetting because I felt that I was a good and possibly even gifted communicator. If I was in fact a terrible one, then what did that have to say about the other things I thought I did well. Was I just kidding myself? And what about all of the things that I knew I did poorly? It felt as though my entire self-image may have been built like a house of cards. As I did before, I sat the account down for a day or two and then came back to it. After the emotions passed, I was able to direct my energies toward getting to the bottom things.
I started by giving myself a bit of a break and worked to get the higher-thinking part of my brain back in the game. I now know this is my frontal cortex, which rests just behind my nose and forehead. I realized that I was actually a very good communicator when I had time to prepare. These were the situations I was increasingly drawn to because I knew they would turn out well. This current situation had exposed a weakness that occurred when I was speaking in an unfamiliar setting and hadn’t had the time to script things out. This is sometimes called speaking off-the-cuff. For a few hours, I decided that I would just have to accept that I was not good at speaking off-the-cuff and the mature thing to do would be to learn to live with it.
Instead of leaving things at this, I kept going though. I asked myself, “Why do people say ‘ah’ or ‘um’ when they are attempting to explain something anyway? Why didn’t they just pause and not say anything?” The answer to this felt obvious. I reasoned that people insert these sounds because they feel they may lose control of the conversation to someone else if they paused for too long. I also suspected that people did not want to lose credibility by appearing as if they were searching too hard for what to say next. I continued my inquisition and asked, “Well, are there people who don’t say ‘ah’ or ‘um’ in these situations and if there are what do they do instead?”
It struck me that these people must realize that those pauses, in which a person is attempting to formulate what they will say next, likely do not feel nearly as long to the people listening as they do for the person speaking. With this clarity, I was able to continue to construct a more complete answer. Since these individuals understand that these pauses are actually very short, they likely use them to display a calm demeanor. In other words, they project the confidence that what they are saying and how they are saying it is so compelling and credible that they are not the least bit worried that someone will jump in and take the conversation over.
Immediately after this, I wrote on an index card – “I do not say ‘ah’ or ‘um’ when I speak. I realize that my verbal pauses are short and provide the opportunity to calmly project confidence and credibility.” I carried the index card in my shirt pocket and had it ready for the next week’s confrontation with my conference phone. As the call began, and my turn came to speak, I provided the update while glancing at the card from time to time. After my update was over, I knew that I had done quite a bit better and sure enough Mr. Six-Sigma showed up on cue with some new stats. He informed me that I had said ‘a…’ 14 times. I let him know that I didn’t feel that should count and even if it did that was a 74.07% reduction in just one week. I’ve had ample opportunity to improve that score over the years and now when people say that I have a natural gift for speaking with clarity in high-pressure situations, I just smile and sometimes I tell them this story.
Back when I started my self-guided inner-world exploration program, I had little idea that I was embarking on an entirely different way to live. Some people think of it as living from the inside out. This way of living is not easy. A person does not pile up the traditional public accolades that those who manage to side-step a deep inward journey collect. However, it has been worth it. HistorEQ Emotional Accountability principles equip me to make solid progress toward my life goal of not handing anxiety down to the next generation. The principles provide an advantage at work as well that helps me feel that I am competing on a level playing field.
While there have been many opportunities to become entangled in emotional exchanges between myself and our daughters as they have grown into adults, we have been able to have meaningful conversations that eventually led to us understanding ourselves and each other better. As I surveyed what I have accomplished in my life, the one achievement that I cherish the most, is having been granted the opportunity to build the language to have these highly-constructive conversations.
I have shared the off-the-cuff speaking story in just about every Seminar, Keynote, and Workshop conducted. I also often share it with those looking to step up their ability to speak with clarity in tense situations. It wasn’t until I researched the correlation between adverse adolescent events and anxiety in one’s adult life that I began thinking about the particular event that likely provided the fuel for my loaded emotional reactions when it came to off-the-cuff speaking.
About 6 months after my dad had passed away, I was in middle school. I had started to take refuge in the many friendships that I was able to build. In spite of the fact that my dad’s death had plummeted us into poverty, I was turning out to be a pretty nice looking kid and the kinds of kids that end up with countless photos in the annual yearbook were befriending me.
A couple of these individuals told me that I should run for Student Council. I didn’t want my friends to know that I didn’t have a clue as to what a Student Council was much less what it meant to run for one. I didn’t give it much thought and one morning the next week, a teacher said, “I see that you have signed up to run for Student Council. Each candidate will give their speech this morning. So report to this room at 9 am.” I still didn’t really get what was going on, but I did as I was instructed. After reporting to the room, the candidates were walked down to the gymnasium, which was now populated, to my surprise, with the entire middle-school student body. I complied with getting into the line that led to each candidate speaking, one after the other, at the podium regarding why they were the best to be on the Student Council.
The enormity of what I had stepped into didn’t hit me until my turn to speak actually came. I recall that the faces of the 200 to 300 students just seemed like a blur, with the exception of the two friends that were smiling empathetically in my direction. I tried to speak, but I don’t recall that I was even able to clearly articulate my name. To this day, I don’t know what I said, other than it sounded to me like some sort of garbled alien language. I’m not entirely sure, but I believe that I was still elected. But today I know that this is one of those adverse, loss of control, embarrassing, adolescent events that left an imprint on my rapidly forming brain.
Today I know that this scripted story was waiting in my subconscious to place me on high alert when I encountered situations which were remotely similar as an adult. Understanding this helped explain why this subconscious fear had driven me to work so hard on my communications skills and why I had made myself into a decent speaker, as long as I had time to prepare. The adult “ah” and “um” incident triggered this subconscious script and stirred deeply unpleasant feelings when this ability was questioned.
It was only after I familiarized with these feelings, that I was able to investigate, challenge and disrupt how they were making me feel. After this, I found it quite easy to create a new script to shore up my frontal cortex. I used the index card for a few days to drive this re-scripting, until my frontal cortex could take full control and fully subordinate the energies of the lower-thinking part of my brain, my amygdala, to my advantage. I was also able to emphatically share this story to help others face the same type of fear. I had methodically used the principles of EMotional Accountability to transform anxiety into Emotional Intelligence.