2 Ways to Keep Your Cool in a High Stress Environment
In challenging times, leaders strive to find ways to increase their effectiveness as they pursue their business goals. At times the equilibrium between the daily pressures and the long term goals becomes unbalanced and can send an individual into a flight or fight response derailing their success.
We’ve all seen it; professionals unexpectedly losing their composure. An individual blows up in a meeting, an angry e-mail is sent or a terse statement issued that is quickly retracted, the slamming of the phone’s handset two offices down. These are all responses driven by our limbic system to real or perceived threats. As the limbic system engages it shuts down the executive (higher) brain functions. Surprisingly it may be something small that triggers this reaction. But why does this happen and what do we do to prevent reaching that moment?
The good news for leaders is that there are findings from neuroscience that can help reduce the levels of frustration and provide insight into how better to effectively tackle these challenges without impacting our performance. My fellow researcher (and wife) Moreen Singh is doing work around the optimum balance needed by the brain to ensure peak performance. She is exploring the effect that the proper balance between sufficient energy reserves, effective decision making, having clear purpose and maintaining composure has on our performance. Her research into the “Optimum Balance Model” shows that having even one of these areas out of balance can adversely affect the rest. In some cases this imbalance can create catastrophic career limiting situations. For example lack of exercise, improper sleep and poor diet can affect our energy reserve in turn making it difficult to maintain proper and professional composure.
One of my areas of research is on how you maintain balance or composure in a powerful life or death event (critical incident) while avoiding or minimizing a limbic response. You may think that this is a reference to an emergency services incident, but in reality a powerful life or death event is defined by the individual experiencing it. It could be organizational change, the drive towards quarterly sales results or a performance appraisal. Any of these can affect an individual’s optimum balance by creating ambiguity and stress which in turn affects our ability to make sound decisions and maintain composure.
The brain is a wonderful thing – it contains our wisdom and our intelligence. It is also hardwired to, at times, let us do dumb things. Dr. Avian Gordon proposes that the core motivation underlying all brain processing and behaviours is minimizing danger and maximizing reward. The key processes of emotion, thinking and self-regulation interact in parallel along a continuum of time, and the non-conscious and conscious modes of brain and body activity can help or hinder composure. Understanding this relationship lays the foundation for developing effective regulation strategies.
Most of us will encounter situations and people at work or home that cause us to have an emotional response and lose our composure. By understanding how and why we think the way we do, we can improve or maintain our performance and be better equipped to deal with those around us.
For example two of the more commonly employed composure regulation strategies are avoidance and suppression. However, in reality physically avoiding an individual or a situation is not realistic in a business setting and only delays the inevitable confrontation. Suppressing emotions is a temporary measure and, according to extensive research, if constantly employed can lead to long term physical and mental health issues. There are more effective ways to down regulate the fight or flight reaction and regain composure. Two that I have found that work in a variety of situations are:
- Distancing – by stepping out of the situation and intentionally viewing (replaying) it through the eyes of a third party the limbic response begins to subside and the higher brain functions begin to re-take control.
- Labelling – by labelling the emotion he or she feels the individual recognizes/r confirms its existence. Once we acknowledge what we are feeling/experiencing we can begin to use our higher brain functions to understand it, deal with it and regain our composure.
Neuroscience explains how the brain works and how it is hardwired to react a certain way. The application of neuroscience in the business environment challenges leaders to use this knowledge to understand not only their behaviour, but to apply it to their peers and subordinates. Think of the potential if a leader can anticipate rather than be surprised by people’s reactions in a variety of settings then develop, prior to the encounter, strategies to keep his or her colleagues and customers moving forward towards common goals.
