A few days ago I was listening to my favorite carol, and I found myself imagining the families of the victims of Sandy Hook Elementary, and what it might be like for them to hear these words.
Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm all is bright
But where is the brightness and calm today? We seem to be immersed in strife and discord. Our “leaders” spent billions of dollars this year defaming one another, dodging accountability, passing the buck. In America certainly, but all over the world. In politics it’s absolutely clear, but the same is happening in every sector of society. We’re getting better and better at blame.
And me too.
As I’ve read articles and reflections and facebook posts and petitions of people trying to make sense of Sandy Hook, there is one common theme. Some people say it’s the fault of our education system. Others say that we have poor legislation and inadequate enforcement. Some even say it’s God’s punishment for not allowing prayer in school. Some are talking about the shooter’s parents, some about our mental health system. A few are even looking more deeply at our cultural context of disconnection.
The common theme is blame. Just as I did, decrying the lack of principled leadership in our world today. Looking at the neuroscience, it feels better to blame. When we blame, we know the answer, and that feeling of righteous wrath is actually a dopamine reward that our brain emits when we “know.” While this is part of our basic neurology, we also other circuits that allow alternatives.
The problem, of course, is that while it’s comfortable to be on our high horses blaming others, nothing changes. I, for one, am ready for change. Perhaps the “good” from this brutal tragedy is that many of us are now saying we want to change. Change, of course, requires doing something differently. It’s not comfortable. In fact it’s scary. By definition, it means entering the unknown.
So what’s the alternative to blame? Perhaps we can start with the opposite: Ownership. Where is my responsibility for Sandy Hook? And, even more, for the strife that seems so common today?
Taking ownership is not about blaming myself either. It’s not useful to self-flagellate nor to imagine myself as more powerful than I actually am. Rather, I’d like to look at the violence in my own heart.
If I’m a “leadership expert,” how am I leading myself? When do I let myself slide into a cycle of blame and move toward hatred? When am I violent – perhaps not with my fists, but with my thoughts and words and feelings?
Many years ago I was looking at the research on escalation, stress, and conflict, and I saw that generally we conceptualize “reaction” in a linear process of state-> trigger -> interpretation -> reaction:
We’re having a rough day, someone provokes us, we decide they’re a jerk and we yell.
This is useful – if we can notice there are antecedents to the reaction, and there is a moment of evaluation, and a reaction, we’re well on our way to changing the outcome. I was not satisfied with this kind of linear model, though, because in my experience reactions spiral. We don’t start with tabla rasa, and we don’t go back to a neutral state after the reaction. We spin.
So I put the three stages into a cycle, shown in this graphic. My experience is that seeing this map of our reactions can help us notice the process unfolding, and then step off this “un-merry”-go-round.
Here’s a video where I explain the cycle:
Brining this back to the violence in our own hearts, it’s essential to realize that in each of these three stages of reaction, we have a choice.
In the Set-up phase, we need to notice: I’m getting out of balance. There are signals such as tension in our throats, shoulders, faces. Uncomfortable sleep. Lethargy or excitability. Scattered thoughts. We need to notice these signals and attend to them before we go further into reaction. Research has validated many tools to make this shift, such as appreciative inquiry, meditation, HeartMath, exercise, prayer, or even time in the sunlight.
The Interpretation phase is very short, but it’s essential. We interpret the stimuli based on our current cognitive and emotional state – so our Set-Up changes our interpretation. We have patterns of interpretation, and we’re good at fooling ourselves and making the situation fit our pattern; we might generalize, leap to conclusions, rush up the ladder of inference, or exclude data that doesn’t match our assumptions. With practice we can train ourselves to notice our own interpretations of thought-feeling-action and slow this process down to be more careful.
In the Escalation phase, we have yet another choice. We can glory in the righteous wrath and justify our own inner violence by telling ourselves we’re warriors of good. At the other extreme, we can revel in self-blame and even self-harm, directing our frustration and fear and pain inward. Or, we can recognize that our reactions are just reactions, and decide to step off the cycle. This takes an incredibly simple, incredibly powerful six second pause to integrate thinking and feeling and choose. One effective method is to ask ourselves powerful questions.
Of course just knowing what’s happening is not enough. In Spring we plant, in Fall we harvest, but in between there is a lot of work, painstaking follow-through required. Attending to the “weeds” and nourishing the soil, we can cultivate the garden of our own hearts and grow peace instead of violence.
Imagine what would happen if we each did so? What if a million of us made this a year of peace within ourselves? Then imagine listening to Silent Night a year from now:
Round yon virgin mother and child
Holy infant so tender and mild
Sleep in heavenly peace!
Sleep in heavenly peace!
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- Knowing Isn’t Coaching: Three Emotional Intelligence Tools for Professional Coaches - April 3, 2024
- Coaching Down the Escalator: 3 Emotional Intelligence Tips forCoaches to Reduce Volatility & De-escalate Conflict in a Polarized World - March 6, 2024
- Dr. Daniel Goleman Explains the History of Emotional Intelligence - February 29, 2024
This will be and currently is a major key for my practice of EQ as I learn to manage my reactions to friends, family and neighbors, taking time to use this model intentionally, and hopefully setting an example for others around me.
I am sadden by the extreme violence in the world. This article demonstrates how the violence we see in the media is close to home (within ourselves) if not managed with intention. Broadening our view and witnessing the bigger context of this everyday “violence in the hearts” within everyday people (in our own environment) who are expressing frustration, anger, and feelings of disempowerment, brings the awareness for the potential of violence even closer to us. Without awareness and a tool for emotional management, situations can easily get out of control and become the extreme violence we see in the media. Just stopping for 6 Seconds and making a choice can make all the difference.
Thank you for this model, Josh.
Looking with in to stop the violence – very good – get off the “blame game” which isn’t helpful – thanks for sharing –
Dear Josh,
I can share something from my army days. An old, grizzled NCO told me that when (not if) one gets in a tough situation– control one’s breathing. If someone could do that, he’d never panic. That worked for me, and I see it maps right into the escalation and set-up phases of the model here.
Best Regards,
KL (Singapore)
Great point KL. There’s some interesting physiology behind that NCO’s wisdom. Increased oxegenation and decreased muscle tension seems to help reduce reactivity! Plus, perhaps even more importantly, if gives a tool to slow down and shift focus.
🙂
J
Dear Josh,
Thanks for your sharing. You are so blessed, you have time to take time for yourself. Your experience (stay in temple, Kyoto), very interesting. I found that meditation helps me to be more aware about my emotion, so I could use sixsecond tools more effective.
About the Sandy Hook tragedy, I felt very very sad. In my reflection about that, I aware that maybe God wants to say something to us (not only your people), or, He wants to remind us that we have responsibility to make our friends, our communities, our people aware that we are God’s Children, so we can’t count only on ourselves.
I think you have took your responsibility with what you’ve done (teaching people about EQ).
I believe that God still work in our life with many ways to bring us back to His Love, for example: through EQ we learn to balance our emotion, so we can change our attitude, our thinking, our feeling, and finally we change our life to be better (for ourselves and others). That’s God’s work (through us) .
Love and prayers:
– Anita (Indonesia)
PS. I just saw this quote Susan Stillman posted on Facebook – seems apropos of this discussion:
“Our task must be to free ourselves….by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”
– Einstein
Hello Josh, I also like this quote.
“I accept the fact that cooperation beats competition and that compassion is more effective than coercion, and where love is the ultimate and purest form of desire, the multitudes of problems we rightfully fear will melt away as snow in the sunlight.”–Gary Headrick, San Clemente Green.org
Thank you for this excellent piece of Emapathy and Coaching. The disturbance of people is transferring from your write up with unfolding the difficulty in accepting the grief. Also thought that, how if all the people have this skill to observe the grief from another space from where the ray of hope for safty peeping in.
Dear Arati – I think you’re right about the “ray of hope.” It’s what lets us move through grief and into positive change. As leaders, coaches, parents, friends… that’s something we can give when we use our EQ skills to create it in ourselves.
Hi! Josh, Thank you for your Great Great Work. Hoping a window for hope will be opened and sooth all those devastated hearts.
thank you for this post. An option, a positive change could be to jump into the “care cycle”:
I care (about any kind of feelings inside and outside myself), so I decide to be gentle (this is my choice: tenderness), then I act helping (myself or the others, as I can).
Thank you Ilaria – I agree — we could change the cycle. For example, if we go through the Reaction Cycle as you’ve said, a “Care Cycle,” the steps might be:
Setup: Take care of ourselves. Deepen our ability to care.
Trigger: Someone does something.
Interpretation: They need more love and care.
Reaction: Tenderness.
Escalation: Increase Empathy.
New State: Greater peace.
Sounds like a better life!!
🙂
I like the Care Cycle. Very helpful.
I like the CARE cycle comparison
🙂
Thought-provoking, insightful, interesting. Excellent read.
Thank you Michael!
Like most people, I’m troubled by the violence, but I am more troubled by the reaction to the violence. Your blog reflects the reaction to the event which is largely about blame. Where is the reaction to the 40,000 deaths in Syria? Maybe the number is too big for us to comprehend and emotionalize. Sandy Hook is close to home and our media continues to make it personal for everyone. Violence is part of our society. Stockton, California just recorded over 60 homicides this year. Where is the outrage?
I appreciate your blog and your thoughts about getting off the cycle. I’m sending your blog to my LinkedIn friends. Maybe it will be enough for them to ask themselves some powerful questions.
Thanks Terry – I certainly agree with you that violent tragedy is all around us. There’s an invaluable as well as disturbing mechanism in the human brain which is our ability to dissociate, to detach emotion when something is overwhelming. We can’t cope with the emotion of 40,000 deaths, so we treat it as something completely abstract. That same detachment is why we don’t feel the pain of the extinction of several species per day. In fact, as “bad news” escalates, rather than being compelling, our brains treat it as “normal” and there’s no real impact. I suspect that if you had a time travel machine, and brought people from 1800 or 1900 forward to today, they would be abhorrently horrified by the things we simply accept as “unfortunate.”
🙁
so needed in this disturbing and confusing time. thank you for posting. suzanne rapley in santa barbara, ca
Hi Suzanne – thank for commenting — and for being someone who’s committed to slowing down and seeing the possibilities of the moments unfolding. Let’s change to a caring and exciting time!
Please explain how we expect these parents to react. So if they were aware of their thoughts and feelings they could keep from “spinning” All they need is to practice we should all practice so when the day comes that our children might be victims we would be able to handle it better — not get caught up in the reaction. Really? And on the other side of discussion. we are talking about ‘outrage’. We should be outraged about 60 homocides in Stockton. We could spend our days in outrage.OOps is that coming ‘full circle”?
Hi Diane,
I agree with you that we, and these parents, should feel pain and sorrow and betrayal and rage — they and we should grieve. And I agree we should feel outrage at what’s happening. Then we have a choice:
Do we go back to “normal” and acquire/shop/drink/etc to push away the problem?
Do we blame and push these problems onto others?
Do we take more full responsibility ourselves?
What I’m trying to suggest here is that only the 3rd choice works… and to do so, we can each change our own reactions and stop contributing to fear & hatred & violence ourselves. This doesn’t mean “not feeling.” Rather the opposite. Then what do we DO with the feelings.
Warmly,
– Josh