CHAPTER 4
Bouncing back
What is emotional resilience?
In this chapter you’ll read some simple tips that will highlight how your personal attributes, such as self-belief, self-regulation and vulnerability can play an important part in managing yourself and helping you to bounce back.
By the end of the chapter you’ll be able to take charge of yourself should you begin to feel emotionally overwhelmed. You will also have the ability to regulate your own physiology through your breathing – one of the most powerful and effective tools you can add to your armoury.
This all means that you will be boosting your emotional resilience. But just what is emotional resilience? Higgs and Dulewicz define it as: “The capability to perform consistently in a range of situations under pressure and to adapt behaviour appropriately. The capability to balance the needs of the situation and task with the needs and concerns of the individuals involved. The capability to retain focus on a course of action or need for results in the face of personal challenge or criticism.”
Take a moment to reflect on this definition.
• What is it saying to you?
• Which are the key words or phrases that stand out?
• Why are they important to you?
It’s about bouncing back
In essence, emotional resilience is about how well you manage your negative emotions when things get tough, and how quickly you can take charge of yourself, refocus on the needs of those around you, and move forward.
Rookie Buster
Emotional resilience is about how well you manage your negative emotions when things get tough.
Take a look at the question below, reflect on the different bullets and, being honest with yourself, consider the meaning of each part and how you would really respond.
Question: When I’m under pressure or things have gone badly wrong, when I’ve made a big mistake or I’ve been personally challenged or criticized, do I have the ability to:
• Remain buoyant outwardly and centred inwardly?
• Behave in the way I would normally?
• Produce consistent results and/or show consistency in my performance?
• Think clearly and make appropriate and timely decisions?
• Adapt to the new situation and implement the necessary change?
• Assess the needs of the team and enable them to move on?
• Maintain my self-confidence?
If you can answer a resounding “Yes” to all the above, you probably have a high level of emotional resilience and have already found ways to change the way you feel and restore your self-belief in the face of pressure, following major setbacks or personal challenge.
Now consider the following.
Have I ever:
• Felt downhearted or dispirited when things are difficult?
• Become overwhelmed and felt ineffectual when deadlines are looming?
• Found it tough making timely judgements and decisions when trying to overcome a setback?
• Treated others in an inappropriate manner or found it hard to say the right thing to get the support I need to move on?
• Behaved in a way that was really not constructive or even withdrawn completely under extreme pressure?
• Lost confidence and belief in myself and found it difficult to retain focus and move forward after being challenged or criticized?
If you have never experienced any of the above, then you definitely have a high level of emotional resilience!
However, it is likely that something in the list resonates with you. Therefore, you could probably benefit from strengthening your emotional resilience, or at least familiarizing yourself with some techniques in case you ever feel overwhelmed by your emotions, out of control or unable to cope.
Avoiding the hijack
Being swamped by your emotions is sometimes called an emotional hijack. It means that negative feelings such as frustration, anxiety, disappointment, embarrassment, hopelessness, despair, worthlessness, guilt or uncertainty have completely flooded the emotional brain and hijacked your attention from the task at hand.
This flood of negative emotions erodes not only your mental abilities (such as your ability to rationalize and make decisions), but also affects your overall emotional intelligence. A downward spiral of selfdoubt ensues, and you become unaware of how you are behaving or of the affect you are having on others. Your ability to read the emotions of others is also impaired, and so your interpersonal sensitivity and ability to influence are diminished too.
Why is emotional resilience important?
Disappointments and setbacks are part of everyday life, and mistakes happen – you are human, after all. But how you deal with these in the moment defines the outcome. Being emotionally resilient means you can cope with the inevitable flurry of emotion, while still retaining coherence and clarity of thought and reacting appropriately.
Rookie Buster
Being emotionally resilient means you can cope with the inevitable flurry of emotion, while still retaining coherence and clarity of thought and reacting appropriately.
Saying the wrong thing, or not doing the right thing, can turn a difficult situation into a disaster, and could cost you an important and profitable relationship or even your job.
Low emotional resilience – an example
To bring this to life, let’s look at an example of how someone with low emotional resilience might behave.
For the last three months, Phil and his team have been working on a major European conference for one of their key clients. Everyone has put a lot of work and effort into creating an exciting event to meet the client’s specific need. This is a big deal financially, and the project is high profile. Phil’s team has had some innovative ideas, and all has been going fantastically well.
Phil takes a call from the client. The client explains they have just found out that the venue for the conference has been booked for the wrong dates and there is no availability for the date required. This has huge ramifications in terms of the invited audience, and major financial implications should they have to rearrange the conference. Phil is directly responsible for this error.
How does Phil react?
Phil is devastated and feels confused, helpless, shocked and scared. These feelings well up inside; he feels physically sick, his breathing becomes irregular, and he is unable to function. He recognizes the mistake that he has made and realizes the financial implications for the company. He recognizes that his own credibility has been placed in question and that he might face disciplinary action. The client has demanded to know how such a mistake has taken place. Phil can’t explain the mistake; he can hardly speak. He finishes the call abruptly and leaves the building. Totally devastated, he drives home and doesn’t reappear the next day.
How does Phil’s behaviour impact on his team?
The team learn about the mistake from the client, who is trying desperately to get some answers. They try to call Phil, but he does not respond. They don’t know what to do next. The client is furious. The team feel devastated and let down. They are now leaderless. The energy level in the team plummets; they have lost confidence, and are confused and lack direction.
Exercise – Handling the crisis
This scenario highlights the disabling effect that low emotional resilience can have on an individual and also the impact this has on others. Reflect on how Phil handled his emotions, how this affected his behaviour, the impression this made on the client, and the impact on his team. How could Phil have handled this more effectively?
An alternative
When Phil heard the news, he began to feel confused, helpless, shocked and scared as his emotions began to swamp him. Internally, his physiological state went into chaos, his breathing became irregular and he couldn’t think clearly or articulate a response. He needed to:
• Take charge of his breathing immediately, and focus on a regular and rhythmic breathing pattern. This enables clearer thinking.
• Find a way to finish the call, and give himself time to address his emotional state. As he would be thinking more clearly because of his regular breathing, he could make an apology, articulate positive action and finish the call: “I can’t understand what has happened; I am so sorry. Let me make a couple of calls, find out more and call you back within the hour.”
• Take stock; start to rationalize the news and change his emotional state. Draw on a positive state and work through the self-belief cycle; remind himself of his capabilities and strengths.
• Stop the negative emotions from undermining his confidence or disabling his ability to deal with the situation effectively.
• Be strong and face up to the situation; share the news with a colleague he trusts. Show vulnerability; ask for their help to draw up an immediate action plan; initially verify the situation.
• Address his team; explain; take responsibility and ask for their support to work through immediate actions and find a solution or possible alternatives.
• Prepare what to say to the client; consider “what if?” scenarios; practise aloud or with a colleague. Show professionalism and make the call to the client within the timeframe promised.
How emotionally resilient are you?
Let’s stop here and focus on you and how you cope under pressure.
Exercise – Dealing with pressure
Try to recall a work-related situation where you felt under tremendous pressure. Perhaps you were facing a huge setback in a project, addressing a personal mistake, or dealing with a challenging situation.
1. Using the following prompts, take some time to note:
• The situation or build-up.
• The people involved.
• Your thoughts.
• Your emotional feelings.
• Your behaviour.
• How others reacted.
• The outcome.
Whether or not you consider you were effective in handling the pressure, reflect on how you could manage your own thoughts, emotional feelings and behaviour if you were facing a similar situation. What would you do differently to help yourself maintain control and ensure you and others continued to perform effectively?
2. Now try to recall any physiological signals (aches, pains, sounds, sensations) that you may have experienced prior to or during the event you have outlined.
Tip: Be alert to your physiological signals in the future – they are your early warning that you are under pressure. Recognize what they are telling you, and take positive action early. Staying in control will help you avoid an emotional hijack.
3. Now, try to recall any intuitive feelings (knowingness or inner voice) that you may have experienced prior to or during the event you have outlined.
Tip: Be open to and value your intuitive feelings – something is resonating with a past experience. Stop and reflect on their meaning. Trust them, and allow yourself to tap into your accumulated life wisdom.
Personal reflection: Lessons I have learned
about myself
Finally take a few minutes to draw out three key lessons you have learned about yourself, and record them here.
1.________________________________________________________________________________
2.________________________________________________________________________________
3.________________________________________________________________________________
What can affect your emotional resilience?
Your emotional resilience can be affected if you are:
• Working outside your normal sphere of knowledge and experience.
• Under intense pressure for a prolonged period of time.
• Responsible for a major mistake.
Working outside your normal sphere of knowledge and experience
In such situations you may find that you question your own abilities and feel less confident than you would ordinarily be in your own area of expertise. Self-confidence comes from feeling good about what you do, and knowing you can do the job. If you are outside your comfort zone, it is inevitable you will feel less emotionally resilient, as your selfconfidence is not likely to be so strong.
Rookie Buster
Self-confidence comes from feeling good about what you do, and knowing you can do the job.
Tip: To boost your self-confidence, reflect on how you felt when you were learning your core skills. Remind yourself that you had the capacity and capability to learn those skills. So with a little time, and being in the right emotional state for learning (see Chapter 3), you will master the new skills or expand the knowledge base that you need for your current role.
Intense pressure for a long time
During periods of intense pressure, it is easy to get locked into the project or task and forget the need for self-regulation. Regulating your sleep, diet, physical exercise and free time are key to maintaining your level of emotional resilience. Let one or all of these slip and you will begin to notice the effect that this has on you. You may become tearful for no apparent reason, or find yourself making little progress with the task.
Tip: To regulate yourself, be conscious of how you are feeling throughout the day, and take action when you feel your concentration is waning or progress is slowing. Be in tune with your bodily needs, and take the time to go for a walk, eat or relax. Simply moving will shift your internal energy, making you feel better and able to think more clearly. The benefit when you return to the task will outweigh the time taken for the break.
Being responsible for a major mistake
When the responsibility for a major mistake falls to you, it is likely you will feel overwhelmed by negative feelings. Perhaps you feel guilty, embarrassed, that you have let others down, or that you have failed yourself. Whatever you are feeling will alter your physiology and emotional state and lead to you questioning your belief in yourself. You may find you retreat inwardly, want to spend time on your own and physically remove yourself from the presence of others. These are your signals that your emotional resilience is low and you’ve lost your selfbelief. The earlier you can take positive action the better for you and anyone else involved with you.
Rookie Buster
Regulating your sleep, diet, physical exercise and free time are key to maintaining your level of emotional resilience.
Tip: To regain self-belief, introduce positive self-talk and draw on a more resourceful state. (See the section on personal development activities in Chapter 3.)
How does your emotional resilience affect others?
In Chapter 2, you were introduced to the “open loop” design of our limbic system, and learned that your emotions are contagious. How you feel and the state of your energy will be reflected in those around you.
Let’s look at a few examples.
Under pressure, a person with high emotional resilience will be:
• Calm and collected.
• Consistent in their manner and how they respond to individuals.
• Open to challenge and debate.
They will therefore:
• Create confidence in those around them.
• Retain respect.
• Find others respond well, maintain their focus and perform effectively.
Under pressure, a person with low emotional resilience will:
• Appear tense and out of control.
• Show no consistency in what they do or say to others.
• Start to dictate and may bicker about detail.
• Find it difficult to make decisions.
• Appear to have lost confidence.
• Freeze and be unable to react.
They will therefore:
• Lose the confidence of those around them.
• Find the energy level of others will diminish.
• See performance decline in others.
Tip: To strengthen your emotional resilience, be open with those around you and be prepared to show your human side. Acknowledge that you don’t handle pressure well and ask others for support. If pressure makes you quiet and withdrawn, let others know that. Ask others to keep a watch for those early warning signals, in case you don’t notice. Encourage others to step in when they see these signs and offer their support early.
A note of warning, though. While having a high level of emotional resilience helps maintain a level of consistency in your performance, and creates a confidence in those around you, there is a danger in being too emotionally resilient. If you are seen to be too controlled or too regulated from one day to another, and nothing ever seems to affect your outward calm, you could be seen to have lost your humanness. Being too “in control” of your emotions, you may suppress the energy that is needed to engage and energize others. Too much control may have a negative effect.
Bouncing back: Bringing emotional resilience to life
Your starting point
1. Transfer into this box your emotional resilience score from the EI self-perception questionnaire in Chapter 2.
2. Now that you know more about emotional resilience, re-evaluate this score and plot on the Bouncing Back blade above. This score is an indicator of your level of emotional resilience and is based on your self-perception.
3. Reflect on your entries in your emotions diary, and if you recognize there is scope for strengthening your emotional resilience, take some time here to jot down your ideas. You may like to think about this in terms of what you could start, stop and continue.
• Start – for example, start removing myself from the situation when I’m beginning to feel wound up.
• Stop – for example, stop taking criticism so personally.
• Continue – for example, continue putting things into context.
4. Use The Johari Window template in the Appendix and consider, in relation to emotional resilience, how you behave and how you feel. Jot down your behaviours (Box 1) and your feelings (Box 2).
5. Your emotional resilience will have an impact on others. To gain a true understanding of this, you need to ask others for their feedback. Identify four people who know you well in the workplace and use the five statements from the emotional resilience section of the EI questionnaire (page 36 in Chapter 2) as prompts for discussion with each of them. Their perceptions will provide valuable data – some may confirm your own perception, while some may differ.
6. Go back to The Johari Window template and in Box 1 capture the perceptions shared by you and others. Then complete Box 3 and record anything you had been previously unaware of. The real value of this exercise is discovering things you don’t already know about yourself.
7. Based on your findings, revisit and, if necessary, revise your start, stop and continue actions.
You can now bring your emotional resilience to life through the following personal development activities.
Personal development activities
1. Controlling your breathing
One of the quickest and most effective ways to take control of your physiology is to consciously regulate your breathing pattern. Learning to breathe rhythmically and evenly produces a smooth, regular and stable heart rate, and brings your body into a state of coherence.
If you are in a coherent state physiologically, you will be “in the zone” and able to think, feel and act effectively.
The smooth, regular pattern generated by the electrical signal of the
heart when the body is in a state of coherence
If you are not in the right state physiologically, you will be in a state of chaos, which will inhibit your ability to think, feel and act effectively.
The sharp, irregular pattern generated by the electrical signal of the
heart when the body is in a state of chaos
Rookie Buster
Learning to breathe rhythmically and evenly produces a smooth, regular and repetitive heart signal, and brings your body into a state of coherence.
To take control of your physiology, you will need to breathe rhythmically (which means a fixed ratio of the in to the out breath); breathe evenly (which means creating a smooth flow in and out); and focus on the area of your heart.
Try the following to help with rhythmic breathing:
1. Breathe in to a count of 4.
2. Breathe out to a count of 6.
3. Repeat continually.
To help you remember this exercise, use the acronym BREATHE: Breathe Rhythmically, Evenly And Through the Heart Everyday.
After a minute or so, you will start to feel a change within yourself and to notice that you are more alert and able to think more clearly.
Initially you may find it easier to close your eyes to practise this technique. Then, when you have mastered that, try with your eyes open.
Practise this technique as often as possible until you can very quickly switch into breathing rhythmically and evenly. Then try it whenever you feel your resilience is being tested – maybe during a difficult telephone call.
If you have to give a presentation and you are struggling with nerves, try using it just before you begin to clear your mind. You might even use it midway through, if you suddenly can’t remember what you were about to say!
This technique is very powerful, and once you have mastered it, you can use it anywhere and at any time to take control of what is happening within.
2. Controlling your feelings
To take control of your emotional state, you will need to be really familiar with the characteristics of your feelings and where they reside in your body.
As soon as you begin to feel overwhelmed or swamped by emotion, you will need to be able to recognize the feeling and replace it with a more positive feeling.
So let’s take this step by step.
1. Take a few minutes to jot down the negative feelings that you experience when you are under pressure or facing challenges.
2. Now turn to the “Describing your feelings” exercise in Chapter 2. This asks you to describe the characteristics of positive feelings you regularly experience and identify their movement through the body. If you haven’t already tried this, it may be worth completing with your strongest positive feeling.
3. Now that you are familiar with the technique, repeat the exercise for those negative feelings that you have identified above.
4. Next turn to the “Personal development activities” heading in Chapter 3, and find the activity entitled “Becoming more resourceful”. Practise this exercise and you’ll soon see how quickly you can take control of your emotional feelings.
3. “What if…?” scenario planning
Being prepared mentally, physically and emotionally for everything that you do gives you the confidence and self-belief that you need when things become difficult. Planning and preparation is an activity that is often under-utilized and undervalued, but taking time out to clarify your desired outcome, and to identify the steps you need to take to achieve it, can make you feel more in control.
Rookie Buster
Being prepared mentally, physically and emotionally for everything that you do gives you the confidence and self-belief that you need when things become difficult.
Taking this one step further, spend some time identifying the possible hitches and glitches that could occur – the “what ifs”.
Then imagine how you would feel should any of these occur, and what you might say and do. Mentally practise in your head; in the heat of the moment, your brain will follow the pattern practised and help you to stay in control.
Here’s an example. Tomorrow you are going to present a proposal to an important client. Think through the things that might happen:
• What if you get held up and are late for the meeting?
• What if your client has to shorten the meeting length?
• What if the “big boss” joins unexpectedly?
• What if your client challenges you on something that is not within your area of expertise?
• What if your proposal doesn’t meet the brief?
• What if the client has changed the parameters around what he/she wants?
Now for each possible scenario identify:
• How you might feel.
• What you might say.
• What you might do.
Try to do this exercise before you enter any potentially difficult or challenging situation, and see how much it helps you to remain focused, think clearly and take charge of your emotions.
Coach’s notes 
Strengthening your emotional resilience will really help you to retain your composure whenever you feel overwhelmed – whether through anger, anxiety or loss of self-belief.
• Boost your self-awareness – understand how you feel and why you react to things as you do.
• Be aware of your physiological signals and listen to your intuitive voice – they are your early warning system.
• Turn on your positive feelings when you recognize the need.
• Don’t respond before thinking – allow yourself time to reflect, and have confidence in deferring your response.
• Boost your self-confidence by reflecting on your successes, and identifying what you did each time to make it a success.
• Don’t be critical of yourself – accept that you face challenges and will make mistakes. You are human! Share mistakes with others and ask them to help you overcome them and move on.
• Learn to deal with criticism – if you think it is fair, agree and probe for ideas for how to improve. If you don’t think it fair, then ask why others hold that view, and be open to feedback.
• Plan in advance, and be prepared for the unexpected.
Go for it! You are now armed with some powerful techniques that will help you to take charge of your feelings whenever you start to feel as though things are getting out of control. By using the breathing technique, you will be able to change your physiological state very quickly, which will enable you to think clearly. You can then concentrate on altering your emotional state to change the way you feel, and control what you say and do.
At first you may need to use these techniques regularly. But as time goes on you will find that you will have strengthened your emotional resilience to a level that no longer requires continual conscious input.
You may then find you can say “Yes” to all those questions posed on page 66!
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Notes |
