Finding G.E.M.s in the Moment

[This is the transcript of Session 7 at the Emotional Intelligence Online Summit 2022 with Grant Herbert.] 

Resilience is an important topic. However, it is a little bit misunderstood and sometimes taught in a way that is not very supportive and helpful. 

In today’s session, I want to use a simple process and analogy based on "The Resilience Project" by Hugh Van Cuylenburg. I did some tweaking and adjusting around this process to better serve your needs.  

Resilience is not about hardening up or toughening it out. It’s also not about “sticking to it” and grit and all these things. The reason behind that is just like managing your emotions and suppressing and ignoring them; it's not good for you as a human being; things happen and will continue to happen, and you need to be able to navigate through that.  

Resilience is more about how you can set yourself up so that going through tough situations will have a lesser effect on you than what they could and so that they actually propel you to move forward. A good friend of mine, Sam Cawthorne, calls it: “Bouncing Forward” instead of “Bouncing Back”.  

What I want you to do is look at the last couple of years of COVID or look at how last year has gone and what you have experienced. Then, look at how you could use those happenings, experiences and learnings to bounce forward (I’m also going to teach you how you can do that.)  

In his book, Hugh tells us the three things to help build resilience, and those are G.E.M.s which stands for Gratitude, Empathy and Mindfulness. That is why I've used a bit of a play on words with the name of what I'm doing here is all about finding GEMS.  

I also want to give you a quick talk about that before I get into what I was going to give you. Doing so will give you a platform that I can add to.  

So, let's start with gratitude. 

Sometimes when we go through challenging times, we only look at the negative side of it. And we get stuck in that negative.  

(By the way, it’s a good thing that you “go through” things rather than stop. Sometimes, people say, “Oh, I’m going through hell at the moment.” And I tell them, “Hey, that’s okay. Just make sure you don’t stop. Let’s come through it together.”) 

When you’re stuck in that negative and your thinking is going a certain way, navigating your emotions will obviously spiral down into that negative experience. So, as I have always said: Emotions are not positive or negative. However, the behaviour that comes out of navigating those emotions can either be positive or negative.  

So, when you are just dwelling on what’s going wrong, it will not set you up to get the best out of what you’re going through at any part of your life — whether it's good, bad, or indifferent.  

What is gratitude? 

Gratitude is simply being grateful for what you have rather than being sad and feeling like you're missing out or less than what you don't have.  

In a world where we are continually comparing ourselves to others and in a world lived out on social media, most people put their best day up for you to look at. And for a lot of people who have low self-worth and personal power compare their best selves to how they are going through what they are going through right now. Therefore, that comparison can create some negative feelings toward themselves.  

So gratitude is simply being grateful for what you DO have.  

What I want you to do now is to pause for a moment, close your eyes and think of the things you are grateful for.  

For me, I’m very grateful to have the privilege to be here talking to you today. I am grateful for having an amazing wife and great kids. I am grateful to be able to experience the things I experienced. I am grateful to have my health.  

How about you? What are the things you are grateful for? 

Just take a moment to think about that and write it down. 

You can type those in the chat from below this blog if you want. I’d love to see what you are grateful for.  \

As you contemplate and write about those things you are grateful for, I want you to notice how you feel. Notice the experience and the effect it has on how you are feeling.  

So, no matter what you are going through right now, I want you to remember this:  

It’s not about what others are going through and in comparison to that. Remember that it is your world and what you are going through is your situation.  

How does it feel as you feel grateful? 

It’s like this little trick someone taught and used on me years ago, and you can do this along with me: 

They said, “I want you to put the biggest smile on your face." 

“Now, I want you to feel sad.” 

However, doing so is not possible because you've set yourself up to experience some positive feelings.  

It's the same with gratitude: Looking at what you're grateful for can help you have your mindset where it needs to be to get the best out of your day. 

A little caveat to go along with that is when we are grateful for the things we have, we need to be mindful and careful not to feel guilty or shameful about the fact that others do not have that. I want you to focus this on YOU and be okay with that.  

The second part of the G.E.M. is the E for Empathy.  

I believe the whole world could use a lot more empathy right now.  

I want to help you have an understanding what empathy is. 

Empathy is one of the key competencies of Social Intelligence and Social Awareness. To understand empathy, we first have to understand what it is not. 

If we look at a continuum, and if we look at what people normally talk about with these things, we've got, on the one hand, apathy. Apathy says: “I don’t care at all. I’ve got no concerns about this. I’m being apathetic around it.” 

On the other hand, is sympathy.  

Sympathy is about “feeling sorry.” 

Empathy is neither of those two things.  

Empathy is sort of in the middle of those two things. 

Empathy is at least starting to want to understand how other people might be feeling and what they might be experiencing and wanting to have. It is being curious and wanting to understand the other person. It is trying to look through the lens they are looking at. 

One of the biggest reasons there's so much conflict, particularly in social media, is that people look only through their lens and agenda. 

Empathy says: “I really want to understand it from your perspective.” 

It’s like walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. It’s about looking through their lens. To do that, you need to understand what their lens is. Doing so creates an opportunity for you to ask questions rather than make statements. 

By asking questions to clarify and get an understanding, you have communication instead of having the mindset where you say: “No. What that person's saying is rubbing against what I believe. Therefore, I'll speak my mind,” which is where the communication falls apart.  

So, empathy says: “I've got concern for you. I want to know what you're going through. Please help me to understand.”  

How can we use that every day?  

Well, you can use that by simply asking questions and pausing. And I’m going to help you with a strategy to do that.  

By pausing and going, “you know what, before I respond and get involved in this any further, let me get some more information.” 

So, it's simply a matter of going, “Hey, I would really love to understand more about that. Can you help me understand why you think or feel that way?" 

Doing that says to the other person a number of things: 

You value them.  

You value their opinion. 

You are open, teachable and humble enough to see others' perspectives. 

I concluded a long time ago that it’s okay for people to have different opinions. Just because I have an opinion different from yours does not make you or me wrong. It’s an opinion, a perception. And perception is definitely a reality.  

I was at a conference on the Gold Coast last week (in every conference, I’d like to come away with at least one thing from each speaker and the entire conference), and there’s one thing that stuck in my mind, and it was one slide that said: 

“Strong opinions, lightly held.” 

Most of the time, you have a strong opinion about something — which is great. You want to believe in things and be passionate about them — which is also great. However, when you hold on to these opinions tightly (like a hand clenched into a fist, looking as if it's ready to punch someone), and when somebody has an opinion different from yours, you feel attacked. You feel that if others are attacking your opinion, they are attacking you.  

So, you hold on to it instead of having that opinion but being open to hearing another perspective.  

I am a work in progress on all this stuff, and this took a number of years for me to even consider.  

When you have empathy for others, you will loosen that grasp on the opinion and be open to hearing it from another person’s perspective. When you do this, you can learn from another person’s point of view and then understand why they think, feel, and act the way they do. It doesn't mean that you have to agree with them but what it does is it allows you to communicate in a totally different way. 

The last one is Mindfulness which is being mindful of the moment.  

Social and Emotional Intelligence is the ability to be aware of your emotions and the emotions of others at that moment. For you to be present in that moment, you need to learn to be mindful. 

You can do so many things to be mindful; you can meditate or work on your breathing. In session 6, Shiri talked about the importance of being mindful and becoming more present in the moment and how breathing can help you do that.  

When you are more mindful, you can have more empathy. 

When you are mindful, you can have thoughts of gratitude.  

This is all from Hugh Van Cuylenburg’s book. Although this is stuff that I already knew, I just love the way he put it together.  

So to be more resilient, we need to practice and bring back into our lives the G.E.M.s (Gratitude, Empathy and Mindfulness) we have just discussed. 

I want to finish this off today by giving you a practical strategy that you can use. 

Now that I’ve given you those three, you can sit down and work on what you are grateful for. Some people like having a gratitude journal. One of the greatest things you can do the very first thing in the morning, instead of going through social media or emails, is to start your day thinking of the things you are grateful for.  

For me, the first thing I’m grateful for is waking up — having another day to live on this beautiful planet and then looking over and seeing the people I love the most.  

Be grateful for the good things about yourself. And that takes a little bit more effort for some because of the eroded self-worth.  

So start your day with gratitude and end it with gratitude as well. 

Instead of going to bed at night thinking about all the things you don't have or the things that have gone wrong (which you ruminate on and ruin your sleep), why don’t you go to bed going,  “Hey, what am I grateful for that I took out of today?” “Where was I able to serve?”  

Gratitude is fantastic. Empathy is not just for others; it is for you. Empathy enables you to have healthy self-talk and inner dialogue. Mindfulness, on the other hand, slows the brain down. 

Sometimes, our brains can be all over the place. When things are big, they can seem a lot more challenging than they really are. Our brains can get bombarded with all the bad things that could possibly happen. Therefore, being mindful and focused in the present moment is really important for us to shut out all the negative noise. 

So, we've talked about a number of things, and in this session, I also want to talk to you about how we do the last bit of what I said in navigating emotions.  

As I have said, you don’t want to manage the emotion, but you want to manage the response to the emotion. To do that, you need to manage the thinking and the behaviour that comes. If you haven’t watched that session, you can watch it by clicking this link:

https://www.peoplebuilders.com.au/blog/emotional-intelligence-in-the-context-of-a-medical-crisis 

Emotion is a neurochemical reaction in the body. Your emotions let you know that something's going on. Then, what you make that mean creates thoughts. When taken further and ruminated on, those thoughts can become a feeling and/or a series of feelings that will end up being a state or a mood.  

Depending upon those thoughts, it'll depend then whether it is something that is good or something that spirals down. 

In the work that I do in Social and Emotional Intelligence, we call this Behavioural Self-Control.  

Therefore, healthily navigating your emotions depends on what you do when you experience that initial emotion.  

The first thing you need to do is Name the emotion. 

To name the emotion, you need to notice it. For you to notice it, you need to be mindful and present; you need to notice that sensation or physiological cue coming in. 

Afterwards, you put a label on it — you need to name it to navigate it.  

You need to be able to put it into a sentence that says: 

I feel [ insert the name of the emotion].  

I am feeling [ insert the name of the emotion]. 

The second thing is to do an audit of your thoughts.  

So you’ve got physiological that's happened, then comes the psychological. The psychological is where it can either go off the rails or be navigated in a healthy way.  

To navigate it in a healthy way, you need to do audit of your thoughts.  

So the first question you ask yourself is, “what am I feeling?” 

Then the second one is, “what am I thinking? 

By doing an audit of your thoughts, you're able to challenge those thoughts when their facts are not in evidence. By continually practising this, you will develop your competency and skill in being able to navigate your emotions in a healthy way.  

You need to continually practice this because it cannot change overnight. The reason is that for many years, your brain has conditioned itself to respond in a certain way.  

So, it's about incrementally changing your thoughts and strategies and implementing this strategy that I'm giving you about behavioural self-control.  

The third thing is to ask yourself: 

What is the outcome that I want here?  

What do I want to happen? 

One of the reasons you keep ending up anywhere is that you don't decide where you want to go. The reason why this is the number three, and it's not upfront, is that by naming the emotion and doing an audit on the thoughts, the physiological and the psychological state that you’re in is now more conducive to working from the prefrontal cortex, not from deep in the limbic system.  

So, ask yourself: 

What do I want to happen here?  

Then choose where you want to navigate to.  

It's just like going on a road trip. If you just take off in the car and you go, “Oh, just go somewhere”, you can end up anywhere. But by choosing where you want to go and making that choice filtered through the lens of healthy thoughts and dialogue, your prefrontal cortex will be able to help you regulate what happens from there on in to get you there.  

The fourth thing you want to do is ask yourself: What could I do to sabotage this right now?  

It could also be: What could I do or say right now to sabotage this?  

What you are doing is you are looking at it and going: “Okay, this is where I said I want to go. That's the outcome I want. And now I'm going to make sure I'm not going to the stuff I would normally do.”  
 
So, it's all about controlling that sabotage and being mindful and aware of what you normally do.  

Number five is to choose a strategy.  

Choosing a strategy is about asking yourself: How will I get there?  

By asking yourself that question, you can come up with clear steps that you need to take.  

So that is the five-step process of being able to regulate the behaviour and navigate through the emotion in a healthy way.  

Step 1: Name the emotion. 

Step 2: Audit your thoughts. 

Step 3: Decide the outcome. 

Step 4: Control the sabotage. 

Step 5: Choose the strategy. 

Now, I want to help you understand something that happened in that process as well. By the way, it's not something you have to carry around on a palm card for too long because you will soon condition your brain to ask those questions in that process in the moment. The reason why this works really well is that the questions you ask are “what” questions (you can even use “how”) rather than “why”. 

When you ask a "what" question, you look for logic. Therefore, the logical processes in your brain are lit up, and they're working. However, when you ask a “why” question, it invokes more emotion.  

“Why is this happening?”  

“Why did they say that?” 

“Why did I do that?"  

“Why do I always do these things?” Etc. 

When you ask yourself these “why” questions, it will create a state of overwhelm. 

It's going to create a state that's not going to be conducive for you — it prevents you from feeling good about yourself, others, or both. Therefore, your behaviour will be more of an emotional reaction rather than a logical response. So that's why it’s important to understand some of the neuroscience behind it. 

Let me give you an example: 

The first thing you want to do is to make sure you understand what triggers you into these poor behaviours. You can write them down on paper as you go along this session.  

For me, one of the biggest triggers of poor behaviour (even still today) is traffic. 

I can go from mild-mannered Eric Banner to the Incredible Hulk, just like that, when I hit a traffic jam.  

So why is that? Let me take you through it.  

Let's say I'm heading off to work with a client and hit a traffic jam. You see, it's not what happens, but it's about what you make it mean. So, if I hit a traffic jam, it means I'm going to be late getting to that person. Therefore, they're going to think that I'm not reliable, they're going to think less than of me, and they're not even gonna like me.  

So, the dialogue that I had there spiralled down, and it challenges and works towards those three universal fears: 

The fear of not belonging, the fear of not being enough, and the fear of not being loved.  

When those fears are challenged, the initial thing that happens can cause your brain to get into overdrive, and then your behaviour comes out of that.  

So, it’s about being able to recognise what goes on. For me, I normally grasp the steering wheel a little bit tighter and go: “Oh my gosh…."  By the way, I do this way differently these days because I'm now very mindful of it, so it happens way less.  

However, before I became mindful, I did things like this:   

Whenever I’m three cars behind and when the red light goes green, and the car does not move because they are doing something like being on their phone or eating something and then would cause traffic, I would say crazy things like, “haven’t we got a colour you like?” But they can’t hear me because they are three cars ahead of me, and my windows (including theirs) are closed, so they can’t hear a word I’m saying. However, I can hear myself, so it puts me in that state.  

I want to tell you that I am telling you this story to be vulnerable and help you. How about you? Do you have any experience similar to this?  

I want you to list down the things that trigger you and remember a moment when you were triggered and how you reacted. You can share it in the form below the blog.  

Being able to stop in the moment and go, “Hang on a minute. What am I feeling right now?” (Naming the emotion) and acknowledge and notice it and be okay with that is the start. 

For example, when I am feeling annoyed, the first thing I do is recognise what I am feeling. I then audit my thoughts and ask myself: “Why am I feeling annoyed?” “What am I thinking?”  

Then I say, “I’m feeling annoyed because I’m late. They may think….” 

I then pause and go, “Well, hang on, Grant, that’s not going to happen…." 

I can rationalise that in my logical brain processes, switch it off, and go back to a more positive dialogue.  

Then I proceed to audit my thoughts. I ask myself: “What am I thinking?”  

So, I challenge that and continue from there.  

I then ask myself: What do I want to happen? What do I want the outcome to be? 

I then say: “Well, I want to get to where I am going and be in a state where I can serve and do my best for the client.” 

As opposed to getting down there or becoming agitated and frustrated because the traffic could only prevent me from doing a great job, those things that I feared would happen because I was late could still come to pass because of the way that I worked when I got there.  

So what I want to happen is I want to get there.  

The next question is:  

What could I do or say right now to sabotage getting there? 

Well, I could end up in a road rage situation.  

I could cause an accident.  

I could get myself in a state where I'm not able to do what I need to do when I get there.  

So, all of that could happen when I allow that thought pattern to continue.  

All of that could happen when I verbalise things that are not true when I enter “facts” that are not in evidence. 

So doing those two things sabotages what I could normally do. 

Number five is to choose a strategy — a simple strategy. 

Back to our example, I could say to the client:  

“Hey Joe, I’m stuck in a little bit of traffic. I'm probably still going to get there on time, but I just wanted to let you know out of courtesy that I could be five or ten minutes late. Is that okay?” 

And he could respond: 

“That’s fine, Grant. Not a problem at all. Just buzz me when you get here.”   

By going through a process of naming the emotion, auditing the thoughts, working out where I want to go and controlling that sabotage, I was able to do something that helped rather than hindered me. It helped me get the result I wanted instead of letting me spiral off into a feeling and state that was not going to help me.  

So, I want you to have that strategy.  

As I have said, this is not something that you need to go through, carry around, and say: 

“Oh, hang on a minute, let me ask myself the first question…." 

No, it’s not. 

Initially, you're going to be doing that. Still, over some time, your brain will be conditioned to go through that process unconsciously at any given moment and can then help you to notice, name and navigate the emotions you're going through and navigate them in a healthy way.  

Remember: There’s no such thing as a positive or negative emotion. There's only a positive or negative response to it. Therefore, you can change what happens in those particular situations.  

So, on top of building the platform around your personal power and your identity.  

It's important that you would be able to work on your identity so you can work out where some of your negative beliefs come from that even allow you to fear that you're not good enough, that you don't belong, and you're not loved. 

When I was around 15 years years, I formed an opinion that I wasn’t loved. And I had a pity party for the next 25 years because I thought I wasn’t lovable, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

So, working on that platform first is important. Our speakers from the previous session have given you several things you can do to work on that platform. 

Obviously, it's not all going to happen in a one-day summit. This is a journey of continual improvement that I, myself, will be going on just like everybody else until I leave the earth and working on that is vitally important.  

Hopefully, the strategies I've given you in this session will help you in that journey. 

From Hugh Van Cuylenburg’s book, you learned about the G.E.M.s of resilience: Gratitude, Empathy, and Mindfulness. 

Then, I also taught you a five-step process of asking logical questions to help you behave in a different manner when things don't go your way. 

Well, I could go on all night because I love this and I love what I do. I love to serve, and I love having conversations with people worldwide because this has been a major part of my life experience as a human being — learning this stuff and being able to implement it one day at a time so that it becomes my new normal. 

So, as we're finishing, I want us to take the words: New Normal. I want you to understand that your new normal has nothing to do with a pandemic or a conflict or anything else that's happening in the world right now; your new normal is what you do differently moving forward from today.