Playing With Fire

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This post is all about how to handle stressful or difficult situations. It has been triggered by a recent conversation with a senior executive in a global organisation. He asked me for some tips on how to handle colleagues who appeared to be indifferent to his ideas.

What he found particularly infuriating were people who repeatedly tapped their pens or flicked through their papers when he was making a presentation. This behavior threw him so much off his stride that he found it difficult to even think straight.

I’d like to share my answer with you because it actually applies to any situation that you find stressful or annoying. But first, here’s an analogy.

We all know that fire is a powerful force. It can bring huge benefits: it cooks our food, heats our homes and powers our transport. But fire can also be tremendously destructive, even life-threatening – think here of forest fires, man-made explosions and volcanic eruptions.

Now, imagine a box of matches. When struck, each match becomes a tiny fire. If it is fed with fuel, such as petrol, it will soon turn into a major blaze. If instead it is doused with water, the water would put the match out although it’s likely to leave a soggy mess.

Whenever a thought enters your mind, it is like a match. You can give it the fuel of your attention and it will soon grow into something much bigger. Alternatively, you could pour water on it by trying to suppress it. The question is: which option is the best choice?

The answer can be seen by going back to the senior executive. It became clear from our conversation that when he saw colleagues shuffling papers or tapping pens, the thought that arose in his mind was ‘my work does not matter – it’s not important’. The trouble started when he gave this thought most of his attention, just like adding petrol to a match. The resulting inferno in his mind burned up all his concentration and motivation – no wonder he found it hard to continue his presentation!

Suppose he had tried water instead? Then his attention would have been diverted away from his presentation by the mental effort of trying to suppress the thought. And just as any firefighter will tell you, water can cause much damage all on its own.

Fortunately there is a third option. We know that when a match is struck, it only has limited life on its own. Its energy is soon exhausted because, when the matchstick is burned through, it will automatically extinguish itself. A thought is exactly the same. After it enters your mind, if it is given neither the fuel of attention nor the water of suppression, it will soon fade away.

So my suggestion to the executive was to notice when he started to feel negative because a negative feeling is the signal that an unhelpful thought has been ‘struck’ (in his case it was the thought that ‘my work does not matter’). The critical point is not to pour on petrol by giving it serious attention; let it fade away like a single match with no fuel.

I know this works because I have done this in many different situations. By not fuelling the thought behind the negative feeling, the thought fades away and is automatically replaced with fresh thinking.

The good news is that when you begin to feel negative about a situation, you can choose how to respond to your own thinking – you can add petrol, pour on water or do nothing. Don’t just take my word for it – try it out over the next few days. You may even like to share your experience with other readers with a comment below.

Enjoy the experiment!

Do You Live In Black And White?

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Imagine you’re watching old film, with people moving around in monotone. Do you, like me, get drawn into thinking that these people actually lived in a world that was black and white?

Of course, their reality was just as colourful as ours. The sky had a thousand hues of blue; the grass was as fresh a green; a lover’s eyes still sparkled like a kaleidoscope.

Our ancestors shared with us the same human perception of colour. It may surprise you but this can be a guide towards our most inspiring mental functioning.

You see, our ancestors shared with us an interesting trait: the perception of colour varies throughout the day. Check this for yourself – sometimes you are acutely aware of colour and other times you miss it completely. When did it last happen to you?

Perhaps you see your car catching the sunlight in the car park and notice that the shade is nearly the same as a car nearby, but somehow the colour has more warmth in it. In contrast, you stop to buy a coffee and do not register the colour of the vendor’s clothes. We all do things like this. We tune into and tune out of colour every day. I’d love to hear your examples (you can post a comment below).

So, what does this tell us about our general mental functioning? Well, obviously we detect colour through our sense of sight. We could describe this in terms of the physical structure of the eye and the optic nerve that connects with the brain. But this misses the key point: our sense of sight is turned on or off by whatever else we are thinking at the time.

This is how you can walk past a friend in the street and not notice them (perhaps you remember the toe-curling embarrassment?!!)  We apologise with something like ‘I’m so sorry – I didn’t see you there – my mind was somewhere completely different’. And this commonplace expression captures the truth beautifully.

It’s true with our other senses too – which feeds the old joke that when a man is reading the newspaper, he goes deaf!

The more serious point is that you’ll inevitably turn colour on and off. This is not a problem in itself but it is an indicator of your mental landscape. When you are in tune to colour, the indication is that your mental activity is relatively light and spacious, excellent for creativity and inspiration.

But when you are tuned out to colour, and living in black and white, the indication is that you are preoccupied mentally. This is a warning that you may be stuck in a mental rut.

Now here’s the key principle – awareness brings choice. Becoming more aware of when colour is on or off brings the opportunity for you to choose. You could think of it like traffic lights: colour ON signals a green light to continue; colour OFF is a yellow ‘mental rut’ warning – do you really want to follow your current line of thinking or drop it?

The good news is that you don’t need to make this another task on your list; simply notice what happens. With growing awareness you’ll find that you automatically tune into colour more often. You will literally be coming to your senses. And with this you’ll spend more time in your most creative and inspiring mental space.

Let me know how it works for you…

You Cannot Be Serious!

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If you are of a certain age, you may remember tennis champion John McEnroe and his famous protests against the umpire’s decisions – ‘You cannot be serious!’ Of course, McEnroe did not challenge every decision, only those he considered to be against his best interests.

Now, even if you have never played tennis, there is something important here. When it’s in your best interests, you can challenge your own umpire! This could be at work or at home. It works like this.

We know that many things we do are habitual. Habits can serve you well; they can streamline action and conserve effort. You also know that some habits work against your best interests (you can fill in the blanks here!).

The most insidious habits are habits of thought, well-rehearsed mental pathways that lead in a downwards spiral. You know the kind of thing – you clip the kerb on the drive to work so you criticise yourself for slipshod driving. Then you go on to recall other cases where your action has been less than excellent. As the list builds in your mind, you begin to see a clear pattern of careless and slapdash behaviour. The only conclusion is that there is something wrong with you. It’s obviously deep-rooted and you’re never going to be able to fix it. And that fills you with bad feelings.

This type of thinking is not rational; neither is it helpful. It may be a pile of nonsense but we take it seriously. Because we have rehearsed these mental habits over the years, the results can develop quickly. One minute we are driving along quite happily, next minute we are feeling terrible at the bottom of the spiral.

But what happens if we recognize it for what it is – simply a stream of thinking. Then we have a choice. We can either believe that what we are thinking is the undeniable truth or we can choose not to take the thinking so seriously. The thoughts may linger briefly but without the oxygen of attention they will fade, replaced by different thoughts.

In recent months, I’ve found that sometimes I can catch the very moment I’m about to step down into the spiral. Recognising I could choose to carry on investing in my train of thought or I could use McEnroe’s famous line has enabled me to avoid unnecessary suffering. Even when I miss the first opportunity, the growing bad feelings are a sure sign that it would be in my best interests to stop taking my thinking seriously. When I do this, the downward spiral becomes more of a quick dip than a deep plunge.

As human beings, we think all of the time. Perhaps the ultimate choice you have is how you relate to your thinking minute by minute – whether you buy into it or whether you challenge the umpire. Either way, the consequences are yours.

The Last Gasp of Winter

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Grape HyacinthsAs I write it’s snowing so hard I wonder if the universe has a sense of humour –  this time last year the UK was basking in unbroken sunshine with temperatures in the twenties!

The weather right now is so unseasonal that somehow I can’t take it seriously. If it were the depths of January it would be different because then the days are short, the nights long and dark and all nature appears to be dormant. Thoughts of spring would be far away.

But now, at the end of March, we know that this must be the last gasp of winter. Under the white blanket there are daffodils and primroses in flower; the buds on trees and hedges are ready to burst open; and the birds have already been practicing their courting songs.

If the seasons are a metaphor for our own lives, we all go through periods of winter. We experience these as cold and dark, with our life-energy close to zero. It can seem that winter has become permanent.

But if we take our winter thoughts less seriously, by giving them less attention, we’ll begin to see signs of life. We’ll rediscover that under the snow there are the shoots of new growth, buds swelling with fresh life and brave blooms already showing. Then we can feel confident of coming out the other side.

We can be sure that our personal winter is a passing phase, soon to be succeeded by the warmth and joy of spring.

It’s Never Too Late

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Sometimes it seems that it’s too late to change. Even when we long for something new, something refreshing, we can feel defeated before we begin.

Life can take us so far down a certain track that retracing our steps seems impossible. After all, we’ve invested much time and energy reaching where we are; we have relationships embedded into our way of life; we have financial commitments to meet. Life can become molded like a worn-out shoe; it may not be comfortable but it is familiar.

The good news is that there is hope! My favourite quote from George Eliot gets to the heart of it:

It’s never too late to be who you might have been

You see, what actually stops us making the changes we want is not the circumstances we are in but the thoughts we have about those circumstances. If we think it is impossible to change path, then impossible is exactly how we experience it. If we think that a relationship stops us making changes, then that is what we experience. If we think it is too late to change – it is!!

Liberation comes from realising that at any time you can have a new thought. In the blink of an eye, you can have a new thought and there is a never-ending supply of them. And for each of us, all that keeps new thoughts away is the attention we give to old thoughts.

How can you know if you are giving lots of attention to old, stale thoughts? Because if you are, you will feel stale. Your feelings are a great indicator of what you are thinking.

So whenever you feel dull, listless, drained or defeated, you are re-thinking old thoughts. They may seem so ‘important’ that you ‘have to’ keep thinking them. But when you withdraw your attention from them, you immediately open up space for new thought. And with new thought comes new possibilities.

This is what inspiration really is: fresh thinking that awakens, energises and motivates us. We all have the built-in ability to be inspired because we can all receive fresh thoughts. It’s only our obsession with worn-out thoughts that keeps us stuck. It’s never too late…!