Grace Under Fire
There is no shortage of circumstances that influence your stress level on any given day – from an overflowing inbox to abrupt changes in your schedule, or coming home to chaos. Facing pressure, how is it that some people stay calm, graceful and productive while others are easily rattled, lash out or fall apart?
We all want the ability to remain poised under pressure. It’s never attractive when we lose our s%*t in a public forum. Yet, most of us can recall many instances of doing just that while enduring some amount of stress or pressure. Then we love to replay the event over and over in our minds wishing we had acted differently. It is like trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube – what’s done cannot be undone.
That moment of turmoil leads to consequences.
The most damage generally occurs in two areas of our life.
- Our relationships
- Our reputation or personal brand
We work so hard to build rapport in every partnership. It’s an essential element of effective relationships. We come to each relationship from a place of partnering or protection. When we live in default mode, our primal brain calls the shots. It’s the part of your brain focused on protection, and therefore, always on the lookout for danger.
When we come from a place of protection (versus partnering), we behave in ways that drive space between us and the important people in our life. We do this by engaging in behaviors such as needing to be right, arguing, being sarcastic, assigning blame, avoidance, and withdrawing. Last I checked, none of these things endear us to those we love. These behaviors erode trust and put us at a deficit when it comes to rapport.
What we do and don’t do in response to stressful situations impacts the way people see us. Said differently, it impacts our “personal brand.” A colleague of mine was notorious for being mentally and emotionally unavailable after about 2 pm each day. If you wanted to have a crucial conversation or discuss challenges, it was best to do it early in the day. Repeated episodes of caustic behavior were baked into his “brand.” Often, these behaviors become what we are known for and speak louder than any other part of how we show up, resulting in our brand taking a hit.Are you ready to start bringing the “best of you” to stressful situations?
Here are my top 3 strategies for maintaining grace under fire:
Dismantle Your Stories
This is the hardest part. I watch my clients regularly struggle to separate the facts from their stories. Or, as I like to say, know the difference between true and Truth. When we strip away the judgment, assumptions and interpretations of our experience, we can generally uncover the Truth, or the objective facts. From that place, we can examine the story we created and seek to understand the meaning we assigned to the situation. This provides us a wealth of information about how we see the world. Which, of course, is a choice. Once we see which thoughts and beliefs are influencing the way we experience our reality, we have a choice to make: keep the thoughts because they serve us, or replace the thoughts with ones that serve us better. Every thought is a choice. Learning to choose better is the goal.
Know and Label Your Triggers
As we work to dismantle our stories, we uncover the natural biases and judgments that are a product of our values, experiences, and belief system. A trigger is a stimulus that shapes our thoughts, emotions and behavior. They appear suddenly and unexpectedly, and our environment is filled with them. Positive and negative varieties. They show up in the form of people, events, circumstances, sounds, smells, and memories. They come at us continuously in varying degrees of intensity. Let me be clear in saying triggers do NOT causeour thoughts, emotions and behaviors, they only influence them. This is a very important distinction. Humans are pattern-making machines and, like most people, you have a pattern of being triggered by certain stimuli. You need to find your pattern so you can intentionally interrupt it, insert a pause point, and replace it with something more productive and becoming of your “best self.”
Plan in Advance
We need to anticipate that life is full of “stressful” situations. We cannot act like a goldfish and be surprised by the negative aspects of the full human experience if we ever expect to maintain poise. Once we’ve identified our “triggers,” we can plan for how we want to respond to them in the future. If the new thought doesn’t produce the intended emotion or behavior, it is likely because the thought is not aligned with the intended emotion or we are reciting something we don’t believe fully. Our new thoughts don’t have to be true, but they should be believable. If at first you don’t succeed, try a few different thoughts to see which will get the job done.
For the better part of my corporate career, I was not known for exhibiting grace under fire. More times than I care to admit, I found myself unfiltered and uninhibited in expressing my disagreement or disappointment. Part of me felt “justified” if my behavior had righteous intent. It was almost as if standing up for something or someone I believed in gave me the right to show up in this unbecoming way. Being well intended is never a reason to unleash a “less than” version of yourself in an undesirable situation. While I would agree that sometimes it felt “worth it,” a more conscious version of me would now argue that a better result is realized with a higher energy response to the situation.
If you do these things consistently, you will master managing your mind. Life is guaranteed to be full of ups and downs. When we embrace the three strategies, we can minimize the time between the triggering event and our ability to respond thoughtfully and productively. Doing so will help keep our reputations and relationships sound.
If you want help with these strategies, and others, come check out my INNER CIRCLE. This is my online community where we leverage coaching, tools and community to up-level lives, relationships and our career.
