Do You 'Stress Fight'?

High-Performance Executive Newsletter: You're here because you have already achieved some outer success and reached your current executive leadership position. But growth doesn't have to stop here. There is a thrill and satisfaction in challenging yourself, stretching and seeing how much you can achieve. Have an impact and make a contribution.

The talents, skills and tools that have got you to this point will not necessarily take you further. Or the approaches you've used to achieve this success may have been expensive in terms of time, energy, stress and effect on your relationships. You need new or upgraded power tools to make sure you can sustain or advance your position more easily.

The High-Performance Executive Newsletter introduces these tools, so that you can level up. It draws on many areas of solid research into high-performance in business, including neuroscience, psychology, physiology, trauma therapy and flow-state study.

The three essential areas for high performance are neuro-regulation (to get and stay calm), clear the negative self-talk and the beliefs that create them (including imposter syndrome), and create new success habits.

This week we're looking at the fight nervous system state.

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Do You 'Stress Fight'?

Kim, CEO of a Fintech company, knew that her go-to nervous system state was fight. It was no mystery.

When challenged, she would become defensive, and then try to intimidate people and be aggressive towards them. She was unyielding when she thought people had done her wrong. Kim even had a list of ‘enemies’, those she’d had a conflict with and would never forgive. She would escalate, argue, burn bridges and torch relationships.

This behaviour was costing her dearly, both personally and professionally. It made her tough to work with, and she knew that she had lost friends, support and opportunities in the past because of it.

Kim recognised how much this pattern was hurting her, not only her career, but also her industry influence, which in turn directly affected the company. It stopped her from being as effective, and therefore as successful, as she could have been.

Assessing Fight

Was this Kim’s personality? Was it deliberate or simply reactivity?

How we answer these questions influences how we would view Kim and her behaviour.

Confrontational behaviour like this is never pleasant, and you’d think that everyone involved would want to avoid it as much as possible.

This is true, except for people who use aggression deliberately. Those who see it as a tool to get what they want, to gain power and control. But such people are the subject of a future newsletter.

Here, we’ll focus on people like Kim who don’t do it deliberately.

Those people who think that their personality is prickly, defensive and easily irritated. Who find themselves automatically launching into conflict, and later regret it, feel guilty and judge themselves to be a horrible person as a result.

Kim’s biggest frustration was feeling out of control. Despite her best intentions, she always seemed to find herself being defensive again.

This is not far from reality, because it is out of control.

Psychologists call this an ‘amygdala hijack.’ Where the threat-detection system in your brain (the amygdala) is set off even before your logical, analytic mind has had a chance to think consciously about the situation.

Literally.

The amygdala receives sensory information from the brain stem several milliseconds before the rest of your brain. When the amygdala determines there is a threat, it automatically triggers your nervous system into the fight, flight or freeze state. And in this case, fight.

This is essential if a tiger were in the room.

Not so much if someone has just criticised the quarterly sales figures in your meeting. But the amygdala responds to both as if it is a deadly situation.

Managing the Fight Response

This freight train of a reaction is difficult to hold back because it’s automatic and unconscious. And once your nervous system has been triggered, it’s extremely difficult to just talk yourself out of it.

So how can you regain control?

1.?????? Focus on changing your physiological response first. That is, calm the nervous system. This can be shaking out your muscles, slow deep breathing and becoming hyper-aware of your physical sensations. All of these de-escalate the nervous system activation.

2.?????? Now you can remind yourself that this is a natural, automatic response to a perceived threat. It’s not even your personality. When you stop blaming yourself, you put yourself back in control. If it were your personality, you would be stuck forever getting into frustrating arguments. When you know it’s not your personality, you are now empowered to change the pattern.

Taking Back Control

You have two options to change this reactive pattern.

Firstly, know that this reaction is exacerbated by stress.

Therefore, managing it means doing everything you can to strip out unnecessary stresses in all areas of your life. Getting more help and support with even inconsequential stressors lowers your overall stress levels.

This calmer state means your system is less frequently triggered, putting you more in your conscious control.

The second option is to change what the amygdala perceives to be a threat.

In the 1950s, it was thought that this kind of ‘braingineering’ was impossible. However, modern neuroscience has since proved that it is not only possible but the neurochemical basis for it is clear too. This means we now have a reliably repeatable process that works for all brains.

Further reinforcing that this is not your personality!

Kim’s experience of changing her amygdala perception seemed like a miracle to her. (Of course, it’s science, not magic).

Without the inappropriate drive to fight, she became fully present and calm even in the toughest negotiations. She lost her impatience and irritation with others, and her mental clarity soared.

Her exec team was surprised, delighted and relieved, as meetings became highly productive, energising and exciting.

Here was all the high-performance everyone craved without any of the drama.

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What I've loved this week:

Last year I played with ChatGPT, free artificial intelligence software. I used it to create haikus about imposter syndrome. Cute.

I also asked it for ideas to visually represent ‘outsmart’ for my new book cover. It came up with the idea of playing chess, but it took a real person to capture the moment of checkmate, and create an elegant image (see below).

However, it’s not useful for writing posts, articles and newsletters; it generates bland advice you’ve read 100 times before, and it gets facts wrong. So I’ve only touched the programme twice in the last year.

But this week, I used it to generate boilerplate terms and conditions for affiliates selling my online course. It’s saved me a few hours of tedium, so I couldn’t be happier!

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An action step you can do this week…

Shaking it out

A great way to calm your nervous system from the fight state is to first find a little privacy (even a bathroom stall will do).

Shakes your hands as if you’re flicking off thick mud. Include your whole arms in the vigorous movement. Make it a whole-body movement by bouncing your knees. Shake out each of your legs in turn, in the same way. Then shake your back like a wet dog getting dry.

Do this all for a minute or so until you feel a little breathless. Then stop and do some slow deep breathing.

Try this out, and see how it works for you. You can do it after your nervous system has been triggered, or preventatively, for example before you go into a challenging environment.

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We'll cover more on neuroregulation in future issues.

Do subscribe and share!

I'm Dr Tara Halliday, specialist Imposter Syndrome Coach.

I've been a holistic therapist and high-performance coach for over 22 years.

I'm the creator of the premium Inner Success for Execs programme - the fastest and best solution to imposter syndrome.

My new book, Outsmart Imposter Syndrome is now an Amazon #1 bestseller! Available everywhere books are sold.

> Check out the Inner Success for Execs programme for fast 'up levelling' of your internal leadership tools.

https://www.completesuccess.co.uk

> Think you may have imposter syndrome? Take this free quiz to find out:

https://www.completesuccess.co.uk/quiz

> Here’s the online course to manage the symptoms of imposter syndrome:

https://bit.ly/OutsmartIS

> Want to fast-track and have a chat about your inner success, book a quick 15-minute call here:

https://completesuccess.kartra.com/calendar/sUz3jn51MxZa

Have an excellent, refreshing and recharging weekend!

Tara

P.S. Thank you for reading to the end of the newsletter, I appreciate your interest and attention!

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