First Rate Plus

Let's up the ante: try this with the emotions attendant to the opposing ideas, in a stressful situation that wants action almost immediately. That expands the "first rate intelligence" by far!

The foundation of a first rate cognitive ability, one that can function in high stress environments, rather than just the over stuffed chair in the library, is having a somatic and emotional mix of resilience concrete on which that first rate intelligence can rest. This is something one can build in their lives, as this is precisely what I teach people how to do.

Traumatizing stress demands blood flow to those parts of the organism that need it most: the fighting part, and the fleeing parts. Neither of which include the prefrontal cortex of the brain. This lack of blood flow is referred to as hypofrontality. One can find articles on this hypofrontality in regard to the "flow" state of athletes, where the explicit decision pathway is inhibited by a change of blood flow. How much more then would this make sense in a situation where one's life depended on fighting or fleeing? I have read this is a few of the volumes on my website page titled, "The Information and Practices that In-formed Us."

Think brain fog. Or f;lat out freeze. Have you ever had that? Caffeine to the rescue! Imagine this then: you wake up, and are pouring that cup of coffee when the phone rings. A work colleague. WTH? you think. You answer, and they are in a babbling stream of world ending emergency emotion and verbage.

What do you do?

If you've learned to regulate your nervous system, you get them to take some deep breathes, and then explain clearly what happened. They tell you how four production lines went down, why those four lines went down, and the two employees who were not "working" when they created the issue in the first place. Indeed, screwing around.

Okay, first, is anyone harmed, and what's been done about it? No, good. Send the two employees home, they'll be dealt with later. Assign the rest of the line crews to clean up and restoration of function as much as possible. Can that be done by shift end? Good. Get on it, and make record of losses of equipment and or products. I'll be there later.

Imagine someone having been hurt. Ups the anty, yes? SAME question to be asked. Was anything remedial done? YES. Do you need to be there to "rescue the situation? Not necessarily, although you know you'll get brownie points if you do.

Or you show up at the fire call and as you're unloading hose, a bullet suddenly blows the windshield out of the truck. Suddenly this isn't about a debate of opposing ideas in the cozy confines of a library, sipping whisky in hand. It's life or death. What do you do first? Then you hear more shooting. Now what?

If you don't have a regulated nervous system, your odds of making the wrong decision go way up. The kind of decisions that 1) get others hurt, possibly yourself; and 2) get you fired, demoted, or worse.

The advantage of having a nervous system, and attendant emotional resilience, and cognitive flexibility is that in these situations, you get to be the one that makes the right ones. The one that can resolve the action most appropriately for everyone concerned. And that decision might be to just sit tight. Because as it turned out, that bullet that blew out the windshield was just one of the many you heard that was ammo laying around and cooked off. Fortunately, neighbors already had a sense of this and fled, so no one got hurt.

The production lines? Stuff like this happens every day in the world. Do the best you can to return to work, and deal with the causes. Most of the time that will be a machine issue, in my experience.

Can you handle high stress decision making in the face of intense emotion? Have you ever had to make decisions while "under fire," literally of figuratively? Do you have the requisite capacity and resilience to shine in harsh conditions?

Leave your thoughts and experiences, and if you want that sort of resilience, consider a discussion.