Are you Setting Yourself up for Success – or a Fall?

The only real power you have is your power over yourself.

Of course, you have power that comes from your position in various institutional hierarchies, your expertise and our influence.

Ultimately, isn’t what matters most how you exercise the power you have over yourself.

You have the power to set yourself up for constructive, positive impact on yourself and others – or to engender a more destructive, negative impact on yourself or others.

You have the power to choose.

But sometimes we aren’t aware of the cumulative effect of small annoyances.

If you’re unaware of the unconscious irritations that have built up over time, it’s much harder to choose the constructive path if you’ve chosen to disenfranchise your power over time.

If you unconsciously ignore the minor annoyances that occur – and which surreptitiously steer you from your state of balance and stability – you’re setting yourself up for a fall.

The Set Up

We know we’re wired to react to our emotions. It’s an ingrained multi-millennia mechanism for self-protection. But we’re setting ourselves up for – if not disaster – then sub-optimal performance, if we disengage our power in the face of those manifold micro-aggressions.

If we recognize the build-up of those annoyances - the cab not arriving on time, the preferred choice of dish in business class no longer being available, the CEO not commending you on your superb handling of the merger negotiations, or your teen child leaving the freezer door open all night – then we are in a better position to exercise our power of choice. The choice to handle the mini-aggression effectively – and reset our equilibrium. ?

Of course, we have to be aware that these annoyances are building up – and often the signs occur unconsciously, on a physical or emotional level, but we don’t process those signals cognitively. And when we don’t do that, we are primed to be set up to ‘explode’ in the face of one trigger too many.

There is a great video below from Six Seconds on the reaction cycle – and the set-up stage.

The Power to Re-Set

Only you are in control of your re-set button.

You probably don’t need to reset it frequently – but at times when there is an accumulation of triggering factors at play and stress is building, it’s essential to exercise your power to re-set.

Those times might be when working with a micro-managing boss, frequently sitting in endless meetings where the chair pontificates or the air-time hoggers run rampant, or worrying about the major deals that should have closed last quarter and are running into next quarter.

Those are times when – if you don’t reset your equilibrium - you may be setting yourself up for a fall. When an otherwise manageable occurrence – a team member’s missed deadline, or a last-minute flight cancellation, tips you over the edge and you explode, have an outburst, or suffer a meltdown.

When you’re in a steady stable state – your equilibrium – you are able to recognize and deal with micro-aggressions, whether consciously or not, and you’re exercising your power to re-set yourself. You return to ‘stable state’ and you continue to lead yourself effectively.

When events – triggers – stimuli – the unexpected accumulation of annoyances and disappointments go unnoticed and ignored, and you don’t engage your power to reset – that’s when you are setting yourself up for a fall.

You don’t see the fall coming – but you certainly recognize it after the event: your embarrassment at shouting at a colleague, your regret at having overlooked critical data in a decision, your disappointment in yourself for not having been a good role model for others and your highly critical self-talk.

How to Set Yourself Up for Success

By success I mean successful, constructive interactions and meaningful achievements – arrived at with a sense of wellbeing and satisfaction.

Tune In

What’s going on at a physical, emotional and mental level? What are the signals that you might be moving out of equilibrium and missing the opportunity to reset your state? If the cab is late, do you tense up, curse, or berate yourself for ‘always leaving things too late’?

Can you recognize what is happening to you? If you can, you’re tuning into the data.

Play Detective

Once you’ve noticed the signals, can you dig a bit deeper. Can you work out when they occur – the situations you experience – the people who trigger them?

Sachin Tendulkar never went into bat without thinking through what might be thrown his way – and planning how to handle the knowns and unknowns.

You might know that in a particular weekly review meeting the chairperson is too detail-oriented for your liking and labours over the minutia of every spreadsheet, instead of balancing detail with the big picture perspective.

Know the triggers – then you can exercise your power to choose.

Turn Right

Our brains can broadly be categorized as left and right. The left, the logical, rational, analytical language and meaning maker. The right, the intuiting, non-judging, curious, at-one-with -the-world-and-all-its-glory-and-possibility presence.

In those triggered moments, can you turn right and seek your at-one-with-yourself capacity? Can you by-pass the left-brain construct of ego and all the thoughts that you are flashing at you - and focus on joyful presence?

Turn Left

Once you’ve connected with your present, enthusiastic and empathic-with-the world self, can you turn left and formulate the language – the verbal and non-verbal communication – that is going to best serve you in this situation?

Enjoy the Synaptic Sparks

We tend to spend a lot of time in our left brains. The analysis, the judgment, the language – often very critical of ourselves and others. I wonder how well this is serving us – the frequent judgments and self-criticisms.

As Jill Bolte Taylor explains in her brilliant book, My Stroke of Insight, the two hemispheres of the brain have different personalities. Fortunately for us, they don’t exist in isolation – they connect with each other.

Perhaps the challenge for all of us is to fire those neurons and enjoy synaptic sparks across the hemispheres. And to recognize when we are setting ourselves up and use our power to reset ourselves in a way that better suits us and how we want to lead ourselves.

You have the power to set yourself up - and re-set yourself up for success or failure.

How are You Going to Use Your Power?

What is the commitment you make to yourself to link your right and left hemispheres? Can you practice blending the feeling and the thinking skills you possess and fire those synapses for a greater possibility of long-term success?

Can you start to recognize when you are allowing yourself to set yourself up for a fall?

Can you practice preventing identified triggers to trigger you?

And if they do trigger you on a physical and emotional level, can you consciously accept those signals – tune in, play detective and exercise your power – to re-set yourself?

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Andrea Stone is an Executive Coach working with global technology leaders to support their blending of cognitive and emotional skills to lead more effectively – for themselves, their teams and their organizations.

She is the Preferred Partner of Six Seconds in India, global leaders in research and assessments on emotional intelligence, with over 500,000 assessments taken across over 140 countries.

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?Andrea Stone, Stone Leadership

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