Taking Control in Crisis and Change
The reason that I wanted to talk about taking control of your life, in these times of crisis and change is that as I look around, I'm seeing politicians everywhere. So Trump, Boris Johnson in the UK, but all around in many parts of the world, I'm seeing politicians talk about the need to take control of the virus.
Now, if you know anything about the way that viruses behave and replicate, the idea of taking control with them is a little bit Well, let's just say it's a little bit of political language.
However, there are things that we can do to control in this current current situation of COVID. They are around our reaction to the situation, our reaction to the environment, and things that are happening around us and to us. That's what I wanted to focus on today because as human beings, we need an element of control at a at a neuro psychological level.
Taking control is really important.
How can we get that control that is so important for us? Now, we can't control everything. It's not like that. We need scope for creativity. We need scope for for some uncertainty, but we need as human beings to feel that we have some level of control.
When we feel out of control, it can feel it can be extremely stressful, it can create anxiety. That then generates a whole pattern of behavior, which isn't necessarily useful. So, having some sense of control is really important.
Now, what do I mean about taking control. Basically, there are cycles that we can intervene in, in the way that we're acting things. Something will happen. It could be that somebody in your family gets Corona. It could be that something happens to your business. For example, the numbers go up or the numbers go down. It could be that you're put into for furlough, whatever the event is, all the time, we have and it depends who you talk to.
We have something like 11 million bits per second of information coming in at us all the time on an ongoing basis. This is brought into us by our by our five senses, fundamentally, by our sense of sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, and then it's then processed in the brain. It processes a lot of data. The brain does this in a nanosecond. The way it does it, the way it chooses what to pay attention to, is really based on on a whole load of different factors, your values, your beliefs, your spiritual beliefs, the things that you say to yourself, your past experiences, there's a long long list.
It's a bit like a filing cabinet, either. If you're like me, and you still have an old fashioned filing cabinet with little tabs with names on them, or folders that you have on your computer with even subfolders in them and files inside there. We all have different ways of arranging the filing cabinet of the brain. As the data comes in, we place it in different filing sections if you like, and that tells us what we want to pay attention to.
Pay attention to the good things.
Now, you can either pay attention to the good things. You can pay attention to the bad things. You can then start to put you can evaluate the event and as we evaluate them the event we start to make it mean something so for example, with Coronavirus. You could make Coronavirus mean that something that the person who's got Coronavirus is going to be extremely ill.
Trump right now has gone into hospital with Coronavirus. Now, we can make that mean a number of things. Some people in the states and making that mean that he's an absolute hero. Some people in the states are making that mean he's an absolute fool. Some because he doesn't he hasn't worn masks historically and hasn't protected himself. Some people have made it mean that he's gonna die some people are made in In that he's going to live and be stronger. We put meaning onto all the events and the way we make this meaning depends on our filing systems in our brain and our past experience.
As we make the meaning, this means that our reaction to it our our emotion is going to change. So if you make somebody having Coronavirus, somebody yourself having Coronavirus mean that it's going to you're going to be sick or you're going to die or whatever, this is going to create certain emotions in your body and in your mind.
These emotions, whether they're positive or whether they're negative, again, will have an effect on your overall experience. How you behave, and how that feeds into the next round of the cycle, the next event, the next experience. So we're doing this all the time.
Something happens, we make meaning of it and then depending on the meaning that we make, we experience socially certain emotions. That influences how we behave next time round.
How do you get control out of that, then?
Well, what you can impact is the way you make meaning? I do a lot of work with clients where I'll ask them, what is it that they want out of the coaching session? Or what are they particularly dealing with as a challenge. Suddenly, I get an entire story. Now, this is not just my clients, I do it myself to myself. So I'm not I'm not putting blame on anyone.
But so the client will tell me a story. Sometimes, it's really hard to help the client or myself disentangle the story, the meaning from the actual event. So recently, I've had clients talk about how I had a client talk about how she didn't get an interview. There was a whole story about this. So, I said to her, "What are the facts?" She said, "Oh, well, I didn't get the interview." Then, I said to her, "No, no, what are the facts?"
The facts was she applied for a job. She submitted the application on time. She believed the application was a good application and she got rejected. She didn't get any feedback as a result. She has no way of knowing why she was rejected for this job.
She makes all sorts of meanings out of it and because it's a rejection. The meaning that she makes is triggered by past experiences of being rejected her own beliefs around not being good enough, or not being good and a number of other similar things.
Those old experiences, those old and existing beliefs about herself color the interpretation that she puts on the fact that she's been turned down for a job. The facts are, she's been turned down. Who knows why? Maybe there was somebody with better qualifications. Maybe there was somebody that the company already had in mind and they decided to go with them. An internal candidate, for example, maybe they decided not to hire after all.
There's a whole load of possible different outcomes that she cannot see. Because she's locked in the story and she's locked in the meaning.
The key thing when we find ourselves in these spirals of, "Oh, my God, it's too awful. It's all in me", "I'm a bad person", "Oh, I've been rejected", Oh, I'm going to die" or whatever this, whatever those things that we tell ourselves, what we need to do is to stand back and look at the facts.
So for example, I've been really lucky in Corona, my business is doing extremely well. But there have been previous previous years when my business hasn't gone so well. In previous years, I've chosen to make it mean a number of things. I've chosen in the past I've made it mean about me. I've Oh, I'm no good at my job. "Oh, I can't connect connect with clients." "Oh, I'm, I don't have a high enough profile", all sorts of meanings. That's all they are.
The facts were business took a downturn. The facts were, I wasn't spending a lot of time promoting my business. The facts were, I wasn't spending a lot of time connecting with different sorts of people who might be interested in what I offer. Those were the facts. But the story, the meaning became something else.
So if you're finding yourself in those situations, really get forensic. Boil it down. What are the facts in this situation? What then is the story? Which is all the rest of it? What's the story that you're telling yourself? If you take the facts, what other meaning what other interpretation? Could you put upon the facts?
You might find that you come up with a very different story, and a very different set of emotions. Because so much of this is actually in here. So much of this is in our head, it's in our mind, it's in our thoughts, the more control we take over our thoughts, the more control we have over the language we use with ourselves, then the more control we have over our experience.
Now, it's easy to say I can sit here and say this, I've been studying it a long time. Certainly, I still tell myself stories. So it's easy to say. But the reality is, listen to yourself. Listen to the language you use for yourself.
What are you saying to yourself?
What do you say to yourself on a frequent everyday basis? When you look out at the weather? Do you go another gray day? That means the rest of the day is going to be gray, everything else is going to be gray? Or do you go? Oh, gray day, a jolly good, good chance to make some nice warming soup for example.
Back when I was doing the whole depression thing, I was told by the psychiatrist that because I'd had depression once, then it kind of predicted that I'd get it again, it was likely that I get it again. For a couple of years, I lived with that fear. I live with that fear of depression coming back, every time I felt slightly miserable, for whatever reason.
I'm going back into depression, when I let go of the fear, when I let go of the belief that because I've had depression once met, that I might get that I would get it again, when I let go of those things, then I could start to experience both the ups and the downs of life without panicking.
If on a day, my mood was down I go moods down today. Just notice, because that's the other part of the technique. Noticing, just notice, stand back be the fly on the wall. I used to teach a technique to kids, which is about being the observer of your own experience, and to be the fly on the wall. When you have experiences be the fly on the wall, what would the fly on the wall, say? Because nine times out of 10 what the fly on the wall would say about the experience you're having is very different than the story that you're telling yourself.
If you need help with any of this, if you're finding it difficult to break out of your own story, if you're finding that you're not really feeling in control of what's going on in your head, or if you find that things just aren't going the way that you'd like them to go, do get in touch at https://secretartofhuna.com/diary, and you can book a call. Hopefully, I've got some tools, techniques and different ways of thinking about these things. That will really help you.
