03rd June 2020
Good leadership: How to avoid reactive behavior when under stress
Most people believe that we have only one self. But the reality is we are all battling with our first self run by our prefrontal cortex and our second self run by our amygdala. The first self is often the side that we wish to present to the world: calm, rational and deliberate. The second self on the other hand, is designed to take over in danger and is reactive, impulsive and mostly outside of our conscious control.
So as you are placed under increasing stress, how do you stop your reactive and impulsive self from taking over?
Tony Schwartz and Emily Pines explain self-observation can allow us to be aware of our conflicting selves and avoid reactive behavior.
From the Article:
This second self serves us well if a lion is coming at us, but the threats we experience today are mostly to our sense of worth and value. They can feel nearly as terrifying as those to our survival, but the danger we experience isn’t truly life-threatening. Responding to them as if they are only make things worse.
It’s in these moments that we often use our highest cognitive capacities to justify our worst behaviors. When we feel we’ve fallen short, we instinctively summon up our “inner lawyer” — a term coined by author Jonathan Haidt — to defend us.
Our inner lawyer is expert at rationalizing, avoiding, deflecting, dissembling, denying, disparaging, attacking, and blaming others for our missteps and shortcomings. The inner lawyer works overtime to silence our own inner critic, and to counter criticism from others. All this inner turmoil narrows and consumes our attention and drains our energy.
The problem is that most organizations spend far more time focused on generating external value than they do attending to people’s internal sense of value. Doing so requires navigational skills that most leaders have never been taught, much less mastered. The irony is that ignoring people’s internal experience leads them to spend more energy defending their value, leaving them less energy to create value.
In our work with leaders, we’ve discovered that the antidote to reacting from the second self is to develop the capacity to observe our two selves in real time. You can’t change what you don’t notice, but noticing can be a powerful tool for shifting from defending our value to creating value.
Read more tips and get the full article online: Great Leaders Are Thoughtful and Deliberate, Not Impulsive and Reactive.
Make sure to explore Inspiring Workplace’s other content and insights about leadership.