In my work life, it was deadlines. Ah, deadlines. The sound of them whizzing by in the morning. Stress inducing. And faced with stress, which of your multiple personalities comes to the fore: your parasympathetic self or your evil amygdala? I suspect, more often than you wish, it's an "amygdala hijack" and the result is not pretty.
Tony Schwartz, in the Harvard Business Review, warns that you need to be aware when your amygdala is at work versus your prefrontal cortex. Your parasympathetic system presents as logical, reasoned, and objective, calmly discerning fact from fiction, considering evidence, and making a cool judgment. Your evil twin the amygdala thrusts you into hurried thinking, hasty decisions, and fight or flight responses. Your perceptions become myopic and emotional. It's called the Survival Zone and your prefrontal cortex shuts down. Never been there? You might have a career in motivational speaking - or sainthood.
The amygdala is of course a necessary part of your emotional makeup. It is there to detect and react to threats. Like the sabre-tooth tiger bearing down on you. But these kind of threats are now quite rare and unfortunately the amygdala cannot distinguish between life threatening situations and an insult - or an unrealistic deadline.
The Energy Project studies how you can move from the Survival Zone to the Performance Zone, where you are capable of being your best. And their bottom line is - "Whatever you feel compelled to do, don't. Compulsions are not choices, and they rarely lead to positive outcomes."
Although it can feel cathartic to let my amygdala rule, I almost always regret it. When your time comes, count slowly to ten and consider Mark Twain's words: "Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured."
Would that our public figures could discover their parasympathetic side.
Copyright © 2019 Dave Hoplin
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