Coaching: Understanding my emotional response

At a time in our history when we need to be open to new ways to move forward and to thrive, we are frequently stressed by our emotional reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic and its spread. Mary Britton, Coach and Co-Director at Coaching Pacific, explores how our emotional response can help us to thrive.

Every interaction we experience has a response or reaction inside your brain or mine. It’s either a stress reaction, pushing us into automatic fight or flight (the famous amygdala hijack) or a resourced response, which allows us to learn new things, think new thoughts and innovate. The stress response, left to run uninterrupted, will have detrimental mental and physical effects. Repeated often enough, these responses can build to high stress, anxiety and even clinical depression. So how can we move to more often choosing the resourced response?

Let’s consider resilience

Resilience is our ability to bounce back, to make use of the data we get from every event in life, and to build this data into a worldview that allows us to learn and innovate. Let’s consider the following seven learnable competencies that will support us in consistently choosing the resourced response, instead of the stress reaction.

A real-life example

HIJACKED! Carl is due on an important Zoom call for work but gets delayed when his eight-yearold, Amelia, takes time to settle to her virtual school day at home. After sorting things out, he is 15 minutes late joining the meeting.

1. Emotion regulation: identify and manage feelings.

2. Impulse control: tolerate ambiguity. Sit and think.

3. Causal analysis: look from many angles and reframe.

4. Self-efficacy: I can solve problems.

5. Realistic optimism.

6. Empathy: building relationships and social support.

7. Reaching out: willing to try and to understanding failure is part of life.

Hijacked to the fear reaction, Carl experiences nausea and stomach cramps from the stress; triggering some thoughts. "I am always late. If I keep messing up, I will lose my job.” Without pausing to consider whether his thoughts are true, Carl takes unhelpful actions. Feeling he needs to impress the team leader, he interrupts several of his colleagues and claims sole-credit for a jointly created project.

RESOURCED! Leveraging his resilience competencies, Carl could have thought, “I am a little worried, but my colleagues will manage well until I arrive. Amelia and I can learn to create a better start to our day for next time. I am grateful my team leader is understanding about family.” Carl joins the meeting and plays his part in supporting the co-created project and appreciates his teammates and his team leader for their patience with his lateness.

Top five actions to thrive

1. Complete a self-assessment and action plan for those learnable resilience competencies.

2. Create a list of positive truths about yourself and your life.

3. Notice when your thoughts are taking you in a fearful, stressed direction and reframe them to support your learning and build new ideas.

4. Take five minutes every night before you sleep to note three things you feel gratitude for.

5. Choose a news diet that serves you well. Choose your sources for accuracy, and ration your access in support of a good habit.

Understanding your self As humans, we are wired to react and pay more attention to fear-inducing, ‘dangerous’ stuff. Developing new habits that take us more often into a resourced state and allow us to innovate and learn will move us more rapidly to a thriving future. I am always happy to hear how you are doing with these ideas.

Mary Britton is an International Coach Federation (ICF) Professional Certified Coach and member of EMCC and HRNZ. Co-founder and Co-Director of Coaching Pacific, Mary trained for RCS (now NLG) before working with Linley Rose, Master Certified Coach, to develop the Executive and Organisational Coaching Certificate, which takes coach training to a new level. Mary speaks at global coaching and leadership conferences. Mary is a qualified coaching supervisor, member of the Association of Coaching Supervisors, has a BA (Massey), and a Diploma in Te Reo Māori. Mary is currently co-creating 2020TRANSFORM, a virtual summit for ICF Australasia and is Immediate past Head of Coaching Excellence.