Comfort zone Challenge summary, Eric's personal experiences from the challenge

Comfort zone Challenge summary, Eric's personal experiences from the challenge

15:05:00 - By Vincent 0

How to Express Anger in a Healthy Way

By Lisa B. Marshall

Do you struggle with understanding or managing anger? Do you wonder how to communicate when you’re feeling angry?

A listener recently asked me to address implosive anger, also called repressed anger. There’s a funny movie that addresses this subject. It’s called Anger Management, with Jack Nicholson as a psychiatrist trying to help Adam Sandler's character realize he has a problem. He says to Adam,

“There are two kinds of angry people: explosive and implosive. Explosive is the kind of individual that you see screaming at the cashier for not taking their coupons. Implosive is the cashier, who remains quiet day after day, and finally shoots everyone in the store. You’re the cashier.”  (Hearing Jack Nicholson say those words is both funny and scary at the same time!)

Signs of Implosive Anger

Sometimes people who appear mild-mannered really are as calm as they seem and don’t get upset easily. But some people are actually getting upset, they just aren’t letting it show. The first sign of implosive anger is denial. 

Going back to the movie, after the doctor tells Adam he’s the cashier, Adam replies, “No, no, no. I’m the guy hiding in the frozen food section dialing 911. I swear.” Denial. These are the people who say, “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.” Or “I’m not angry, I’m just upset.” They can’t admit to themselves they’re feeling anger.

However, though they won’t admit something made them angry, they will withdraw from the person or situation, and then brood about the incident. “How rude he was! I can’t believe he said that to me. And in front of everyone! He humiliated me.” The angry person replays the event over and over. Maybe you’ve felt that way from time to time—I know I have. But when people have an anger problem, withdrawing and brooding go to an extreme.

Effects of Anger

According to an article in Psychology Today, anger is triggered by some sense of having been disempowered. Thus the purpose of anger is to eliminate a feeling of powerlessness. So anger wants to attack. Expressed anger attacks the other person in some way. But who does suppressed anger attack? It attacks you.

It’s well-known that negative stress causes a variety of illnesses. In fact, a study by UC Berkeley recently found that repressing anger leads to back pain and stiff muscles.

So, let it out, right? Well, maybe not. According to the same study, venting causes heart disease. What about a physical vent? Maybe punch something to get it out, or take a jog? Apparently, that doesn’t help, either. A study entitled Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? indicated that because exercise keeps the heart rate and blood pressure elevated and doesn’t distract the angry person from thinking about it, the person’s anger remains high, and perhaps even higher.

So, what’s an angry person to do, then?

Managing Your Anger in a Healthy Way

Emotions help us manage our experiences. And since we sometimes have negative experiences, negative emotions serve a purpose in our lives and should not be denied or suppressed. But they need to be managed and communicated in a healthy way.

The first approach is to calm down. My advice about how to calm down before speaking in public is very useful here. In my episode, 5 Ways to Speak Up without Freaking Out, my guest and I discuss recognizing your feelings as normal, then learning to calm them through visualization and deep breathing.

The next method is to change the way you look at the situation. It’s often helpful to consider the other person’s perspective, or try to think of it as if you were a “fly on the wall”. How would a casual observer evaluate the situation? What if both sides gave their perspectives? My episode How to Handle Rude Questions discusses this a bit. Additionally, doing things incompatible with anger can make a huge difference. How can you be angry while watching a comedy or playing with kittens?

Communicating Effectively

If you’ve calmed down enough to look at the situation somewhat objectively, and you find you have a legitimate reason to be angry, it’s important to communicate it in a way that will improve and resolve the situation and your feelings, not perpetuate them.

I have discussed many times on this show the value of diplomatic speaking. In a nutshell, you need to think about what you will say, choose words carefully, and listen with an open mind. The following podcasts go into this in detail.

How to Have a Difficult Conversation

How to Handle Criticism

6 Constructive Ways to Give Negative Feedback

How to be More Diplomatic

You should also consider other people’s communication styles. You might be a quiet type, but someone else might be more dynamic or to-the-point. Neither communication style is bad, but the difference almost guarantees misunderstandings. Some of my best podcasts on this subject are:

How to Deal with People More Effectively

How to Deal with Difficult People

Communicate Better with Different Types of People

Does Your Communication Style Hold You Back?

Finally, remember that sometimes life is hard. Sometimes you just have to Choose to Be Happy. If you or someone you love continues to have issues with anger or sadness, please talk to a professional. But usually, putting into practice the suggestions in this podcast will help you balance anger so that it’s a rare occurrence.

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13:00:00 - By Vincent 0

Discourage Critical Feedback If You Want To Improve Faster

By Gavin Meikle 

I’ve been training presentation and public speaking skills for more than ten years now and today I’d like to share one thing I learned which has had the biggest single impact on the results I get.   If you are curious to know what it it, then read on.

I still remember the first bit of feedback I got when I stood up to give a talk.   The giver, no doubt intending to be helpful told me that I had said “um” 42 times in my three minute talk.   It’s all too easy to be critical but the question is, does giving critical feedback work?  Does it have the desired effect of improving performance and changing behaviour?   I’ve been a manager and a trainer for more than 20 years and I have learned the hard way that most critical feedback, no matter how well meant, has the opposite effect.

Why should this be?   Well I’d like you first to follow the instructions in the following statement. Ll

What ever you do, – Do not think of a purple elephant!   Under no circumstances should you think of a purple elephant!

So what happened?  Of course you couldn’t do anything else but imagine a purple pachyderm.   It’s the way or mind works, we cannot not think of something.   Our attention inevitably goes to the thing that is unwanted or forbidden.

Now imagine you say to someone, “don’t keep saying um.  You have a habit of saying it at the end of every sentence and you must stop saying um if you are to improve.”   Immediately your attention is drawn to the very thing that you don’t want to do as an a result you do more of it!      “Energy flows where attention goes”

Now imagine i said to you this instead. “I want you to concentrate on saying nothing at the end of every sentence.  Put a pause in, as you think of the next thing you are going to say.”   Now notice what you focus on.

But there is more to it than this.   Critical feedback hurts!

When I started teaching presentation skills I used to give lots of “constructive” feedback which inevitably meant pointing out things that people were doing wrong.    No matter how sensitively I gave this feedback, I could see the pain in the eyes of my students and despite their accepting nods, Is till saw the same unwanted behaviours repeated time after time.

And then I went to America for an NLP trainers workshop. During those long hard three weeks we would all be expected to give lots of presentations but a the beginning of the course, Robert Dilts our tutor introduced the concept of “Positive Feedback Only”  He challenged us to focus on commenting solely on what we liked about the presenters delivery, structure or visual aids and other than that to phrase or suggestions for improvement in terms of  “what presenter could do more of that would make his talk even better”.

Initially we were all sceptical about this approach but we quickly discovered that it has a hauge impact on the presenter and people improved far faster than using traditional critical feedback techniques.

When I got back from the States I incorporated this approach into my own one day workshops and the impact was huge!   The degree of improvement I started seeing over a day was at least 25% greater than previously.   So if you need some help with your presenting here are some suggestions to help you get the most change in the shortest possible time;

• Tell your audiences to keep any negative feedback to themselves but that you will be delighted to receive any amount of positive feedback.  My good friend Richard Wilkins does this at the start of every talk and it works a treat as well as getting a good laugh and lots of nods of agreement.
• Encourage others to confine their feedback to two areas – What specifically did I do that you liked or that worked?  What could I do more of that would make it even better.
• If you are looking for a trainer or coach, ask them how they give  feedback.  If the tell you that they will spend any more than 5% of the time telling you what you are doing wrong – walk away!

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13:00:00 - By Vincent 0