There are no good or bad things in the world, all of which are caused by thought.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Common sense of management” (ID: Guanlidechangshi), author Cory Patterson et al.
Do you often hear people say, “I really can’t stand this person!” Do you often say this yourself?
Why can some people listen carefully to unpleasant opinions, and some people will be angry when they hear people say that they have something on their mouth?
Why do you sometimes face the accusations of others and you will be quiet, sometimes the eyes of the pedestrians will make you feel awkward?
There is no doubt that no matter who makes you feel bad, some people are always more responsive than others. Why is that? Below, Enjoy:
01 Emotions are not out of thin air
To answer these questions, we first make two bold and little-known statements, and then further explain the logic behind them.
Declaration 1: Emotions are not a layer of mist that surrounds you, not imposed on you by others.
No matter how plausible you are to blame others, in fact others can’t make you fall into a certain mood. You create your own emotions, and you make yourself feel scared, annoyed or angry.
Make your emotions only and always be yourself.
Declaration 2: You have only two choices after generating negative emotions, either controlling it or being controlled by it.
In other words, when you have strong emotions, if you can’t control it, you will become a prisoner.
The facts prove that there is indeed an intermediary between the behavior of others and our feelings.
This link exists because the behavior itself is not, and it does not cause emotional reactions.
Because of this, 10 people will have 10 different emotional reactions in the same situation.
So what is this intermediary link?
It is such a state of mind, the thoughts or plots we conceive in the brain before we observe the behavior of the other person, before generating some emotion.
Alternative sentenceIn other words, we will give some meaning to the observed facts, guessing the hidden motive behind this behavior, that is why they do this? At the same time, we will add our own judgments – is this behavior good or bad?
Then, based on these thoughts or plots, our body begins to respond to emotions.
If you use graphics to represent it, the whole process is shown in Figure 6-2. We call this model a behavioral model because it explains how emotions, thoughts, and experiences lead us to specific behaviors.
Behavioral mode model
You will notice that this model has added the “subjective break” link.
We first observe the facts and then plot the plot in the brain, and then we will feel.
Although this is a bit more complicated, the benefit is that it brings hope to solve the problem.
Because of the ability to subjectively cut off is only ourselves, this shows that if we can conceive different plots, we can control our emotions.
If we have the means to control our inner thoughts (by rethinking or reinterpreting), we can manage our emotions and take control of the performance of the entire key conversation.
02 Tips for controlling ideas
What is the most effective way to form a different idea?
The idea of a conversation master is to find ways to slow down the rhythm and then control how you behave.
The specific approach is as follows.
To slow down the fleeting subjective interruption process and avoid the accompanying agitation, you should push forward along the behavioral model level one level.
This process requires a bit of brainpower. First you should stop the current practice and then analyze why you do it.
The entire reverse process is as follows:
[Behavior] Pay attention to your performance and ask:
Do I show a way to deal with silence or violence?
[Feeling] Determine the feelings behind the behavior, ask:
What emotions have caused me to do this?
[Idea] Analyze the thoughts behind the feelings and ask:
What is the idea of generating this emotion?
[See the truth] Find the facts behind the idea and ask:
What is the basis for the formation of this idea?
Through this reverse process, you will put yourself in thinking and questioning activities, and then change one or more of them.
1.Follow your performance
Why do we want to reverse the reason for our behavior?
Obviously, if you keep reviewing your behavior and looking for the hidden motives and purposes, you will never be able to complete the conversation, because you will fall into analysis and be unable to extricate yourself.
In fact, you don’t have to do this all the time.
If you learn to pay attention and realize that you are responding to each other in a silent or violent way, you can stop the wrong behavior and find a solution.
However, it is not enough to pay attention to the problem. You must honestly examine your behavior.
If you tell yourself that the violent response is because “the other party is self-sufficient,” then you certainly will not consider changing this practice.
So, when wrong ideas force you to take a silent or violent coping style, you should stop and think about how others think about your behavior.
For the masters, they are not only good at paying attention to the situation in which they will fall into the wrong way, but will actively acknowledge this.
They will never indulge in the quagmire of self-doubt, but try to find problems and correct wrong behaviors.
Therefore, when they realize that the dialogue is deadlocked, they will immediately examine the reasons for their behavior.
2. Determining the feelings behind the behavior
When reviewing the reasons for your behavior, the conversation master will immediately shift from examining the wrong behavior to exploring the potential feelings.
It’s much harder to find the emotions behind the behavior than you think. In fact, many people simply don’t know anything about emotions.
When you ask about their feelings, they will only use words like “bad”, “angry” or “fear”.
Some people say that life is not a word game. Is it so useful to make so many different expressions? It’s a big mistake to think like this, because accurate expression is really useful.
Understanding the real feelings can help you understand more accurately the reasons and causes of the problem.
For example, if you admit that your true feelings are embarrassing and weird, rather than simple “anger”, then sureCan better understand what kind of subjective assumptions you have formed in your mind.
So what about you? When there is a strong emotion, will you stop and think about your feelings first?
If the answer is yes, are you using rich vocabulary, or are you using ambiguous “upsets” or “angry” to describe feelings?
Second, will you talk openly and talk about your feelings with others? Are you willing to talk to your friends about your problems? Finally, in doing so, do you use the descriptive vocabulary to be true?
Exactly?
Undoubtedly, it is important to understand your feelings. To do this, you should learn to use more accurate words to describe emotional feelings.
3. Analyze the thoughts behind the feelings
After determining your true feelings, you should stop and ask yourself the question: Is this feeling correct? In other words, is your subjective assumptions correct?
The reason is simple, the feeling comes from the idea, and the idea is the product of our brain’s thinking.
The first step in controlling your feelings is to break the wrong view that we are producing the only correct feeling.
This is the hardest step, but it is also the most important step.
Only by questioning feelings can we be able to question ideas.
We refuse to believe that the idea of not thinking is the right idea, and we dare to question whether our emotions (the emotions are real) and the thoughts behind the emotions (the idea may be just one of many judgments about the facts) are accurate.
Don’t confuse ideas with facts.
Sometimes, you can’t question your thoughts because you think of it as an unchangeable fact.
In the blink of an eye, because you are too concerned about this process, you will mistake your thoughts for facts.
Although it seems to be similar to the facts, the idea is not a fact after all. This is equivalent to confusing subjective conclusions and objective conditions.
4.Find the facts behind the idea
Differentiate facts and ideas by focusing on behavior.
To distinguish between the two, we must analyze the true source of feelings.
You can use a very simple standard to test whether the idea is accurate: Is there anything I can say that can be seen or heard? Is it true?What happened now?
Examine your thoughts by focusing on the wording of “excessive”. To avoid confusing ideas and facts, it is a good idea to be overly aggressive.
For example, when evaluating facts, you would say: “She blinks at me” or “He sarcasts me.” Here, “blinking” and “scare” are “excessive” words.
Because of their nature of judgment and attribution, they directly trigger strong emotions. Obviously, these words are just your thoughts, not facts.
5. Keep an eye out for three common “small smart”
As time and experience accumulate, by understanding why the other party is doing specific behaviors (including, of course, understanding our own behavioral reasons), we will slowly be good at summarizing the causes of various behaviors.
Two things will happen at this time, or our ideas are completely correct and push us in the direction of health;
Either these ideas are not accurate enough, but they can reasonably explain the current behavior, making us feel right and feel that there is no need to make changes.
Obviously, the second idea will definitely cause us trouble.
For example, we have shown the wrong way of dealing with silence or violence, but after analysis, it is a plausible and reasonable conclusion.
“I shouted at him. Why don’t you see what he did? It’s just a matter of self-deprecation!” “Hey, don’t look at me with that look, I’m forced to do it.”
For these imaginative self-defense, we call it “small cleverness.”
Understanding the following three “small smart” can help us find a response and control our emotions.
1) The victim’s thoughts – “This is not my fault!”
The first kind of cleverness is the victim’s idea.
As the name suggests, this kind of thinking will turn us into innocent victims.
It can be said that such ideas are basically this model: the other party is evil, wrong, stupid, and he is kind, correct, and intelligent.
In short, others always make mistakes or stupid moves, and as a result, we become scapegoats.
In most key conversations, when you present a victim’s idea, the goal is to hide your responsibility for the problem.
In this way, you can wisely avoid your own practice (or notThe problem caused by).
2) The big villain idea – “This is all caused by you!”
In the fictional idea, we will turn sensible and normal people into evildoers.
We blame the other party’s evil purpose, and then tell everyone “justly” as if they were the savior.
For example, we will call the boss who is highly concerned about quality issues a control freak; when spouses complain that we don’t count, we will say that they are stubborn.
Our eyes only focus on their most evil motives and the worst performance, completely ignoring any good-neutral intentions and outstanding performance in them.
When you fictionalize this idea, labeling each other is the most common method.
For example, “No, that idiot has given me the material again!” To the other party with a label with a certain “feature”, we feel comfortable that the object we deal with is a stupid guy. Instead of normal people with complex psychological emotions.
In fact, the essence of the victim and the villain’s idea is a very unfair distortion of the facts. These thoughts show that we have made double-standard judgments on both sides of the dialogue when the emotions are out of control.
3) The helpless idea – “I can’t do anything about it!”
The last wrong idea is the helpless idea. The hallmark of this idea is that we always feel that we are unable to make any positive efforts or help.
For the problems encountered in the dialogue, we believe that there is no constructive solution at all, as an excuse for not wanting to act.
For example, we would say: “It’s also a white saying to the boss, he certainly can’t listen, so I won’t do that stupid thing!”
If the victim and the villain idea are looking for excuses for what we have done, then the helpless idea can be said to be an excuse for our negative behavior.
When we treat each other’s behavior as a habit that is accustomed to and difficult to change, the helplessness idea can easily appear.
03 Change subjective cuts
After learning the wrong ideas that have formed in your own mind, what we have to learn is how to eliminate these ideas.
Aware that you are looking for an excuse for wrongdoing, rightWord masters will pause communication, try to change the wrong ideas, and conceive the right ideas.
The so-called correct ideas refer to those ideas that can lead positive emotions, because only positive emotions can lead to healthy coping styles such as dialogue.
So how can you turn a wrong idea into the right one?
You should change subjective assumptions because wrong ideas have one thing in common, namely lack of integrity.
What is the best way to make up for the missing details in the wrong idea?
It’s very simple, turning the victim into a participant, turning the villain into a normal person, and turning the helpless into an actor, as shown below.
1. Turn the victim into a participant
If you find yourself portraying yourself as an innocent victim in a conversation, you can ask yourself a question.
Do I deliberately ignore my responsibility in this matter?
In other words, you are not a victim of an incident, but a participant in the problem.
Of course, this does not mean that you must have sinister behavioral motives, perhaps your mistake is just an unintentional loss.
But no matter what, you are still somewhat responsible.
For example, your colleagues always throw you hard and boring tasks, and you often complain to your friends and relatives that you are being used at work.
But, the fact that you didn’t mention is that every time the boss boasted that you have the courage to take on the heavy responsibility, you are happy to keep your mouth shut. You didn’t mention anything to your colleagues, but at most it was hinted at several times.
The first step in changing your mind is to add important facts to your description.
Analyzing your responsibilities, you can be aware of how biased your knowledge is, and how you can ignore your mistakes and exaggerate your mistakes.
2. Turn the villain into a normal person
If you find that you see each other as a sinister villain in a conversation and are jealous of them, you should ask yourself a question.
Why is a rational and normal person doing this?
This question can help us treat each other as a person full of humanity.
When looking for answers to this question, our negative emotions will gradually fade away, replacing the harsh negative evaluation with emotions.
Recalling the way we treat others rudely, our sense of personal responsibility will gradually sublimate, abandoning shallow self-justification.
Ask such a question, not to find an excuse for the wrong behavior of the other party.
If they are indeed wrong, we can find a chance to solve it later. Learn to treat each other as normal, with the goal of changing our own wrong thoughts and emotions.
Doing this allows us to do everything possibleUnderstanding the other party’s behavioral reasons is an effective way to self-regulate emotions.
3. Turn the helpless into an actor
If you find yourself complaining in the conversation that you are unable to change the facts, you can change the wrong ideas by rethinking the original purpose.
You can ask yourself the following questions:
What is my real purpose?
What purpose do I want to achieve for myself, others, and our relationship?
Understanding this problem, you can eliminate the “foolish choice”, which is what makes you fall into a silent, or violent, helpless mood.
To this end, you should ask yourself the following questions.
What do I do now to achieve these goals?
For example, you find yourself attacking a colleague who is not actively involved in a difficult job. Your strong emotions and sudden attacks make the other person feel amazed and squat there.
Of course, you don’t believe in this kind of appearance. I firmly believe that she deliberately evades difficult tasks and thinks that she will not make any changes.
You said to yourself: “I am also involuntarily, I don’t want to get angry, but I can’t do it without it.”
When you think like this, you have deviated from the real purpose of dialogue, that is, sharing work tasks and forming good interpersonal relationships with each other.
At this point, you can only make a radical “foolish choice”: “It’s better to let the other person lose face than to lose face.”
What should you do? You should discuss the issue openly, honestly, and effectively with each other, rather than slamming the other person and finding excuses for yourself.
When you no longer see yourself as a helpless person, you can actively assume responsibility for dialogue, rather than complaining about the problem.
04 Summary
If strong emotions make you silent or violent in conversation, try the following.
1. Behavioral Review
Follow your performance. If you find yourself away from the conversation, ask yourself what you are doing.
Are I caught in a silent or violent coping style?
Determining the feelings behind the behavior. Learn to accurately identify the emotions behind your behavior.
What is the emotional feeling that leads to this behavior?
Analyze the ideas behind the feelings. Learn to question your conclusions and find other possible explanations behind the feelings.
What is the idea that causes this emotion to appear?
Find the facts behind the idea. Go back to the facts, give up absolute expression, and distinguish objective facts from subjective ideas.
What is the factual basis for this idea?
Pay attention to the plausible “small clever” idea. Especially the victim’s ideas, big villains and helpless ideas.
2.Change subjective censorship
You should ask yourself the following questions:
Do I deliberately ignore my responsibility in this matter?
Why is a rational and normal person doing this?
What is my real purpose?
What do I do now to achieve these goals?
About the author
Curry Patterson, Ph.D. in organizational behavior at Stanford University.
Joseph Greni, a senior consultant with more than 30 years of experience in corporate change research. Ron McMillan, a well-respected speaker and corporate consultant.
Ayr Schwitzler, Lecturer, University of Michigan Administrative Development Center.
