International Women’s Day Part 2

Doing something different is hard (imagine folding your arms the wrong way if we have done that activity together over the years…)

When we see exclusion at work, or someone says or does something to cause offence to ourselves or others, of course we want them to do something different. I want to share some science with you that might help you to actually move a difficult or upsetting situation forwards.

It’s really difficult to accept that it is really hard to get other people to change – imagine you are trying to get someone to fold their arms the wrong way every day – or write with their wrong hand, and they aren’t that motivated to make the change for themselves or can’t really see what is in it for them. The only person we can really change in a situation is ourselves or our perspective on it.

When we feel offence or unfairness of any kind, our instinct is that we want to get rid of it. The world would be a much worse place if we didn’t get those feelings! However, often we are trying to ‘fix’ a problem for ourselves or others with only a small portion of our logical, problem solving and long-term brain in the game. Incidents where someone has been intimidated, unfairly treated or judged create anxiety and fear which are perceived as a ‘threat’ within our brains. And ‘threats’ trigger our SCARF Reaction.

For more information about SCARF, this topic interlinks really well with this sister-blog on SCARF.

SCARF is an acronym that helps us to understand that when our Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and sense of Fairness are challenged, rather than responding in a calm and logical way, we can instead go into ‘Fight or Flight’ or ‘Freeze or Appease’ mode.

I use a model called the Drama Triangle with clients to help them better understand what their choices are when they are responding to a problem they face in their lives. The model is really practical and flexible because it works whether this ‘baddie’ is an illness or something negative that someone says to us at work.

I know it works because someone very wise once used it with me! I’ll tell you now, it’s not easy. You have to have a really good look at a situation and have an open mind which is not easy when someone is pushing your buttons, or the world feels like it is dealing you a really bad hand…but honestly it does work!

When our intention is to get rid of a problem, we usually go to a fight/flight/freeze or appease that gets us a fix. We say something sharp and spiteful to put someone in their place who said or did something unacceptable. We try to get away from the situation – either literally by refusing to work with someone, or by distracting ourselves – maybe with too much wine or comfort food. Or we do nothing, hope things get better by leaving them alone and then feel guilt or shame that we didn’t make a different choice, and then spend hours head-rehearsing revenge strategies or beating ourselves up for eating too much.

We then find ourselves inadvertently ending up in a similar situation or at loggerheads with our persecutor a few weeks later, or realise we have spent hours – berating ourselves for not speaking up or over-eating, or take up weeks of airtime with our friends or colleagues getting them on our bandwagon about how unfair something is…literally all our attention has gone on focusing on a past event, but with very little of it focused positively on anything other than making the problem go away as quickly as possible in any way we can.

None of these reactions are surprising, given we made those choices with a lobotomised threat reacting brain. It’s also not surprising that these solutions don’t usually work very well and don’t make us feel that good about ourselves. The reason for that is quite simple but be prepared for an unpalatable truth…

…when we react to a challenge in SCARF mode, we are accidentally putting and keeping ourselves in a victim position.

Yes, we are doing that to ourselves. I’m going to let the mike drop there.

It’s simple to explain why we get stuck. When we give airtime to something we don’t want – so for example when we talk over and over about what happened with our friends or colleagues – we are repeating the situation.

Our brain is a pattern machine – it looks for repeats and ‘evidence’ that things are true. Because we are talking or thinking about something all the time, we provide our brain with the repeat evidence it needs to confirm that our version of events is absolutely to be believed and that you are right – ‘this always happens to me’ or ‘he is vile’.

Once we have used that airtime and brain fuel to replay the situation on repeat to yourself and anyone else who will listen, we can’t get those hours/brain fuel back. Faced will that negative repetition and depleted time and focus, it’s not surprising we feel exhausted and don’t really feel motivated or able to confront someone out of the room to constructively feedback how they made us feel. Or come up with more creative solutions to work together better.

This is where the science helps. When we see ourselves as a victim our brain looks for evidence that are being victimised.

When we spot that we are spending all our energy on a quick fix, we can train ourselves to stop and see a Drama Triangle for the short-term vicious circle (well triangle!) that it is.

When we ‘re-frame’ a situation, we re-direct our evidence collecting brain. We use the same wiring that our ancestors gifted to us – which isn’t always helpful for modern life – but this time make the wiring patterns work in our favour.

When we start to look for what we could learn from a bad situation, amazingly we learn more new things. When we ignite our curiosity about what we are not seeing that could also be true, we see perspectives that were previously obscured. When we imagine how we could use a threat event to strengthen our ability or resolve to get something we want far more than ‘revenge’ or for it to ‘just go away’ something amazing happens. We start to spot new connections and possibilities.

When we see ourselves instead as a catalyst, our brain looks for evidence that we are capable of changing our perspective and doing something more dramatic with what is happening to us. That we can use it to learn things that could stretch us that we would not otherwise learn. That the learning from this situation, bad though it is, could help move us, in small steps, towards something we really want for ourselves or to be a version of ourselves to be proud of.

Using the same airtime and energy to think about what we really want for ourselves, what good could come from this bad situation and what single small step we could take today that would take us forwards and feel like progress is literally game-changing. Imagine all those hours you spent talking about your old boss or partner – after you left and found another job or life!  You were never going to change something that is now in the past. You can’t get any of those hours back. All that energy and brain fuel is spent. Gone.

What if every time you caught yourself thinking that way you picked up a book on a subject you want to be more knowledgeable about, or wrote a card to a friend to cheer up their day, or picked up a guitar in the corner of your kitchen and practised a chord…

There’s a really hard thing to do first because all this brilliant stuff only happens if we can reframe the ‘problem’ as an ‘opportunity’. Or if it is a person causing your threat response to see this ‘Perpetrator’ as a ‘Challenger’

I personally find this easier to do than I used to. Firstly, because I have done it once, so I know it works! Also, in training to be a coach and working with many people across the world embroiled in literally thousands of Drama Triangles, I have come to know that people are always well intentioned and that they unintentionally SCARF one another all the time.

Often a ‘bully’ (or Perpetrator in our triangle) is shocked and upset to find that their well-intentioned challenge or something they see as ‘banter’ and wasn’t received that way at all.

Or I find when I feedback to people about ‘poor’ behaviour – and make it safe for them to explore what is going on for them, we come to understand they too were in SCARF themselves – motivated by fear or anxious about something.

Imagine finding out you had been offending or upsetting someone for years, no one has ever mentioned it directly and you hadn’t realised the extent of the problem or were so tied up in operating in SCARF from a place of fear until a huge amount of damage was done. That is challenging coaching territory…

Just to be clear, I’m not for a second condoning bullying behaviour, condescending feedback or thoughtless unconscious bias leaking out without calling it. It’s just helpful for us to see that behaviour through a different lens if we are going to help someone to help themselves or help them to see things the way we do.

When we are given feedback that makes us confront one of our own unhelpful behaviours, our brains will only have a fighting chance of being able to hear that feedback accurately and act on it if we don’t SCARF someone back. The only way to do that is to make sure it feels safe as possible to be on the receiving end of an uncomfortable truth. Fundamentally we can only accept feedback if someone makes us feel safe to hear it.

Making a ‘Perpetrator’ feel like ‘the bad guy’ will have the same effect as us telling another woman (or anyone else) ‘You are making yourself the victim in this’. They are likely to take refuge in that ‘role’ because it isn’t safe to explore the feelings that would get them out of it. The victim becomes someone else’s perpetrator! Remember musical chairs. You can’t all win. And a win: win is the thing we should look for in an organisational drama.

It is much more helpful to see these roles as perspectives that we can see a problem from, rather than roles we are playing and stuck in, but sometimes we have to hit rock bottom or for things to become really bad before we wake up to how we are not helping ourselves.

So how can we hold the mirror up to victim-type behaviour to help people become a catalyst for change? Or transition colleagues perpetrating unhelpful behaviours into allies who provide strong challenge so that we make our workplaces more diverse and positive sooner?

A trusted colleague can help you to see you are getting in your own way before you spend hours going over the past and considering all the alternative ways you could have been witty and brilliant in a past life to enable the other person to have an ‘aha’ moment and see the error of their ways…I hope it’s not just me?!

However, there is another dangerous role in the triangle. And when I first heard about it, I felt a bit sick. In the past when a friend or colleague was hurt or upset, I wanted to sort it out! I might take up the mantle, give someone feedback on their behalf or hustle them to the disciplinary procedure kicking and screaming. I wanted to come to their rescue.

I now know that this wasn’t usually helpful. In going to someone’s ‘rescue’, we can accidentally keep them in ‘victim’ mode. This is because we accidentally give them the impression, they won’t be able to fix it without our suggestions or interventions.

This can happen particularly when we are senior or in a position where we can bring about change in behaviour within our roles. We can see it as our role to ‘sort this out’. And whilst there is absolutely nothing wrong with shining a light on poor behaviour and speaking truth to power, we have to be careful in case we are subconsciously giving people the impression that if it happens again, their best and only recourse is to come to you.

What is better is that we support someone to grow new brain pathways so that they can think it through for themselves and choose their own courageous actions. In this case, they become better placed to help themselves – and other people – with these challenges in the future.

So, before you jump to the rescue with your big boots on, try instead to ask some questions as a coach. Being a coach in this situation really helps people to grow their resilience and their ability to think well for themselves – even in stressful and SCARFing situations.

Coaching isn’t reliant on seniority or experience. Anyone can coach. Sure, there are some tools, but it’s a mindset more than a model – you have to believe that someone can grow their own capability to think and act differently.

Science helps because this is absolutely true – our human brains are infinitely plastic – we all have the capacity to grow some additional neural pathways as we experience discomfort, see the discomfort for what it is and choose to do different things. All those small, single steps literally grow our brains – and therefore our ability to believe in ourselves as a catalyst who can proactively work through other challenges in life.

And guess what – when we believe something to be true it becomes more likely to be true – our brains look for evidence that we can repeat the small step that worked. And because we look for the small steps we could take, we findthem!

The main thing to remember when you are coaching is not to offer solutions, but to believe that someone can be the catalyst for change and find a solution that works for them and strongly transmit that belief to them with confidence.

Here’s some questions you can ask yourself – or ask someone else, if you think you might be stuck in a Drama Triangle.

Asking yourself “What am I doing…What pattern am I repeating which isn’t working…How am I keeping the threat at bay, but accidentally keeping it alive and well by giving it precious airtime…?

These are deeply uncomfortable questions. However, allowing yourself to feel the discomfort of seeing your own my part in any drama – and experience the fear of doing something different can be life-changing.

Ask yourself if I could see the discomfort as an ‘arm folding’ moment, what one small thing could I choose to do as a catalyst to get what I really want here?

These coaching questions can help…

“What would good look like? If anything was possible, and I could have, do or be anything, what would ‘great’ look like?”

“What happens if I do nothing…what are the longer-term consequences…is that OK?”

“What things could this experience help you to learn and benefit from? – even if it doesn’t feel positive right now?

“What small but significant thing could I do to make it more likely I would get good/great

What’s the worst-case scenario if you try and fail? How could you minimise or reframe that?

What one thing do I want to do today that will mean I move in the right direction?

“What or who could help make sure I do it?”

And a final note – if you see someone involved in the Drama Triangle, resist the Rescue!

As your gift to yourself on IWD, notice if there is something in your life where you are resorting to a ‘victim’ response every time – and spending precious AIR-time going round in circles.

And instead of ‘IWD Congratulations’ today, offer a genuine gift to a woman in your life. Notice any SCARF reactions and Victim language. Maybe you are accidentally being their Persecutor or Rescuer? Move your position – make it safe. “You are being a Victim…” isn’t likely to feel safe!

What one thing could you ask them to become their Challenger or their Coach instead?

You could today help someone take one step towards growing their brain and living a happier life. It sounds massive but it’s not. It’s infinitely do-able and repeatable.

Literally what’s not to like?!

And as a final nod to the hashtag of the day

Which perspectives #InspireInclusion – I’d suggest Catalyst, Coach and Challenger?

Which roles don’t #InspireInclusion and instead lead to repeated patterns of unhelpful behaviour? I’d suggest Victim, Rescuer and Persecutor.

Don’t just TELL them it’s safe, actually find out what safe would mean for them

A little science can go a long way so I hope this snippet will also help you to think about how you might be getting in your own way when it comes to having the work life you want, or the balance you need and how sometimes when it comes to helping others to challenge unhelpful behaviour we are not always as helpful as we intend to be.