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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781576752302 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/10/2003 |
| Pages: | 234 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.52(w) x 8.56(h) x 0.66(d) |
About the Author
CHARLES C. MANZ, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Management at Arizona State University. He is coauthor of SuperLeadership: Leading Others to Lead Themselves and the author of Mastering Self-Leadership: Empowering Yourself for Personal Excellence.
HENRY P. SIMS, Jr. Ph.D., is Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Maryland. He is coauthor of SuperLeadership: Leading Others to Lead Themselves, The New Leadership Paradigm, and The Thinking Organization.
Read an Excerpt
Emotional DISCIPLINE
The Power to Choose How You FeelBy CHARLES C. MANZ
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2003 Charles C. ManzAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57675-230-2
Chapter One
Choice 1Create Your Emotional Discipline Process
If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would have thus been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. —Charles Darwin
The first and most important emotional discipline choice is to select an overall process for applying emotional discipline. Ultimately you will need a process that is designed specifically for you. This chapter will introduce the five key components or steps that need to be addressed in the process that you create to fit your specific needs. To help you get started, a sample of a complete process for practicing emotional discipline will be presented along with a case example that illustrates how it might be used.
The five components or steps of a complete emotional discipline process were derived from several key sources. They are partly based on the work I have been pursuing with colleagues on the topic of self-leadership over the last twenty years. This source of input draws upon my personal knowledge gained from research, consulting, and teaching experiences. Over the past two decades I have had the opportunity to study and facilitate learning for thousands of people regarding their self-leadership practices, including the incorporation of positive discipline in their work and lives. Beyond this direct input and experience I drew upon several other key sources that I have found to be particularly helpful in the literature on personal growth and improvement. I have personally tried many of the strategies that these sources suggest (and all of the ones included in this book) and observed them in many others.
First, I will describe in detail the five key components or steps of a complete emotional discipline process and provide a sample process that incorporates all of them. Learning these steps, adapting them to your specific circumstances (customizing them to your individual needs), and using them as a source of inspiration to create your own emotional discipline process, is key. It represents the foundation for, and the first of, the 25 choices (strategies) that make up the primary content of this book.
Then I will provide a concrete case example that demonstrates how the process might be applied to a specific challenging situation. Later, in the chapter on Emotional Intelligence (Chapter 4), some of the books that were helpful with the development of the process and that can further add to your knowledge for effective practice of emotional discipline are listed. I recommend that you consider reading some of these books for additional information and guidance on the emotional discipline process.
Five Components or Steps for Practicing Emotional Discipline
The effective overall practice of emotional discipline as a lifestyle commitment includes five specific components or steps. Together they can be applied to meet current life challenges as well as to help develop your capacity for meeting emotionally challenging situations in the future. Ultimately they are founded on the powerful idea of CHOICE—choosing how you feel through the application of an overall multistep process and specific strategies (emotional discipline choices) to meet immediate challenges. Here are the components or steps:
1. Cause—identify the immediate cause of your emotions.
2. Body—assess the location and intensity of your physical reactions.
3. Mind—identify the thoughts and beliefs that accompany your physical reactions.
4. Spirit—note what part of yourself is being revealed in your response to your current circumstances.
5. Choice—make an emotional discipline choice and apply it for constructively dealing with your immediate challenge.
The key, at least in the beginning, is to incorporate all five of these into your emotional discipline efforts as you encounter circumstances that trigger your emotions. It is usually very helpful to do your initial work in writing. Writing out your thoughts as you work with the five steps provides a special kind of discipline and can reveal deeper insights than just running through them in your mind.
Eventually, your own customized emotional discipline process should become almost automatic and second nature and will not require that all the steps be used for every emotion-filled circumstance. For example, you may reach the "mind" focused stage and naturally find yourself drawing upon an appropriate emotional discipline choice, such as mental reframing, that addresses your immediate needs. In effect this represents automatically jumping to the final "choice" part of the process as you become more experienced and effective in applying emotional discipline. Or some circumstances (particularly ones you have encountered in the past) may automatically prompt your use of a specific choice without needing to work through any of the first four steps.
Also, one other point of clarification needs to be made at the outset. In Step 4 of the process (as well as Part Four of this book) the word spirit is used, which has been assigned many meanings over the years. In this book I refer to spirit less in terms of its religious and supernatural implications, and more as that part of who we are that represents our best and most constructive self. This view is relatively consistent with many writers and speakers who make the distinction between our ego (which generally includes our more fearful, closed, selfish, and destructive self) and our spirit (which usually reflects our more caring, open, trusting, and constructive self).
Some dictionaries include more than a dozen different meanings for spirit. Some portions of the definition contained in the New American Webster Dictionary that capture best how I am using the term here include "The nature of a person ... vivacity; optimism ... the essence or real meaning." In this book, spirit is generally used to indicate that part of ourselves that we recognize as the best that is in us and, from an optimistic stance, the more accurate reflection of who we really are.
A Sample of a Complete Emotional Discipline Process
What follows is a complete 5-step emotional discipline process. This sample process is offered to help you get started. It is possible that you may even find that this specific process adequately addresses your particular needs and that you can begin to use it to meet your own life challenges. More likely you will need to create a customized process, and use the one offered here as a source of insight and inspiration for creating an approach that is better suited to your own circumstances.
For example, if health issues are especially prominent in your life, you will probably need to create a process that emphasizes constructive ways of addressing your physical needs. If on the other hand, you are struggling with painful mental issues due to a recent loss of some kind, the mind part of the process would receive more emphasis. The 5-step process that follows represents a comprehensive generic approach to practicing emotional discipline.
1. What is the Cause?
Identify the issue or event provoking the feelings. What has happened that has triggered significant emotion for you? Have you encountered a setback in your life or work, a disagreement with someone else, a troubling thought or realization in your mind, or some other circumstance? This might be a long-term issue that keeps recurring or it might be an unexpected one-time event. Step 1 involves specifically pinpointing whatever it is that is stirring up feelings that you feel a need to address.
2. Focus on Your Body
Scan your body. Determine the location of your physical sensations and whether they are uncomfortable or pleasant. Where specifically are you having the physical feelings? Are you feeling tightness in your chest, butterflies in your stomach, a pleasant flowing warmth throughout your entire body, tingling down your spine, or some other physical sensation? Pinpoint the location of the physical feelings and whether you are experiencing them as pleasing or painful.
Rate your physical feelings. How do you rate the physical feelings you have pinpointed on a scale ranging from –10 for very negative (uncomfortable/painful) to +10 for very positive (comfortable/enjoyable). If, as a result of a heated argument, you have a strong unpleasant knotted feeling in the pit of your stomach, accompanied by rather severe tightness in your chest, you might rate the sensation as a –8 or –9. If, on the other hand, as you sit under a palm tree on a tropical beach with a warm light breeze gently caressing your hair, you are experiencing deep calmness and muscle relaxation along with a wave of contented pleasure throughout your entire body, you might rate this sensation as a +8 or +9.
3. Focus on Your Mind
Identify your thoughts and/or images that accompany the feelings. What thoughts are going through your head as you experience these physical sensations? What internal statements (e.g., "this argument is awful ... he is being terribly rude and unreasonable ... this kind of stress could ruin my health ...") and/or mental pictures (images of the other person later saying things to discredit you behind your back ... seeing yourself in an ambulance as a result of having a stroke or heart attack ...) are running through your mind?
Identify your beliefs that underlie your thoughts. What beliefs do you hold that are laying the foundation for your mental and physical reactions? For example, do you believe that things should always go smoothly and that all problems are bad, people should not argue, strong feelings are bad for you, it is important to always keep your feelings tightly under control, when anyone disagrees with you it represents an attack? Pinpoint what you specifically believe that forms the foundation for your stance and reaction to the situation or event.
4. Focus on Your Spirit
Determine what part of yourself is being revealed and what part is being hidden. We tend to have different noteworthy parts of who we are that are more or less engaged at different times. Some of these parts we tend to like and value and others we don't. For example, in your response to this issue or event, are you acting from a state of openness, caring, and love? Or are you acting from a state of fear, defensiveness, and hostility? As you work with this process across different situations, try to become aware of the different aspects of yourself that you live and act from in different situations. Also, work toward gaining a better sense of those parts of yourself you would like to have more revealed and activated and those that you would not.
5. Make a Choice
Choose your actions and reactions (your emotional discipline strategies). The greatest value of emotional discipline is in its potential to increase your power to choose, and most notably, to choose how you feel. In response to the issue or event that you have pinpointed, how would you like to be able to respond? What actions and reactions (in terms of physical sensations, thinking, and action strategies) would you like to have? More specifically, what emotional discipline choices have you built into your repertoire that you can draw upon to constructively address your current feelings and to help you create constructive future feelings? What choices can help you to experience and live from your more constructive, effective, and empowered self a greater amount of the time and in more situations?
An Example of the Process in Action
(Note: The following case was written to illustrate the complete 5-step process, but it is inspired by actual events.)
The founder and beloved leader of an emerging service-oriented software firm unexpectedly passed away about three weeks ago. Since that time the organization has been largely paralyzed and ineffective and experiencing a business-threatening downturn as a result. Today the remaining 21 members of the management team of this rapidly growing enterprise have gathered to support one another and to begin to sort out the implications of their former leader's death and how they can proceed from here. This is the first time they have been together in the primary meeting room at their main corporate office without their deceased leader. No specific agenda was set for the meeting. Mostly, some key members of the management team felt a time was needed to get everyone together in one place to begin the process of moving forward.
A sense of despair filled the room. Some people had tears in their eyes and others spoke of the deep sadness they felt and their anxieties about the future of their firm. Kris Woltuf's initial reaction had been much like that of the other managers. She was overwhelmed by difficult feelings, including deep sadness and anxiety, when she first heard the news. She felt an uncomfortable tightness in her chest and a knot in her stomach. In her mind she focused on all they had lost by the passing of their very compassionate and inspiring leader. She was not able to think clearly and was ineffective in her job. And she was unable to be the way she wanted for her husband and two children, especially when significant family challenges arose. She just seemed to lack the strength and will to be fully present in her life. That is, until she made a conscious choice to work with the emotional discipline process.
* * *
For Step 1, it was easy for her to identify the triggering event as the loss of her friend and leader. She then pinpointed the primary location of the physical discomfort as residing in her chest and stomach in Step 2. And she felt the intensity of the physical sensations was pretty high. Consequently, she rated the physical discomfort as a negative 6 on the physical feelings rating scale.
Next, in Step 3 she identified her corresponding thoughts. She recorded on a note pad some of her more prominent internal statements. These included, "This is an absolute tragedy to lose such a wonderful and inspiring man" ... "The firm will be lost without his leadership" ... "Why even bother with our work." And she noted some of her mental images such as picturing a sense of hopelessness and despair hanging over the company for years to come and even eventual bankruptcy for the firm.
She also recognized some of her underlying beliefs including the following. "Good people shouldn't die, especially unexpectedly." "The entire strength of the firm was tied up in one single person who is now gone." And "extreme situations like this are entirely destructive and beyond our ability to constructively respond to."
Recognizing these dominant thoughts and beliefs helped her with Step 4. She recognized that she was mostly responding to the situation from a part of herself that was fearful and that felt and acted like a helpless victim. She knew that acting from this part of herself would not enable her to be of much help to others who were affected by the death nor to effectively perform her job or to be supportive of her family the way she wanted.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Emotional DISCIPLINE by CHARLES C. MANZ Copyright © 2003 by Charles C. Manz. Excerpted by permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface....................ixIntroduction Discovering the Power of Emotional Discipline....................1
Part One — Emotional Discipline Foundations....................19
1. Create Your Emotional Discipline Process....................21
2. Learn the Key Characteristics of Emotional Discipline....................35
3. Choose the Meaning of Your Feelings....................49
4. Increase Your Emotional Intelligence (EQ)....................55
5. Feel Your Feelings....................63
6. Emotional Kung Fu....................69
7. Weather Emotional Storms....................75
Part Two — Mind....................81
8. Happiness Is a Choice....................83
9. Meditate for a Better Life....................89
10. Mental Reframing....................95
11. Direct Your Inner Theater....................99
12. Think and Grow Richly Alive....................105
13. The Manifesting Power of Positive Thinking....................111
Other Mind-Centered Emotional Discipline Choices....................118
Part Three — Body....................121
14. Breathe with Healthful Discipline....................123
15. Enhance Your Emotional Fitness Through Physical Fitness....................129
16. Inner Jogging: Music and Laughter....................135
17. Body Work 101: Massage and Beyond....................141
18. Body Work 102: Tai Chi Movement and More....................147
19. Flow with Balance....................153
Other Body-Centered Emotional Discipline Choices....................160
Part Four — Spirit....................163
20. The Power of Silence....................165
21. The Drama of Subtlety....................171
22. The Power of Purpose....................179
23. Have an Out-of-Ego Experience....................187
24. What About Love?....................195
25. Get a Life, with Spirit....................201
Other Spirit-Centered Emotional Discipline Choices....................206
Getting Started: The Power to Choose How You Feel Motto....................209
Notes....................216
Index....................224
About the Author....................233