Practical Developmental Ideas June/July 2004
This issue is about how to remove emotional blocks. We
are all blocked to some extent by the effect of painful experience. I will give
some thoughts about how this happens and some practical ideas on how to remove
blocks and/or move on.
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What are the issues about "emotion" and
"emotional blocks"?
Most organisations still follow the
"machine" or "military" model to a great extent. In this
model people have roles to perform that are relatively tightly defined and they
use their intellect, logic and professionalism to perform those roles. You help
the organisation to achieve its objectives and get paid for it.
But people are more complicated than
that as we have feelings. When our positive feelings of excitement,
comradeship, determination and hope run, we can achieve wonderful things. If we
feel angry, afraid, powerless, sad, abandoned, ignored and confused, we achieve
very little. Difficult experiences now, reduce our performance immediately.
Difficult experiences from the past, even the far distant past, can also limit
us.
An example
Perhaps a small example will
illustrate this. As a very small child, I was allowed to ask lots of difficult
questions and my parents were always very honest with me when they did not know
the answers. They would say, "We don't know, you will have to find out for
yourself". So, I continued to ask questions when I was at school, and
later, and soon got into lots of trouble with teachers and headmasters who
don't often like being questioned! I got humiliated several times for
"impertinence" and caned for breaking silly rules. This has left me
feeling very uncomfortable about meeting very senior people in organisations as
I anticipate that I will be ridiculed and humiliated again. Now there is no
"rational" logic in this. I am not going to be caned and am very
unlikely to be ridiculed now when I meet the CEO of "Intergalactic Enterprises" but it still feels a bit
like that! There is emotional logic.
Why does this happen?
What seems to happen is that we
literally record everything that happens to us as sensory data, sights, sounds,
smells etc together with our feelings. When we have an experience in the
present which reminds us of the difficult experience in the past, we feel those
feelings again and lose again our ability to think clearly just as we did in
the past and may do ineffective things as a result.
So, I avoid even trying to meet CEO's
because they will think I am an impertinent rebel with nothing to offer - not
sensible as I have been working and thinking in the development field for over
thirty years! This is clearly nonsense.
Why is this important?
All of us have painful experiences
that can condition and limit our effectiveness and happiness. All our clients,
colleagues and friends do too. So understanding this and not blaming people for
being "difficult" or being unhappy will be helpful.
There is also hope, as we now
understand some natural ways to remove these blocks and free our intelligence
and thinking. I will give some more detail in the next part.
If you see a very small child fall over and bang her
knee, she will typically whimper a bit and then look for her Mum or someone she
knows and run towards that person, be held warmly, kissed better and
have a good cry. If the parent allows that to happen, she will cry and cry and
then stop and go back to what she was doing full of energy and fully recovered.
This is the natural way we recover from hurts, by
finding another person and that person listening, supporting, accepting and
helping us express our feelings fully. This can be by talking, laughing,
sweating, shaking, crying, angry movements (a "tantrum").
You will all have done something really silly sometimes,
I know I have, and when to talk about it to a friend you laugh and get hot.
After this, you realise it was not as bad as all that and that you have learned
something valuable that you can use in future and what you did was based on
your best thinking at the time. You get new insights after emotional release.
Unfortunately, there are some problems with using the
natural process in organisations. The first is that that most organisations do
not encourage or accept the free and full expression of feelings. Yet doing so
may be the best way to free the intelligence of themselves and their staff. The
second is that most of us don't appreciate the value of paying attention to
others and allowing or encouraging other people to express their feelings. It
does not have to be this way.
Every attempt we make to listen to people or to help
them listen to each other, will help.
"Counselling" is associated in people's minds
with dealing with deficit, illness or personal trauma and so cocounselling may
be too.
However, cocounselling not this but a way to organise
and enable the natural process of growth, as above. In a cocounselling session
one person, the client, works on an issue and the other person, the counsellor, provides the support,
attention, closeness and love that is enough to help the client feel safe
enough to express all her/his feelings about the topic fully. The client may
talk, cry, shake, get angry just as in above and afterwards have new insights
and be able to move on. After, for example, half an hour the participant's have
a little break and then exchange roles.
You can set up your contract with a
client to work in these deeper ways one way, if you wish. You are much more
likely to succeed if you have had first class counselling yourself first.
Otherwise, you will find your client's pain stirs up your own and it is
impossible to maintain your attention.
You can find out much more about this
in the literature on re-evaluation counselling www.rc.org
or cocounselling international http://www.shef.ac.uk/cci/cciuk.
This uses the idea of sharing time
and taking turns listening to each other but tends to keep the process at a
light and organisationally acceptable level. I have written about it in other
ezines and you can read more on my site on coconsulting.
Even here, people find the idea of talking to each other about the issues that
concern them and actively helping by listening quite difficult. This may
indicate that we need to build more mutual trust in organisations.
Paradoxically, doing coconsulting or cocounselling together is one of the best
ways of building trust that I know. You just have to start!
A contradiction is something that goes in the precisely
opposite direction to the emotional block. It can be something you ask the
client to do or say. An example may help.
I was teaching a counselling course and about to show
people how to do it by working "live" with a one of the course
members in front of the group. K's issue was that she liked J very much but was
too embarrassed to ask him out. She also did not want to appear
"cheap". I contradicted her fear by asking her what she would like to
do if she were totally unafraid.
Eventually, after getting very hot, she said she would
like to say, "I really like you and would like to get to know you
better". She liked this, as it was direct and honest. Then we contradicted
the embarrassment by her saying this directly, with much laughter and more
heat, to the other eight people in the group! Afterwards, she realised she
could talk to him and would and any residual anxiety was not going to stop her.
She did talk to J as she planned and the last I heard
they were happily married and had two children.
Emotional blocks can arise quite early in life and still
have consequences long afterwards. You still can be very helpful using simple
questions and listening hard. An example may help.
F worked in large company and was quite senior and
technically excellent. Her manager told her that she would not get any further
until she learned how to be less aggressive in meetings. That was the bad news;
the good news was that I was available to help her, if she wished. It turned
out that she was the youngest of five children, all the rest were boys and the
only way she could get any attention was to SHOUT. When she realised that she
was doing in the company what she had to do as a child to survive, she changed
her behaviour.
Another paradox is that fear is only powerful if we take
it seriously. The classic "Feel
the fear and do it anyway" by Susan Jeffers is all about
this. The question, above, can help people face their fears and realise they
don't have to be imprisoned by them. Another example follows.
P was overwhelmed with work. His health, marriage and
work were suffering. We talked about what he could do and realised one possible
source of help was his staff. He was a bit scared of involving them, he
wondered if they would find him weak and would lose their cooperation. He
realised that the "worst thing that could happen" would be that he
would then find his job truly intolerable and would leave and that would mean
he would have a break to think, spend more time at home and that would be OK!
Peter levelled with his people and asked for their help
and it worked wonderfully well. He realised he was doing half of his managers
job as well as his own and was able to get rid of this work. He was able to
pass on some work to his staff and stop doing some. His team were glad to help
because they understood why it was necessary. By being open and vulnerable he
created great support and team spirit too.
The ideas above come from on my limited thinking and
experience. I believe these issues are important. You will have found different
and interesting ways to look at this. If you email me your thoughts and
experiences about how to do this, and then I will send something back to the
list that will give a richer picture to us all or, if you want the yahoo group,
this might be good to share there.
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I hope you have found the information in this issue interesting and useful. The subjects I might cover in the next issues are: -
Conflict resolution
Designing learning events
Developing your people
Improving working relationships
Stimulating creative thinking
Thinking tools and processes
If you have any particular developmental interests, you would like me to cover, please let me know. I will try to respond if I can.
Commercial
I enjoy helping clients think through real issues
involving people. I sometimes stay in the background as coach or consultant and
sometimes work with people to help them design and deliver developmental
events. If you need to know more please refer to www.nickheap.co.uk
or give me a call.
I have had one request recently to coach someone, by
email and phone through the Influencing skills material on the site. If this,
or face to face coaching, appeals to you about any of the material, I would be
glad to hear from you.
Many of the readers of this newsletter are consultants themselves. I have learned a great deal from other consultants over the years so I am glad to have this opportunity to offer something back.
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Best wishes,
Nick Heap
43 Roe Green Close
Hatfield
Herts AL10 9PD
UK
01707 886553
Web, with many resources: www.nickheap.co.uk
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