Tag: stress management

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Aiding Trauma Recovery With Emotional Intelligence

Executive Producer, Gaby Acosta

For the last few months, I’ve been working with a team of creative, passionate, and talented folks to conceptualize and develop a podcast about emotional intelligence and the systems we are all a part of. Hosted by Daniel Goleman and his son Hanuman Goleman, the First Person Plural: EI & Beyond podcast will encourage us to be more self-aware and deepen our understanding of how our actions influence others at a time when we need it the most.

Emotional intelligence is personal for me. 

Serving as an Executive Producer for this podcast is particularly meaningful because as a queer bi-racial Latina immigrant born at the tail end of a civil war in El Salvador (a tiny country in Central America), I’ve witnessed first-hand the aftermath of trauma. I’ve seen what it does to people and communities feeding disconnection, conflict, and violence. Trauma can also cause us to lose our sense of self and our ability to regulate our own emotions, often leading to challenging relationships with ourselves and others. 

However, the skills of emotional intelligence serve as a countermeasure in trauma recovery teaching us to become more self-aware and attune to our emotions and inevitably enabling us to become more resilient over time. My experience has shaped me into a highly curious person, fascinated by people’s stories and the unique ways we each experience the world. 

Executive Producer, Gaby Acosta attempting to work from home with her needy pets (pictured are orange tabby, Noah and husky, Kyra).

I don’t think I’m alone when I say that the events of the last year have left me mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted. 

We’ve all had to adjust to life in quarantine during a global pandemic. Racial violence and injustice are playing out on the global stage. We’re experiencing the devastating consequences of climate change in real-time. Oh, and did I mention that we’re amidst one of the most intense Presidential election cycles in U.S. history? 

Still, contrary to what I expected, in the past six months, these events have motivated me. More than ever, I feel called to openly discuss the complex realities of 2020—to tell the stories of those suffering and thriving at the forefront of change to bring us all into the conversation. 

Here is what I know from my own experiences with trauma: the societal tumult and volatility we’re experiencing can trigger old pain, causing deep anxiety and stress. All of us have a response to this stress: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Personally, when I reach my stress threshold, I tend to go into hibernation mode—I shut down or sleep to escape it all. As an adult with responsibilities, this response is not a viable solution. It’s also contradictory to my deep want to be part of creating change.

To stay rooted, calm, and focused and override my automatic stress response, I always rely on the tools of emotional intelligence. 

If you’re new to the concept, finding emotional intelligence is like putting on a pair of glasses for the first time. EI offers us the tools to see ourselves and the world around us more clearly.

Gabriela Acosta
Check out our Kickstarter!

If you’re new to the concept, finding emotional intelligence is like putting on a pair of glasses for the first time. EI offers us the tools to see ourselves and the world around us more clearly. These new lenses adjust our focus and improve the way we navigate and engage with our surroundings. At the end of the day, this newfound clarity allows us to make better choices—we are better able to manage what enters our field of vision and decide how we want to proceed.

While I can’t control what’s happening in the world or my visceral emotional responses to current events, emotional intelligence has helped me find healthier coping mechanisms. As of late, I’ve doubled down on a regular mindfulness practice to strengthen my resilience and vitality. Rather than run away from my emotions, I acknowledge how they show up in my heart, mind, and body. I also lean more heavily on my relationships and community for moral and emotional support. 

Because of the role EI plays in my life, I could not be more excited to be a part of this podcast and I am energized to share the wisdom that Dan, Hanuman, and all of our guests can offer. I believe this podcast has real potential to help people process what’s been happening in the world and to develop healthy tools that will support their wellbeing. We’ll address some highly-pertinent topics such as the challenges of social-emotional learning in the age of zoom schooling, how we can leverage constructive anger to create social change, and how our systems influence the environment. 

I believe that emotional intelligence is the antidote to some of today’s biggest challenges like extreme isolation, animosity, and polarization. Author Robert Jones Jr. explains it beautifully when he said, “we can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” Our society would go a long way if we could all remember that we are all deserving of empathy, understanding, and human decency. 

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Is it Worth It? When it’s Time to Question Your Career Ambitions

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career
Source: snapwiresnaps.tumblr.com/Pexels.com CC0 License

The late New Zealand-based art director, Linds Redding has recently gained notoriety for his brutal rant against the soul-grinding culture of the advertising industry. He started a blog after he was diagnosed with inoperable esophageal cancer. Many of his posts reflected on his career – a rather impressive one in the creative field. Yet despite his accomplishments, he felt it was all a waste of time.

Redding wrote, “It turns out I didn’t actually like my old life nearly as much as I thought I did…Countless late nights and weekends, holidays, birthdays, school recitals and anniversary dinners were willingly sacrificed at the altar of some intangible but infinitely worthy higher cause. This was the con. Convincing myself that there was nowhere I’d rather be was just a coping mechanism. I can see that now. It wasn’t really important. Or of any consequence at all really. How could it be? We were just shifting product. Our product, and the clients. Just meeting the quota.”

Could that have been his understandably stark end-of-life perspective, or a legitimate warning to all who put pleasing the client and the company before their own wellbeing? And is this exclusive to the advertising industry?

Pushing yourself – or others – past their limits isn’t sustainable. Burnout, resentment, and backstabbing are common symptoms of work cultures that expect everyone work at a break-neck pace. But some of the most successful organizations recognize that productivity, profits and personal fulfillment are intertwined. Such a corporate mindset is often identified as “good work.”

Multiple Intelligences author, Howard Gardner defines good work as a combination of the three Es: excellence, ethics, and engagement. When what we do becomes good work, we love what we do at every level: we feel competent, happy, and that our efforts have meaning.

[PODCAST: What is Good Work?]

How Can Leaders Create a Culture of Good Work?

Creating a workplace that embraces the good work concept must start from the top. When Daniel Goleman spoke with Gardner in his Leadership: A Master Class video series, he asked him: What would a business leader look like who exemplified good work? Here’s an excerpt from their discussion.

Gardner: A business leader who exemplified good work is somebody who understood himself or herself, understood the corporation or company that they were in very well, knew something about their history, understood the domain and had some sense of the mega-trends going on in the world. You cannot be an excellent leader unless you’ve thought about this kind of knowledge, so that’s excellence.

Engaged means they really love their work. They want to do it. Their energy crystallizes other people, and the other people on their team love them and want to be with them. Charisma doesn’t hurt, but you ought to be able to inspire people even if you’re not charismatic, because of the way you behave.

And a person doing good work is someone who is always trying to do the right thing. The right thing, of course, involves the self, and it involves the company. But if it’s only about advancing the company, then it cannot be ethical. There are many things we could do to advance the company that are bad for the company in the long run, or bad for society.

Goleman: Well, I think I need to push back a little. Did I hear you say that you can’t be a good leader if all you care about is promoting the company?

Gardner: Of course you need to promote the company, otherwise you shouldn’t be the leader. But if you’re promoting the company at all costs, you’re not thinking about how the workers are being affected, what happens to the company in the long run, what are the externalities. If you’re not thinking about the people that might be hurt by what you do, then you certainly would not be an ethical leader, and it’s a continuing conversation. You never get to be ethical or not. There’s always an effort to try to figure out what is the right thing in the broader picture, and whom we respect over the long run.

Don’t Wait to Make a Change

If you find yourself in an organization or an industry that puts profit over people – and don’t know how to transition out of it – consider Gardner’s tips on developing a career using the good work model as a guide.

Decide what you really would like to spend your life doing. According to Howard, this is much more important than deciding what particular job to hold, as the employment landscape changes so quickly. Let’s say you went into journalism with plans to work for a newspaper or magazine. Those outlets may not exist in their traditional forms now, but you still might want to write about interesting things. You want to investigate and talk to people. So you have to say “Where could I carry that out?” and be very, very flexible about the venue and the milieu, but not flexible about what you really get a kick out of and where you excel.

Think about people whom you admire and respect. Then think about people whom you don’t want to be like. Consider why you admire certain people and why you’re repelled by others. If you can’t think of people you admire, that’s a warning sign. It’s not necessarily a warning sign about you; it’s a warning sign about the culture around you. Perhaps you’re in a situation where you can’t admire anybody at all, or the people you admire don’t do anything related to what you do.

Consider where you want to work. Then ask yourself, “Is this the kind of place where I can see myself in others and where I can see others in me?” For example: Say you have job offers from both a small startup company you believe in, and a large corporation with a worrisome reputation for treating employees unfairly. You might make five times more money in the latter position, but does that reflect who you are and where you want to be?

If you’re a coach working with people in career transition, help them approach their search through the good work lens by asking them these three questions:

  • How much of what you do now is good work?
  • What could you do to boost that percentage?
  • How could you develop your career to maximize good work?

Additional Resources

Good Work: Aligning Skills and Values

Today’s Leadership Imperative

The Executive Edge: An Insider’s Guide to Outstanding Leadership

Thriving on Change: The Evolving Leader’s Toolkit

The Competency Builder

The Coaching Program

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Distraction: How Americans Manage Stress

Avoiding Stress Doesn’t Help You Manage Stress

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Meditation: Breathing New Life into an Ancient Practice

California has always been open to the next new thing, whether a technology, a vintner’s innovation, or what the cultural winds blow in from over the Pacific. That’s how I first tried meditation, back when I was a student at the University of California in Berkeley, then the epicenter of the try-any-new-thing attitude.

As a competitive undergrad, my first impression of meditation was that it eased my worries. I used it as an anti-anxiety measure. Like a pill, I took it morning and evening. Those late in the day sessions proved another benefit: as a chronically sleep-deprived sophomore, I would nod off for a nap as soon as my meditation started.

When I went on to study psychology at Harvard, I did my doctoral research on how meditation helps us recover from stress. But I was ahead of the curve in my interest; my professors thought I was a bit batty to take a serious interest in what was then an exotic method.

Now, though, the meditation story has changed. Several decades of research, including state-of-the-art brain imaging, reveal that this simple method trains the mind and shapes the brain, with a basket of benefits that ranges from sharpened concentration to lower blood pressure. Medical clinics routinely teach meditation to patients with chronic diseases from arthritis to diabetes to help them live better with their symptoms. And businesses are offering their employees the chance to learn meditation in order to improve performance.

Meditation refers to a range of techniques, from mantra repetition to mindfulness, which all share a common cognitive method. It boils down to retraining attention. Research at Harvard has found that our minds wander on average 50% of the time, that is, when we’re trying to focus, our minds are elsewhere.

Meditation trains attention by having us focus on one target (such as a mantra or the breath). Then comes the crucial difference between meditation and other ways to relax, whether exercising or spacing out online: in meditation, when we notice our minds wandering, we bring them back to a mental target and keep them there. Then when it wanders again, repeat. And again and again.

Brain imaging studies of this simple mental process, done at Emory University, find that the mental circuitry for focusing on what’s important becomes stronger. Attention is a mental muscle, and every time we repeat this cycle it’s like lifting a weight: each repetition makes us just a bit stronger. And focusing on what’s important is what every leader, student, coach – anybody – needs to thrive.

The research shows that this mental gym pays off after the session, throughout our day: meditation enhances people’s ability to concentrate, to keep their minds from wandering too much, and to focus in general. “Every time my mind wanders off during a business meeting,” one executive told me, “I ask myself, What opportunity did I just miss?”

A bonus here is that the same strips of neurons that help us focus also are crucial for managing our distressing emotions. The longer people have been meditators, the better their bodies become at recovering from the agitation of stress.

The biological advantages from a faster physiological recovery from upsets include a stronger immune system, lower blood pressure, and more stable blood sugar levels, just to mention a few.

When researchers at the University of Wisconsin taught mindfulness to stressed-out workers at a biotech startup, they found remarkable changes after eight weeks (average daily practice time: 30 minutes). Mindfulness led to a shift in the centers that control moods: they went from anxious and stressed to upbeat and enthusiastic. Spontaneously, they recalled what inspired them about their work. And, to the researchers’ surprise, their mindfulness also resulted in a boost in immune effectiveness.

A caution, though, if you’re thinking of starting meditation. Many people expect that they will somehow experience a high during the session. But the practice is more like going to the gym: at first it can be a struggle, though it gets easier over time. Many first-timers report, for instance, that their minds are more wild than ever during meditation, actually a sign that they are finally paying attention to how often our minds wander.

The real payoffs come during your day, not necessarily during the meditation session. Don’t expect miracles; the changes are gradual and can be subtle. Dan Harris, the ABC news anchor, calls it “ten percent happier” in his account of why he meditates. But the improvements are real, as research studies verify.

The CEO of a construction firm, a meditator himself, asked me to share these methods with those working at his headquarters. Understandably many were dubious. But I approach the method as a way to train the mind, not as some woo-woo magic, and the science behind it brought people around enough to give it a try. The CEO later told me the most enthusiastic person turned out to be his head of HR; she organized an ongoing meditation group there. And she was initially one of the skeptics.

Now that I’m in my 60s, the finding I like best comes from Harvard Medical School: some parts of the brain that shrink with aging actually seem to grow larger and their neurons more densely connected in meditators!

This article originally appeared in The Private Journey Magazine.

Additional resources:

The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience

Relax: 6 Techniques to Lower Your Stress

Working with Mindfulness CD

Working with Mindfulness Ebooks

Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Skills

Bridging the Hearts and Minds of Youth 2012 and 2013 Conference Videos