Communication Archives - Mindful Call

Emotional resilience

Anyone who watches the news knows that the world is not in a good place now. With escalating conflicts, political and economic uncertainty, and environmental devastation. The climate crisis is already changing the lives of many people across the world; from coping and recovering from extreme weather, wildfires, floods, and droughts. As well as the practical and physical health responses to these disasters, providing psychological and emotional help, support and guidance is now an important focus for researchers and public health professionals.

On an individual level, we all encounter the challenges that life throws at us at work and in our personal lives. We cope with adversity in different ways; some people seem to flow through difficulties relatively unscathed, while others appear to crumble under the burden. As with many things in life, it’s not just the event, it’s how we react and relate to the difficulty that makes a difference.

In material science, resilience is the ability of a material to absorb energy when it’s bent, compressed, or stretched and release energy and bounce back as the force subsides. Similarly, developing emotional resilience allows us to absorb adversity, stress, and pressure by being more flexible and skilful in managing our thoughts, emotions, behaviour, and relationships. This allows us to emerge stronger, wiser, and with a positive outlook on life.

Before going through what it means to practise resilience, it’s useful to explore what typically happens when we encounter difficulty. For example, an email arrives with some bad news at work. The first thing we normally do is react unconsciously. Emotions are much faster than thoughts, so strong feelings like anger or anxiety are the first to appear. At the same time, our body may become tight and tense as the flight-or-fight response is triggered. Then thoughts appear that reflect the feelings, for instance, thoughts about who’s to blame, self-criticism, or worry. As we entertain these thoughts two things happen. The first is that our attention on critical and worrying thoughts amplifies feelings of anger and anxiety. The second is that we identify with the whole state which includes the emotions, agitated thoughts, and physical tension, which intensifies how we feel. When we are stressed or experience strong emotions like anger or anxiety, we lose the inner resources, like thinking clearly, that would otherwise help us respond more skilfully, so we tend to react automatically, which rarely serves us, other people, or the situation well.

Bringing resilience to the same situation requires some important missing ingredients. The key one is our awareness and focus on what’s happening in the present moment. So, we notice, acknowledge, and allow the feelings that arise in our bodies as we start to read the email. We may even label the emotions, for instance, “There’s some anger and anxiety”. When thoughts appear, we’re ready to observe them, maybe even noting them as, “Angry, self-critical and worrying thoughts”, or “Useful and constructive thoughts”. Rather than automatically identifying with the state, we know that we’re not our thoughts and emotions, which makes it easier to let go of limiting thoughts and beliefs. This stops the emotions from being amplified by our thoughts in a vicious spiral. Realizing the challenging situation, we can create some inner space by taking a brief pause, for instance, by taking a couple of aware breaths and relaxing tension in the body.

This gives us a more open perspective that allows us to respond more flexibly and skilfully. This does not mean that we become passive victims and accept things that are wrong or unfair in the world without acting. Quite the reverse; from an aware place we can use the energy from the emotions to drive us to act and explore a range of solutions with an attitude of realistic optimism. By responding in this way, we are better placed to act skilfully and appropriately.

Cultivating and practising mindfulness skills can help us develop resilience in all areas of our lives. Other mindfulness skills like practising patience, gratitude, and kindness are also relevant and useful. Having access to caring friends and family in a support network is also important. All of this relies on using the right skills when challenges arise. Although it’s not easy, the next time you experience a difficult event or situation, start by quickly tuning into your body and how it feels, before being drawn into worrying and angry thoughts, and being more skilful in how you respond and see what difference that makes.

Suggested weekly practice

Explore what happens in your body, emotions, and mind when you next experience a challenging or stressful event.
When you react, take a moment to reflect on whether how you reacted served you, other people, or the situation. Did you notice that there was a choice of options, including one that may have been a more skilful response?
Reflect on the health of your social support network, especially given the limitations of the pandemic, and take positive action if it needs improvement.

Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware. There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then close your eyes while this meditation plays to explore and experience using skills that help develop emotional resilience.

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Roles we play

In 1971 Philip Zimbardo and his team of psychologists carried out an experiment on college students at Stamford University. The purpose of this infamous research was to explore the causes of conflict between guards and prisoners. The participants were randomly assigned these different roles and the guards were told to produce a set of rules for how they controlled the prisoners. Even though the guards knew they were being observed, their behaviour towards the prisoners became increasingly oppressive, abusive, and dehumanizing. Several prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns and the whole experiment was stopped after six days. Although the ethical foundation and objectivity of the experiment have since been criticised, it did demonstrate that normal human behaviour can change dramatically when people have roles with power and authority over others. On the positive side, the experiment led to some improvements in how US prisons were managed.

As Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” We all play different roles in our lives: as a child, adult or parent, student or teacher, brother or sister, wife, husband or partner, friend, colleague, manager or leader. Roles are about our relationship with others and how we contribute to the values and goals of our family, social life, organisation, or society. Defined roles at work are useful as they provide structure, purpose and shape what we do and how we work together.

We all have different skills, knowledge, talents, and levels of energy. For some people, their role can dominate, define, and limit who they are – as if they’ve become unconscious of their broader sense of self. We’ve probably all experienced this happening to ourselves or to someone else. When people take their role too seriously and totally identify with it, natural human relations become distorted. As part of our language, human beings can become patients, consumers, passengers and employees, which not only limits who they are but also the relationship between the individual and the person in the functional role. It’s not that these collective nouns are not useful, it’s that we fail to notice the alienating, biased, and de-humanising power that is implicit in them.

Work hierarchies can sometimes cause people to hold beliefs and behave in ways that are limiting to the people around them. For instance, if I’m your manager then it follows that you must be inferior to me, which makes me superior. One insight from social psychology is that behind the need for superiority is the fear of not being good enough. One interesting thing to notice is what changes when you walk through the door at work, or log onto your computer. Are you the same open, kind and fun individual when you are out with friends at the weekend, or have you morphed into a limited sense of who you think you should be at work?

So, what has all this to do with mindfulness?

Roles play a powerful function in our lives, so being aware of how much we identify with our thoughts and feelings about our roles makes a difference. After all, we’re not our thoughts or emotions and we’re not the roles we play.

With awareness, we’re more likely to catch ourselves playing a role, which creates the space and freedom to remain authentic to who we are. We can also bring kindness and compassion into how we interact with others who are in roles. For instance, when we talk with the person serving us in a shop, or café; a cleaner or road sweeper, we can see them as much broader than the role they are playing, as a fully rounded human being with a complex inner life just like our own.

One illustration of the limiting nature of roles is to reflect on how we feel when asked at a party what we do. This may be okay if we’re something like a professional athlete, celebrated artist, or film director; but for most of us, we feel as if someone is just about to put us in a box, which limits who we really are.

A healthy approach is to put roles in their proper place. They’re useful and they’re important, but they don’t have to determine or limit who we are, which is always far greater than the roles we play. By creating an authentic space around our roles, we allow the freedom to embrace the broader humanity in everyone we encounter, playing our roles skilfully on the world’s stage; with awareness, kindness, and compassion, as we explore what it means to be human.

Suggested weekly practice

Reflect on the roles you play in your life; how much you identify with them and whether or not they sometimes limit who you are.
Observe if anything changes when you walk through the door at your workplace. Do you feel as open and expansive or has some limitation and constraint crept in?
Bring the same openness, kindness, and compassion to everyone you encounter who is playing a role, from the chief executive to the cleaner.

Guided practice

Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice to explore a role you play with awareness and gain insights into the thoughts, feelings, and relationship you have with this role.

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Working skilfully

Mindfulness is about working skilfully with whatever arises in our present-moment experience. Although we tend to imagine the past, present, and future as a combined range of time that we can access, in reality, we are only alive to our experience in the present moment. We can explore thoughts about the past through our memory and have thoughts that anticipate the future. Sometimes this may be intentionally “thinking on purpose”, for instance planning a holiday, and at other times we unintentionally drift off in thought when our minds wander. Working skilfully means bringing the right skills and attitudes to our experience.

In theory, we all have the capacity and opportunity to work skilfully with each passing moment. The reality is that we are often not as skilful as we could be. Several obstacles that make this difficult:

The first is that we may not be as aware and awake as we could be, so the moment passes us by.
When we’re under stress or are not fully aware, we tend to react automatically, rather than responding skilfully.
When we react, we often avoid or resist anything that appears as a threat or is seen as unpleasant, in our experience.
And to complicate matters even further, we tend to automatically identify with our thoughts and emotions, which gives them a power they may not deserve.

So, what are some of the mindfulness skills and attitudes that allow us to work more skillfully with our experience?

Attention: Our experience is where our attention is, whether this is listening to birdsong, in an app on our Smartphone, or off in thought in our heads. In the modern world, most of us are the servants, rather than the masters of our own attention. Knowing where our attention is at any moment is a fundamental skill.
Awareness: If attention is where our experience is directed, awareness is what we notice in the present moment. Ways to improve awareness include getting a good night’s sleep, eating healthily, exercising, and practising mindfulness during the day. This could be a simple ten-minute breathing practice at the beginning of the day, walking mindfully, or listening to a guided meditation.
Presence: This is about grounding ourselves in the present, by connecting with our body and senses, which are only ever in the here and now.
Thinking: Around half of our waking lives our attention wanders into automatic thoughts, which can be creative and useful but are more likely to be negative and limiting. Noticing when our mind wanders is a core mindfulness skill.
Emotions: Working skilfully with emotions as they arise, acknowledging what we’re feeling, and allowing them to be just as they are so they can play out and dissolve naturally, rather than keeping them going with thoughts about the emotion.
Responding: There is always a choice in the present moment if we are open and aware enough to notice. This allows us to choose from alternative responses that serve the situation better, rather than reacting automatically without any options.
Acceptance: Old ways of coping can sometimes lead us to avoid or resist what we experience. When this happens, we try bringing an attitude of openness and acceptance to the situation, which can change our relationship with it.
Space: Creating a bit of space and separation between our thoughts and feelings and who we are means we’re less likely to react and automatically overly identify with thoughts and feelings. By creating space, we also have greater mental clarity and access to more inner resources, which includes exploring choices and options for responding skilfully.
Kindness: Although we sometimes treat this as a scarce resource, there is no limit to bringing kindness and compassion to ourselves and others. Kindness, compassion, empathy, and understanding are at the heart of all good relationships, for individuals, and wider society.

One useful outcome of working skilfully is that it can help us to rise out of self-imposed limitations; habitual reactions and stuck feelings of the unconscious background of who we are; like an aircraft rising through the clouds into a clear open sky, letting go of heaviness and limitation; open to new possibilities.

We work with whatever arises in our experience. Sometimes we do this skilfully and at other times not so skilfully. The only time we have any real freedom and flexibility to make a difference is in the present moment, which is where cultivating mindfulness makes a real difference, reducing stress, anxiety, and low mood, improving communication and relationships, and helping us live with greater ease.

Suggested weekly practice

Appreciate the benefits of working skilfully in terms of wellbeing, for instance, reduced stress or anxiety, as well as how you perform at work and in your relationships.
Congratulate yourself every time you manage to respond skilfully rather than react automatically during the week.
Use curiosity to notice the link between being present and the ability to work skilfully.

Guidance

Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice to explore working skilfully with your experience.

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Listening

Many of us take our ability to listen for granted. We listen to the sound of conversation, music, birdsong, and traffic. Our ability to hear evolved over millions of years and goes all the way back to early fish who used a hair cell to detect changes in water pressure. Over time, special small bones evolved to form the inner ear that mammals, including humans, have today. For animals, ears are useful for sensing danger, communication, and, in some cases, navigating the environment. The ear also provides an important sense of balance. Sound is a wave of vibrations that travel through the air or another medium. Humans can hear frequencies from 20 to 20,000 Hertz, or cycles per second, which varies from one individual to another and declines with age. Some animals like dolphins and bats can hear up to 100,000 Hertz, while elephants can hear sounds as low as 14 Hertz. The Great Grey Owl, one of the largest owls in North America, has amazing hearing and can detect the heartbeat of a vole through several feet of snow while resting in a tree.

Hearing is the raw sense of picking up sounds, while listening occurs when we make sense of and apply meaning as we perceive what we hear. As social animals, our ability to listen, understand, and communicate is so important that the frequency range we hear may well have evolved to optimise around the sound of the human voice. So, we have this amazing sense of hearing combined with powerful processing in our brain, which changes sound into meaning.

If only we could simply listen to what other people are saying. As we all know, simply listening can be a bit of a challenge. In a typical conversation, we may be listening to what someone is saying with “half an ear”, while also getting drawn into our own internal dialogue. Interestingly, conscious thinking works by semi-verbalizing in our own heads. For instance, asking, “Where did I put my keys?” causes related thoughts to emerge from memory. In the same way, when people talk through an anecdote, for example, travel problems on holiday, we’ll experience similar anecdotes arising in our own minds. We then experience a strong impulse to share what’s on our mind, before we forget, and the conversation moves on. At other times we get so caught up in our own thoughts, we completely fail to hear what’s being said. This is not helped by the fact that we can listen and process information much faster than someone can speak, which means we tend to anticipate and think ahead. On top of this, adding distracting technology like smartphones into the mix it’s no wonder that we sometimes feel ignored.

Listening mindfully means:

Setting the intention to listen mindfully with open awareness and kindness.
Putting aside your inner dialogue and focusing your attention on the sound of the speaker’s voice and the words being said.
Giving your undivided attention – if your mind wanders, bring your attention back to listening mindfully.
Removing any obvious distractions like screens and smartphones, if you need to communicate properly.
Being patient and allowing the other person to finish what they’re saying, without interrupting or jumping to conclusions.
Using curiosity to really listen – as if your life depended on it.
Not judging, or imposing limitations on the other person – allowing them to be the full and complex human they really are.
Noticing your habits and impulses, for instance, wanting to interrupt with your advice or anecdote.
Acknowledging any insights or intuitions that emerge through non-verbal communication, as well as your own emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations, without being distracted by them.

There are many benefits of listening mindfully: you build better relationships by connecting with people and bringing out the best in them; people feel appreciated, so are happier and more productive; people feel heard, so they work better together, and with greater understanding, the right things get done.

Suggested weekly practice

When listening to someone, try simply focusing on the sound of their voice and see what happens.
Notice what’s going on in your own mind when you are listening. For instance, the impulse to share what you want to say, rather than listening properly.
See if you can let go of impatience when listening and bring kindness, openness, and generosity to the other person.

Guidance

Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice to explore your sense of hearing and what it means to listen mindfully.

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Working with anger

Anger is a powerful emotion that everyone experiences. Some people only get angry a few times a week and others experience this emotion every day. Anger can vary in intensity from mild annoyance to irritation to raging out of control and arises when we perceive a threat to ourselves, people we care about, our values, identity, or property. We can be aware of feeling angry in the moment, and also unaware that this emotion is driving our behaviour. For instance, we can act in a passive-aggressive way without being fully aware that our behaviour is driven by anger.
Like other emotions, anger tells us that something needs attention, drives us to act, and communicates how we feel to others. Often seen as negative, anger is the most powerful of all emotions in positively motivating us to act, whether this is righting an injustice, standing up for ourselves, or pursuing our goals.

When anger gets too intense, or out of control, it impedes decision-making, challenges relationships, and is physically unhealthy. People who regularly experience high levels of anger are more prone to the symptoms of stress, insomnia, high blood pressure and have a greater risk of stroke and heart disease.

Throughout human evolution, anger has served us as a motivating emotion of the fight-or-flight response when faced with a threat. So, when a dangerous animal appeared our body was quickly primed for action. The trouble is that evolution has not kept pace with changes in human lifestyle, so the threat response can be triggered even when it’s not necessary. For example, when we’re stuck in a traffic jam.

Like other emotions, anger involves thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. For example, imagine that you booked an important hour-long meeting and also sent an email reminder to a colleague the day before. Now fifteen minutes have gone, and he’s still not turned up. You messaged him, but there is no reply. “Where was he? He couldn’t have forgotten, as I sent the reminder. How could he be so inconsiderate and let you down like this?” You’re frowning, feeling annoyed and your body is tense and warm. You think, “This is not acceptable. I’m really going to have a go at him for wasting my time like this. Who does he think he is?” In this example, you’ve entertained negative thoughts, felt anger, experienced the physical symptoms of stress, and changed your opinion about a work colleague. What if you later discovered that your colleague had dropped everything and rushed to the hospital as his daughter had a serious accident that morning?

So how can mindfulness help us work more skilfully with anger?

Ways of working mindfully with anger include:

Noticing anger as it arises. The quicker you notice, the easier it is to manage.
Being aware of changing physical sensations like some increased tension, warmth, or changes in facial expression, like frowning.
Noticing angry thoughts running through your head, which are often about who’s to blame.
Trying not to personalise the anger. For example, not saying to yourself, “I’m getting really irritated by this person”.
Instead, acknowledging the anger in a non-personal way and referring to the feeling in your body by saying internally, “There’s some frustration” or, “There’s irritation arising”, for example.
Being kind, compassionate, and open with yourself and other people involved if you can.
Validating whether the anger and intensity you’re experiencing is appropriate. For instance, feeling a little bit annoyed about a colleague not turning up for an important meeting is understandable.
Accepting the situation as it is. Maybe reframing the situation “as if you have chosen it” and, for instance, using the spare time not spent in the meeting as an opportunity to catch up on those important emails.
Bringing your attention and awareness to your body; connected and grounded in the present moment.
Taking some long, deep breaths and release any physical tension that has built up, as you allow the feeling of anger to take its natural course and release in its own time.
Then beyond the angry event, watch out for angry thoughts about the situation that, if entertained, will keep the anger going longer than necessary. This could be the same day, the same week, month, or years after the event.

Here are three useful quotes on anger:

“For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” Mark Twain.
“Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy”. Aristotle.

Anger is a powerful emotion that can be positive and useful, as well as negative and destructive. By learning to work more skilfully with anger we can improve our relationships and lead a healthier, happier, and more productive life.

Suggested weekly practice

Noticing when anger arises and seeing whether or not it serves you or others. Are you simply reacting, or is it the most skilful and appropriate response in the situation?
Becoming aware of what parts of your body tighten up when you are angry. This could be around your face, jaw, forehead, neck, shoulders, or belly. Notice what happens in your body when anger arises.
Using curiosity to notice a tendency to hold onto anger for a long time after the triggering event. Was this useful? How did you manage to keep the anger energised? What thoughts were around and were they unresolved and repetitive?

Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice to explore working with anger.

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