Invisible strength: Building Emotional Resilience
Being busy
Our Western society attributes great value to accomplishing tasks and to being busy. This often means we’re productive, we can show a concrete return for our efforts, and we can demonstrate our value. It’s critical for the success, viability and sustainability of organisations, companies, governments and initiatives of all kinds.
Reflection and somatic responses
However, focusing only on accomplishing is not enough on its own to help ensure that our conscious and unconscious decisions and judgments go beyond knee-jerk reactions or habits. Like building a house, the key work goes on underneath what shows on the surface – silently and invisibly. Easiest to name is the work of reflection: enquiring into ‘what’s here’, what’s going on contextually, what’s happening for us emotionally and somatically (our physical sensations and our somatic responses are the real basis of how we feel emotionally, how we’re responding, and the meaning we’re making of a situation – and therefore the perspectives we’re shaping and the assumptions, judgments and beliefs we’re applying – in any given situation).
Focusing and the Felt Sense
These somatic responses are therefore where we really need to look if we’re to mine the insights inherent in a given situation. Amongst the possible ways of identifying, surfacing and exploring those somatic responses is, for example, Focusing, an approach developed by philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin, which shines the spotlight on the Felt Sense – the body’s experience, how ever vague or obscure. My own experience of Focusing is that, especially with the right Focusing partner, and also when I’m alone ‘in the field’ it allows the most profound insights to emerge, simply by calling attention to my physical experience.
If I feel a pang in my stomach, a stiffness in my legs, or a sudden impulse to move my arm, where does that come from, and what message does it carry? That I’m in danger, under some sort of threat, or that I need to run away from something? How do my instantaneous behaviours, or my tone of voice, respond?
Building Emotional Resilience
My practice in Focusing has been invaluable as I engage in ever more depth with the programme on Building Emotional Resilience, run by Adeptify. It explores the emotional foundations of resilience, building the awareness that enables conscious choice. It puts some emphasis on triggers – those instances or moments which elicit a negative emotional response or emotional sensitivity – a ripple of fear, a rigidity of thinking, an instantaneous judgement of a person’s behaviour or of the person themselves, a disproportionately angry outburst.
A long-anchored pattern
That response is, in turn, a manifestation of a somatic response that underpins and accounts for our behaviour. It may well be a very long-anchored pattern – the result of something that may have happened for us long, long ago, when we chose (unconsciously) to deal with the challenge in a particular way (perhaps to protect ourselves).
The Subject-Object Shift: being had or having?
The challenge has converted itself into a bodily experience (think of the physical response elicited ad infinitum by the memory of having been bitten by a fierce dog) and has since become embedded as a fixed part of our repertoire of behaviours, whether appropriate or not to the circumstances. We live it out unconsciously – it ‘has’ us through assumptions, beliefs and impulses arising from our unconscious (in the sense of Bob Kegan’s Subject-Object shift) rather than our ‘having’ it – making a conscious choice through reflection and exploration. It not only gets in the way of more appropriate responses, but it diminishes our resilience because it puts us into autopilot and inhibits aware choice -and decision-making.
Leaders
I see Subject show up in leaders who struggle to step into their authority, who resist innovation despite claiming it, who fail to plan for their own succession, who push hard for results without curiosity about what might produce sustainable results.
Such leaders are fragile and their leadership may be unsustainable. Exploring and building their emotional resilience can surface what would otherwise have been hidden, in the process strengthening and sustaining them, and enriching their achievements. It’s work that is neither easy nor quick. You have to really want to do it, and you need to be purposeful about doing it. There will inevitably be uncomfortable bumps in the road, ambiguities, uncertainties, stuck moments, dilemmas, things you’d rather not see, perhaps, which may be eased and smoothed by working with a buddy, a Thinking Partner or a coach, or a community: all people who share the journey, who won’t judge, but who will notice and bring thoughtful curiosity.
Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash
