photo credit: Stephen Brace

I was really pleased when Ellie used a picture of Eeyore on her post because I’ve always liked Eeyore.  I guess that’s because he was soooo gray that he seemed funny to me.  I never really thought of him as being depressed or depressing.  He was so extreme that he was endearing, though I wouldn’t actually want to have to work or live with him.

Ellie talked about changing into Eeyore, meaning that she could go from OK to gray in the blink of an eye.  She had been hijacked.  It can happen to all of us and does upon occasion.  Dr. Relly Nadler, CEO of True North Leadership, writes in What Was I Thinking? Handling the Hijack that the point is that rational thought has ceased and your amygdala has taken over.  Until, you consciously examine what has happened, as Ellie did in Ellie Just Morphed Into Eeyore – Now What’s That About??? you are out of control.

Our brains are constructed so that we don’t have to think when faced with a potentially life-threatening situation.  The stimulus bypasses the logical brain and goes right to the instinctual fight or flight response, thus the ability to morph into Eeyore in the blink of an eye.  That worked when we were cavemen and it was eat or be eaten.  It doesn’t work when we are at work.

Real Emotional Intelligence

Speaking of NOT being hijacked at work, in The Power of Getting Along, I talked about the value of being able to find common ground and work with people who aren’t like you to accomplish common goals.  While I was surfing, I found this great bit of wisdom for all of us.  In When to Argue,Brad Isaac was inspired by one of his kids’ arguments to suggest the following rules for getting along.  Before getting into any argument, ask yourself three questions:

1. What do I get if I win?
2. What do I get if I lose?
3. What is the cost of this argument?

If the answers to 1 and 2 are “nothing,” say “Ok” and walk away.  When you can do that, you are in control.  (If I can learn to do that, they may even canonize me BEFORE I die.  Canonization is what Catholics do to create saints.  Needless to say, you can’t be a saint until you die.  There are lots of other requirements, but that’s the first one.)  And even when there’s value to winning and/or no risk in losing, we’d all do well to consider the COST of arguing!  Think relationship, angst, time wasted.

I think that what Brad Isaac wrote is true wisdom.  How many of us have known in our hearts that this argument we’re having would have no effect at all.  It’s ground that we’ve covered over and over and yet we haven’t found a way to break the pattern.  It becomes habit.  The idea of replacing the habitual argument with a habitual examination of the value and/or cost of the argument is one of the abundance of right answers that Ellie wrote about this week.

The Lucky Environment

One of the places that we consistently are looking for right answers in is the area of success.  I talked in Persistent Perseverance about the myth of the “overnight success.”  There is another myth that is almost as pervasive.  It is the myth of self-sufficiency, the idea that any of us make it on our own.

In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcom Gladwell proposes that “people are products of their environments, for better or worse, and nobody succeeds alone.”  In this excellent book, he builds a convincing case that the luck of connections and the luck of available resources have significant effects on the power of the individual to succeed.  (Read more about Outliers:  The Story of Success)

Cesar Millan is a good example of this affect.  Although we don’t know very much about how Cesar built his business, we do know that he grew up in an environment filled with dogs.  As young as 13, he had figured out that he wanted to be the best dog trainer in the world.  At the time, he had no idea what that would mean.  He just knew that he had a great connection with dogs.

When he came to the US, he became a dog groomer.  Observing the behavior of the dogs that came in to be groomed, he noticed that their behavior was very different from the behavior of the dogs he had been with in Mexico.  Because he had run with packs of dogs as a boy, he had been able to observe their behavior and define the significant difference between them and the dogs in the US.  It was the luck of available resources (the packs of dogs he grew up with) that let him to develop his approach to successfully working with “any dog.”

All of us are where we are from a combination of luck, perseverance, finding and trying many answers and recovering from our emotional hijackings.

How have you gotten where you are today?  What were the things that contributed to your success?