How are you feeling right now?
Are you relaxed – got a coffee and a biscuit listening to the gentle sounds of the birds outside in your garden? Or maybe you are tense with your shoulders hunched up around yourself as you try to get five minutes peace in a busy diary schedule?
You would think that it is easy to work out if we are happy or sad, angry or calm, but we cycle through such a vast array of emotions throughout their lives it can be difficult to distinguish them from one another.
The emotional response
Emotions are not a simple experience. Every time you feel something your body initiates a physiological change, a chemical release and a behavioural response. This process involves multiple processes working together, including your major organs, neurotransmitters and the limbic system. Your limbic system is the most primordial part of your brain, thought to have first evolved in early mammals. It’s filled with ancient neural pathways that activate our emotions in response to stimuli and control our fight-or-flight response through the autonomic nervous system. (we’ve discussed this in more detail in earlier blogs)
This response evolved from a need to make decisions based on our emotions. As our body fills with adrenaline and our heart starts racing we prepare to react; do we stay to fight the bear that has come scavenging for food, or do we flee to somewhere safe? We can still feel the effects of this response today, despite the lack of bears!
When we are confronted for not doing something we promised (like the dishes, or that piece of work) we actually feel the same fight-or-flight response as our adrenaline starts to flood our system. Our heart rate and breathing increases, the fine hairs on our arms stand on end, and our hands feel clammy as we decide if we are going to stay and argue or if we are going to escape to the safety of a different room.
The biological sensations in our bodies in response to emotions can feel very similar to one another. Imagine your palms sweating, feeling your cheeks warm as they flush red, and your heart pounding in your chest. You could feel this because you are sitting nervously in the dentist’s waiting room, or you could be excited as you wait to see your loved ones for the first time after lockdown – the physiological reaction is the same.
The interpretation of emotions is our logical brain rationalising these responses and describing them as feelings. We take into consideration the context and label our emotions accordingly.
However, we don’t all do this the same way. Because our bodies cause different floods of chemicals in response to different environmental triggers, each person naturally reacts to situations differently.
Have you ever seen someone who is being berated in a meeting but facing the onslaught with nothing more than a slightly raised eyebrow? Or watched as someone finds out some bad news but keeps their composure?
You are sure that you would have raised your voice or burst into tears, but our responses are defined by how our neurons are networked together. Our past experiences and belief patterns (habit loops) influence our brain chemistry and therefore our physiological responses, which in turn determine how we react to various situations – like largescale change in our ways of working, or surprising us by showing up at the front door unannounced.
At times our emotions can seem like an irrational response, but our brains have carefully evolved these mechanisms with just one target – keeping us alive. While we interpret different emotions as positive or negative, the most ancient parts of the human brain developed them on the principle that we must survive. We evolved emotions as a means of communicative function and to help us navigate social interactions and our environment safely: they are designed to protect us.
Evolution and emotions
Our fear responses were originally a survival tactic that warned us of potential dangers, such as our innate unease around spiders and snakes. Then there is the feeling of disgust, which warns of foods or other substances that may be dangerous.
Our other emotions are responses to social interactions that keep us part of a group, because we are fundamentally a social species, and throughout our evolution have relied on our tribe to help us survive by working together to find food and shelter.
Anger is a response to perceived social threats or a signal of dominance, pride can help us to boost our social status, while shame is intended to decrease our standing within a group. These emotions maintain the social balance of our environment safely: they are designed to protect us.
These emotions maintain the social balance of our tribe – who we follow, who we trust, who we care about.
The fundamental emotions that motivate us individually are almost always sadness and happiness.
Sadness results from loss and serves the biological purpose of motivating a person to recover that loss, whether it is a young child searching for their mother in a supermarket, or trying hard to get a new job after being dismissed.
But the ultimate human emotion is happiness, and we are all in search of it. When you’re sitting around a campfire, safe in the countryside with some close friends and good food, you feel happy because you have found the resources that your primitive brain is seeking. Our species is drawn so much to happiness because this emotion is our brain’s reward system for finding environments where we are free from threat.
Protection vs. Growth
And these are not just for non-work situations. Our emotional responses to change at work are just as impactful. It essentially means that your feelings/emotions about change can put you into a protection or a growth chemical state.
Back to the primordial aspects, by necessity, being in growth means we are “open” to the environment in order to assimilate those elements that support your vitality and development (i.e. make you stronger to increase chance of survival). In contrast, when in protection we are “closed” to wall-off a toxic or threatening environment (i.e. stop anything threatening our survival). Since we cannot be open and closed at the same time, it means we cannot be in growth and protection at the same time.
Now, there are two key points I want to pull out of these – and to relate this back to us and my previous blogs.
As individuals if we see change as something to be feared, we automatically put ourselves in a closed position – we are now in survival mode, waiting for the threat to pass. We are not capable of growth in this position. That means there is no desire, nah, there is no ability to interact and collaborate - we are not going to be finding solutions, learning - we shut ourselves down; we become insular and singular – hiding, waiting for the bear to move away.
Evolution is limited when we perceive ourselves as individuals. That is not what we were designed to be – as a species, we are designed to be a collective – to be part of a community, to give as well as take – all to increase our chances of survival. We need to have these multiple levels of interaction to enable us to feel connected and safe. Being an individual is unnatural and make us more susceptible to any threat that may harm our survival. In contrast when we come together in a coherent community, that is when the real evolution will manifest. When we function in harmony entire new levels of thinking will collectively emerge. Our innate superpowers that include self-awareness, compassion, altruism, and most importantly… our ability to adapt are now accessible. Evolution and adaptation go hand in hand.
Let us not forget that crisis/need ignites evolution. With the circumstances we find ourselves in today, in regard to the challenge to keep a competitive advantage, the levels of organisational change and the need to adapt not only our tech, but the skills and processes that underpin that; we need to be a collective. When I look around the organisation we all call our tribe right now I see so much siloed thinking and activity. Organisational evolution works exactly the same as human evolution and one thing that will forever be true – silos and transformation – Do. Not. Mix.
We need to find a way to attach to change a positive emotion – to see it as an opportunity to arise and express our fullest potential as each individual within a collective tribe (organisation). We can rise to the challenge, if we work together… it is our moral duty and profound personal responsibility to ensure the tribe’s survival.
So, if you’ve been sticking with me for the past couple of weeks, you’ll know we are a nymph mid-metamorphosis aiming to become a gorgeous Dragonfly, aware that as we adapt and grow, we must shed our skin, and then harden our new form before repeating the cycle again and again to edge us towards that shared vision.
“Growth is never by mere chance; its is the result of forces working together” – James Cash Penney
We’ve also reflected on the fact that we need to take lots of small steps to make these big changes, and that we need to be considerate of our audience as we do those as so we can take everyone on the journey with us.
So far so good, if we then overlay the learning of today – that nicely brings us to the concept of collective action. We have to be in this together, we have to be willing to include others in our thinking, to breakdown existing barriers, to work across areas, to get over hierarchies, to seek out like minded, or even contra-minded views to harness for the tribe’s benefit – to support each evolutionary step, each exoskeleton molt to ensure our survival – to ensure our wings grow and we can fly away…
So are you feeling for the future?
Until next time….
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