Mindset Monday - Emotional Baseline for Decision Making Power

This is episode 264 of the Empowered Team podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider.

Welcome. Welcome to the Empowered Team podcast is another episode of Mindset Monday. Today we are talking about the emotional baseline for decision making power. So I am your guide in unlocking your full potential today because we love to dive into the strategies for high performers, and this I think is one of them. I've thought about this a lot, so I'm going to riff on this one today. The emotional baseline for decision making power. What does that even mean? So let's do it. So first of all, I think this is such an important topic because there's so many times that we make decisions in our lives from, in, from an emotional space that may not serve the decision, may not serve our future, may not serve ourselves in the moment. And this is a leadership skill that is so important, especially when we're making decisions where other people's lives are being impacted. Maybe it's our children, maybe it's employees, maybe it's our friends or family, whoever it is. So what we want to do today is really explore this concept of an emotional baseline. What is it to have an emotional baseline and then perhaps discover your own emotional baseline simply to be able to make better decisions in your life? Who doesn't want that? Better decisions and maybe more effective, efficient, maybe they're even quicker as we practice it. So let's define what an emotional baseline is. First and foremost, to me, an emotional baseline is this space. Is this almost like a platform of where we feel really confident in being able to think. So an emotional space. Think of it like a platform, an energetic space where we feel really confident in our thinking abilities. The reason this is important is because if we're feeling stressed out, if we're feeling fearful, if we're feeling overwhelmed, then what happens is that our blood flow and the part of the brain that gets really active is not the thinking part of our brain. It's actually our limbic system. It's our primal brain. So, so when I'm defining this emotional baseline, it's important to really understand that it's an energetic feeling. What am I feeling? How, how stable do I feel? How certain do I feel? How confident do I feel in my ability to think right now, in my ability to decision make? So that's what I'd like us to look at as an emotional baseline. And the reason this really Matters is, is because of what, how hijacked we become when our brain is primarily in the limbic system, primarily in that area where if we're angry and we might be in fight orf flight, if we are scared again, fight orf flight, if we are overly excited, we might be a little too high in that, in that emotional space to be thinking clearly. So this is why it ends up being very important that you understand yourself well enough. This is why we're doing the self mastery. We understand ourselves well enough to make a decision about whatever the decision that's needed, and we understand ourselves well enough to know what emotional space we operate most confidently in or we have most certainty in. So what does this even look like? I can say for certainty that now, and this didn't wasn't always the case, that now, if I am stressed out, if I am upset or angry, and there is an urgent question on my plate, I will put it off for at least an hour, sometimes until the next day. If that decision gives me anxiety, if that decision is impacting a number of other people, if it impacts my business greatly, if it impacts somebody that I employ, I'm going to let it sit. I'm going to make sure that I either wait until I'm at my emotional baseline or I'm going to give myself the space or what I need to get back to my emotional baseline. If I was lower or if I was much higher, whatever that looks like. So I'd like to invite you to consider, first and foremost, what is your emotional baseline? What is it? Is it you feeling confident? Is it you feeling stable? Does it have more of a low frequency or vibration? So would you, would you be kind of relaxing on the couch? Is that, is that where you're at your best emotional baseline for thinking? Is it when you are driving or having a shower? Is that, are those the times you tend to think the best? So if you're not sure about what this emotional baseline looks like, then go back for some evidence. Some evidence of when do I tend to think the best? Is it on a walk? Is it when I'm talking to my spouse? Is it when I have reassurance? Is it when I've had some successes or when do you tend to feel that you have your best thinking? And then you look at, okay, what emotions were surrounding my best thinking and what did I do to support or create those emotions? So those can be some questions that you ask yourself to discover. Where is your emotional baseline? The reason that I brought this topic to you today is that Years and years ago. This is 30 years ago when I started working with high performers in sport and then high performers in business. And I started to notice there was a difference in the people who were the most successful. The people who were the most successful had just as many awful things happening in their lives as I did or other people did. But I noticed that the people who weren't as successful, they still had awful things going on. So did the successful people. But what was the difference? The difference was that the people who weren't as successful were focusing a lot of their time and their energy on the thing that was awful. And what it meant is that their emotional state was typically more volatile. It could be very low. It could be not bad, it could be very high. They tend to tended to be more volatile where the people who are more successful had a level of what I've referred to in the past of as emotional intelligence. There's some great. There's a great book called Emotional Intelligence 2.0. And this emotional intelligence, I didn't know what it was at the time, but now when I look back, is that those people who are high performing weren't allowing themselves to be all over the map emotionally. Now, I want to be clear about this. It doesn't mean they were not feeling a full spectrum of emotions. It doesn't mean they weren't processing that full spectrum of emotions. But what it does mean is that what they were bringing to other people and what they were bringing to their work, their decision making and whatever their focus was, was not all over the spectrum. They were staying within a zone that was more clearly defined, likely because they had the support in order to stay in that zone. They may have had the physical support, the emotional support from family, the coaching support, and those are all those secret weapons that high performers use in order to keep them dialed in. And then thereby one of the amazing byproducts is decision making, so that they are then more effective with decision making. Someone told me once years ago that people who are high performers make make decisions faster. And the more I've experienced high performance myself in my personal life, but also with the people that I work with, the more I've experienced it. I don't believe that it's that high performers make decisions faster because they just act very quickly. I think they act very quickly because they've had the practice. They act very quickly because they've either made high performance decisions over and over, or they act quickly as well because they are able to stay in an emotional space that's optimal for thinking that emotional space, that emotional baseline that they are able to continue to have better confidence in their thinking abilities and decision making abilities. So what can affect your emotional baseline? Now if you're anything like me, you've had a lot of curveballs thrown at you. It can be from family, it can be from business, whatever it is. But most of us are stressed by some key things. I'm going to go through the top emotional triggers. High levels of stress from work, personal life, external factors, circumstances like Covid that you just didn't predict. And then they lead to responses such as anxiety or frustration or irritability or even overwhelm or maybe it's a conflict. You're dealing with other humans in your life and there's some sort of disagreement or conflict that can be an emotional trigger. And when you think of these, as I'm saying them, what do these do to you? What does stress do to you? Does it make you go and hide and get sleepy? Does stress make you really agitated and angry? So when I'm saying some of these most common triggers that are emotional triggers, what do you tend to do in that? Because when you know this and you know yourself really well, that's the step to self mastery. When you understand yourself and your tendencies, then you can either support yourself or make a different decision. So conflict or disagreements is another change or uncertainty. So we see that in a move I moved a year and a half ago and before that I had moved two years prior. That created a lot of change, it created a lot of uncertainty. We also moved my mother in law in with us because she had Alzheimer's. So not only was there a move, there was a new family member moving in and then we've got the stacking effect of having Alzheimer's as well. So that level of change and uncertainty was a really big emotional trigger for me. Now let's add a few other factors that can be emotional triggers. Your own negative selft talk, your own self thoughts that are going on that might be beating yourself up, that might not be supporting the direction that you want to go. Also we've got traumatic events. So something that's happened, maybe it's a car accident, the loss of a loved one, or even the memory of traumatic events. If there's post traumatic stress, then that can be something that's bringing you back into the experience of the trauma even though it has passed. Social comparison. We live in a day and age of social media and we are constantly looking at other people. What does that look like when we think that we're not measuring up. And that brings on a level of stress which can cause us to go into emotional states that wouldn't have otherwise been there if we hadn't been looking at whatever Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever you're looking at. And then we've got loneliness and isolation, which possibly wasn't as much of an issue that we're aware of prior to Covid. And then Covid comes along and it isn't just an issue for those who have lost a loved one or are elderly. It becomes an issue for everyone. And so now there's much more awareness of people's isolation or perhaps loneliness. And I'm not talking about solitude. Solitude is that wonderful aloneness that we choose. And it's wonderful and can be amazing for thinking, thinking time for leaders. I'm talking about loneliness. We're literally longing for being with someone else that we either can't be with or we just we aren't with in that moment. And then the last one, which I've experienced a lot of in this last year, is physical health issues. This can be a real emotional trigger, and it certainly has been for me. It has affected me way more than I ever thought it would or could and has challenged me a number of times where I really have to practice this emotional baseline. Getting back to my emotional baseline before having a conversation. Getting back to my emotional baseline before I make the decision. Getting back to my emotional baseline before and allowing it to be there longer than I would have in the past because of an emotional illness that I've been going through. So these are a lot of factors that that affect our emotional baseline. And I hope you're noticing that there's external factors and there are internal factors. So the external factors being the circumstance or outside stressors, work stresses, and then the internal factors being the things that we're causing for ourselves. Maybe we're focusing on a traumatic event or maybe we have that negative self talk. So those are the differences there. But this practice that you're doing right now, listening to this podcast, understanding new concepts, thinking about how you think all of these things are contributing to your own growth, mindset, and that alone can contribute to you having the greater ability of managing your own emotional baseline. So what I would suggest here is the first thing we're going to do is take a look at your top three emotions when you understand the top three emotions that you tend to have on the regular. I'm saying if this was the average three things that you constantly experience, what are they? For me, I remember doing an exercise like this about two years ago. And at the time, my top three emotions were typically annoyance, excitement and drive. I felt very motivated and driven at the time. And part of this was because I was in the the thick of getting things packed and moved. But take a look at that. I'm excited, I'm motivated, and I'm annoyed most of the time. So you can imagine that those three emotions would be fairly energetically draining. If I'm constantly motivated, I'm constantly excited and I'm constantly annoyed. Maybe not constantly, but those are the top three. Then where is my level of peace? Where is my level of just stable confidence? So when I looked at that, I was like, well, this is great, I'm glad I'm so revved up and excited and everything like that. But where is the baseline that is my best thinking baseline? And when that question is asked, there's a shift in what, what the emotional state would be if you're in your best thinking place. And for me, it's a level of peace, It's a level of confidence. Those two zones, peace and confidence for me, create a lot of opening for thinking. When I have peace, that creates more clarity for me. When I have confidence, that creates more clarity for me. It enables my brain to open up and then I can come to the decisions or discernments that I need to make to make the decisions I want to make. So I want to go back to that example that I alluded to with my mother in law. My mother in law has Alzheimer's. And when we discovered her Alzheimer's, she was in a space of living on her own, in her own house. And we knew that that could not continue. We knew she didn't want to go to a home and we wanted to support her in every way we possibly could. So we moved her in with us. And as I said, with the move, we moved not only houses, but we moved her house and sold her house. So you know what that's like already, selling a house, buying a house, selling, but then also the selling of her house and the downsizing and really culling and purging of her house and then the transition of moving her in with us. So there were so many moving parts, but that, that extra stress that came with moving another person in with us and then discovering how much care she actually needed. And we didn't have the care in place yet because we really weren't clear on the kind of care she needed. So I hope you can imagine just the emotional turmoil that was going on with just trying to get the logistics all in place. And what a lot of this meant is that the care that she needed, whether it was meals or bathing, we didn't know what we were stepping into because she was living on her own only to discover that she needed more care than we thought. And that left me doing some bathing or hair washing or, or Paul making extra meals or are both of us trying to navigate her schedule and help her in various ways. And that added a lot of stress to our marriage. It added a lot of stress to us individually. And what was happening is we weren't acknowledging it. But when I look back, I could easily say that the what the emotions I was experiencing every single day were higher levels of anxiety, higher levels of stress, and a significant more amount of overwhelm. So if those are there and more prevalent, then my ability to think, my ability to focus, my ability to be clear wasn't so bad on the things that I was regular with. But if it was something new, then that was throwing me a complete curveball. And we got into a situation where she became more volatile because of her illness and there was some physical threats going on. And this had me in beyond an anxious state. This was in almost a panic state. So when I was in this state, I would have easily wanted to make some big decisions on we can no longer have her in the house or we can no longer do this. But the last thing I want to do is make a decision like that when I'm in an emotional state that is so volatile. So I'm using this as an example so you can hopefully see that this happens to us all of the time. We have a conflict or a disagreement with someone and we send the email to them right away. When we are in that upset state, we make a decision about someone's health care or living arrangements like my mother in law, if we were in an anxious or, or angry or stressed out state. Now I didn't do that. I gave it time, I gave it space. Paul and I decided to revisit things and we really went for it in trying to do everything we could for as long as we could. And we waited on those decisions and discussed them together and waited till either of us were was in a calmer state than whatever the the trigger was. And that helped us find the best solutions for her. It also helped me have great conversations with Paul and it helped him ask the right questions and have wonderful conversations with the healthcare team that he may not have been able to have if we hadn't been able to discuss things calmly ourselves. So that emotional baseline was a critical factor in us being able to make the decisions and provide the next steps that were best for her and best for our family. Now, I see this every single day with my clients because when I'm talking to my clients, they're bringing their problems to me. And those problems might have had to do with employees or negotiations or problems that have come up in their businesses. These are the things that we're talking about when I'm either executive coaching or bringing them systems and tools to use in their leadership. So when this is happening, they're often. They've often either calmed down a little bit or they might still be in it. When they're bringing the problem to me, the thing that I get to do with them is quickly get them back to an emotional baseline so that there's greater clarity and also shine the light on things that they may not have thought of or can't see from their perspective. Now, this also allows them to get back into their most emotional baseline because I'm not bringing inflaming things. I'm bringing things that can tap into their confidence, tap into their skill set, tap into their certainty. And that's why it's so important for you to be able to discover what top three emotions you've been operating on on the regular. So we're going to go through a few steps. Number one is discover what those top three emotions are, as I've, as I've said, that have been habitual lately. And then the next part is a key question. Are they a part of the baseline that you want? Going back to that original definition of the baseline? That emotional baseline is simply that space where you are emotionally clear and confident to have your best thinking ability. So are those three emotions the baseline you want? Because if they're not, then and three, is this baseline a great platform to make decisions from? And if not, you're g. You're going to give yourself what you need to get to an emotional baseline for best thinking. I'm going to say that again because this is so important. If your current emotional, most habitual mainstay are not your best baseline for thinking, then get yourself, give yourself, provide the time, whatever it is, you need to get to an emotional baseline for your best thinking. Now, as you practice this, it will get easier and easier. Whether you're giving yourself the time, whether you're having a conversation with a coach, whether you are self talking or switching out the thoughts that aren't working, and focusing on the thoughts that do in order to manage your emotions, whatever you're doing, the more you practice it, the better you'll get. And then it's critical for this so that you don't have to undo poor decisions down the road. The last thing you want is to make knee jerk decisions that are coming from poor emotional states that are decisions you have to backpedal on, decisions you have to apologize for, decisions that you have to fix because they were definitely not the best. And I know that you being a high achiever, leading yourself, leading others, I know that you have those high expectations of yourself and that's okay to have those high standards and high expectations as long as you are practicing giving yourself what you need in order to maintain those high standards. If you continue to not give yourself what you need to hold, hold the baseline emotional space to be able to think at your best, then how on earth if you can't give yourself those things, how on earth can you maintain those high standards? So by all means give yourself what you need in order to be able to hold those standards of high level thinking, to hold those standards of fast decisions, you're going to have to do the work ahead of time to hold that emotional baseline. That emotional baseline is this prerequisite that people just do not think about in terms of decision making. And it is this prerequisite that will give you the most effective decisions that you can possibly make when you're coming from a space of certainty, peace, confidence, coming from whatever space for you that creates your best thinking abilities. So I would encourage you to apply these concepts because I really believe that they're going to be pivotal for you to make the decisions that you're really proud of for you to hold the standards that you like to have. I think that it's going to really make a difference in fulfilling your greatest potential. So I would love to have you tune in more often. So if you haven't subscribed, please do and share this with a friend. Leave a glowing review if it suits you and together we will keep going on our mission to unlock your greatest potential. Keep going, Keep being Empowered. We'll see you on our next episode.

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