Ep 404: [LIVE 1-2-1] NEW Way To Handle Tension

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Stories are driven by conflict, tension and high stakes. And that is a quote by William Landay. And that brings us on to the conversation we're going to have today. So let's go into the usual summary, shall we? So in this episode, you're going to listen to a conversation between a client and I who in situations when they.

Feel ignored or rejected or avoided, that.

They'Re feeling this extreme tension and wanting to know how can they alleviate that tension so that actually they can have better communication, better conversation, Maybe not take.

It so personally, but just feel that.

Actually that they can handle these types of situations, but then follow it up with productive conversations, whether it's in relationships or in business. And I think many of you listening.

This will be something that you will experience because no one likes feeling ignored or rejected.

No one likes that feeling. But it's the meaning that we give these things that determine how we react to it. And so we're going to go through a few different exercises and explore a few different concepts in this conversation that talk about how actually this particular individual could be handling these situations better so that he's not feeling such intense pain and such intense tension. Let's get into it.

What would make this an extraordinary conversation for you today?

You know, not feeling. Not feeling. I've got to reply. Having a reply that I can think. Well, I've got three replies here. Which one was the best reply? You know, basically with work that will give me a lot of grief yesterday and I felt I'd sat down there, you know, are you the tenant? Are you the person I should be talking to? And then I just thought, let her random rave, you know, I mean, she's not doing, she's not affected me. She's just, she wants to have her say so in her world. Let her, her talk to me, you know, so that's where I was, where I was, I mean, Dave, yesterday, you know, it's like I think the feeling I get, I start getting very tense. Does that make sense to start the physical. We've talked about this before. Tense. Yeah. So if I get tense then I start thinking about things negatively, then that makes the tension worse. Then I'll. Next thing I'm like, I get myself in a rival state last week about it, you know, but then I sat down, just took it easy, sat down, read my rules again and thinking, stop thinking that way. Just don't get frustrated by, you know. You know, I think continuously could be the word because, you know, continuously getting, that's what we've got continuously expecting, you know, continuously we would be a good work.

Like, you know, so good. And so if as you described, if tension is physical.

Yeah.

Tells us a good answer. That gives us a good indicator of how, what we need to do to resolve it. If the tension is physical. And it's probably our physiology that also gets us out of it because on the as just spoke about before that in terms of that negative emotion we have a very intense physical reaction. So things like positive think don't really work because it's a very casual, low level feeling. So we want to create an intense emotional reaction on the other side that snaps us out of it. And that's in terms of some of the reading you've been doing. That's what that principle is. How do we create an intense emotional reaction the other way that completely gets us out of our headspace. So if the word is tension, what do you think your rule has been? What do you think your rule has been for tension? Because it sounds like maybe something at least fairly recently is not been too difficult for you to feel tense. You're sort of, it's almost like if this happens I will feel tense or if this happens, I will feel tense. So you've probably got a very simple rule. As I said once upon a time, my rule for frustration was when someone didn't do something the way I would have done it, well, that's going to happen all of the time. So I'd feel frustrated all the time. And so you might have a rule for tension or feeling tense at the moment that's allowing you to get to feeling tense a bit too often, a bit too quickly. And then we can talk about a new rule for actually I only get tense if this happens. So what do you think your rule for the feeling tense has been?

So I'm going to get, I'm going.

To gather it's going to be something very simple, very short and it'll be like if someone does this or someone does that. And that's a lot.

I think, I think it's what we discussed earlier. I start feeling excluded from things.

Yeah.

I feel excluded from anything. You know, like even if it's something do with work or I can't explain it parties or just exclusions or.

Yeah, but good. So in terms of anytime we feel excluded now again I get excluded.

I said you'd heard about exclude out somebody's life that would be in their life. You know that that makes me tense.

Yeah.

Now that's is what I want. But I'll be excluded in that. In that. In that level of relationship being put down to another level which I don't want to be in that level. In. Included in the. In that level.

And that's perfectly normal and it's totally understandable. And it's a huge, it's a. It's, you know, it's how humans are because at the beginning of time you needed a community or tribe of people to survive. So in some ways we're battling kind of survival instincts. So it's, it's not surprising that we feel tense or feel uncomfortable and therefore part of it is actually that's normal, it's perfectly fine. And actually having our own sense of understanding that it's okay that that can happen because it is uncomfortable, we don't like it. A lot of people will feel that tension or whatever and they'll beat themselves up for feeding that uncomfortability or that tension or whatever it might be just stacks on extra things we've got to then unravel or unpick. So those thing is it's okay to.

Feel that way but then to go.

Back into okay, well so far all is feeling excluded. Well, I feel excluded 10 times a day. I think, you know, for a lot of people they regularly feel excluded in one way or another. Sometimes it's genuinely being excluded from something. And if we've been excluded from one or two things, we start to look for it more as well. And even times when we're not really being excluded, we decide that's what. Oh that we did. We call that exclusion as well. So if I got you to close your eyes and just picture the room and then asked you, you know, how many red things are in the room? If then I said okay instead of red, how about if you look around the room and you look for everything that's brown, look for brown, look for brown, close your eyes and say, how many things in the room are blue? Well, what you've been trained to look for is everything that's brown. And so you find all these things that are brown. You are trained to look for blue. And so back to exclusion. Thing is, when we feel it a few times, we go to pain. We'll always do more to avoid pain. So we start looking for it more and more and more and we start calling things brown even when they're not brown. We start going, oh, that's brown as well. And that's brown as well. And actually it's. It's beige or it's red or it's something else, but we call it brown. So part of it will be creating a rule, but especially around things like exclusion. And the idea of rejection is actually having a meaning of what those things are. So you'll learn this, do this later in the program is actually having a meaning of what these things are is rejection, exclusion. I'm useless. I'm not good enough. I won't get what I want. There are people better than me which will cause intense pain, if that's what we think it means or those things mean. No, rejection is redirection. Actually, I'm moving towards some life is pushing me towards something that'll be better for me. Actually, it's going to stop me making a mistake here. Actually, it's great that there's a force or an indicator that steers me to avoid pain. You can choose what that meaning is, but you can tell between those two meanings. If you experience exclusion, rejection, which one of those is going to empower you and which one of those is going to disempower you. So we now go back to that feeling of tension, what might be a rule. And you correctly mentioned that bit, that bit about continuously as well, which is great. So we now go back to tension and we create a rule around tension and even create a rule that might empower us. That actually if I feel that tension from being excluded, that's a good thing because it's going, this is not for you. Let's go over here. Let's make sure life is actually doing me a favor here. And over time that being reinforced as a message, we start to identify as that. So what do you think a rule for tension could be, Tony? That would stop you feeling tense as often or as frequently as you're doing at the moment?

I don't know. Use neighbors as examples. Think about the benefits of what's. I feel tense. He's making me Wake up to. Is this right for me? That was a lot of work I've said to you this week, you know, is this right? Is the way I've looked at this week, you know, do I want this and is it right? I don't want to be intense. I don't feel this way. Perhaps I might be overthinking it, but am I right to overthink it? Yeah. Conversation. But just had like, no, my rights to think I've been excluded on purpose. And if I have been instead on purpose, do I want to be with that person?

Yeah, absolutely. And it does. And all of those things are absolutely true. And so it's now creating something that feels concise and something that actually you. You can start to believe in. No, there's no point us creating something that we kind of go. It looks like some nice words of paper that you can actually look at it and go, actually, yeah, that. That's probably true. That is probably true. And to go back to the stuff you've been reading, you know, our brain is designed to find pain in those. In those types of situations and those settings. It's. It's designed to do that. So we're. So it's not us. It's. It's a piece of our. Called the limbic. Yeah. So actually training him. We have to consciously train it. And that's. It's. It's annoying. We have to do that. But that's okay. That's fine. We can do that. Because all that's happening at the moment is it's just which message or which rule is being reinforced more often. What's being reinforced more often, as with most people, is rejection or exclusion is pain. It's uncomfortable. We want. It means we're not good enough, actually. Well, we have this other thing which is just being reinforced continuously, actually. We might start to believe one is better than the other and one's more empowering. So if you were to sort of create concise ruling, feel free to use the other rules that you've written down as sort of guides of how to write a good rule. Start to try and think of what a good rule would be for tension. So you could start it like with the other one.

I should do martial arts, you know, she was too tense. You couldn't. You couldn't do it properly. Yes, I had to learn to relax. So lots of times just breathe or slow my breathing down, you know, just take a deep breath and relax myself. Because tense muscles can't work as quick as relaxed muscles, you know. So if you're too tense, worried. Supposed to try and relax my, you know, relax my. My mind. Yeah, relaxed, you know, it's just not, you know, you'll feel yourself get tens. They just try to try to relax with it, you know, if you, if, you know. So I said you wouldn't ride a mobile if your arms are tense. You're not properly. Because your arms are like long lumps of wood. But if you relax and think, I can do this, you can ride quite quickly because you can. You must relax, move quicker because they're relaxed. I make the stiffen and I know that you can't.

Yeah.

So I will. If I feel tense about something, even if I'm riding in the rain or something, I think relax. Just relax and be aware what's happening. Don't tense up. Just tensing up in the rain on a motorbike is probably the worst. The worst thing you can do because you want to be when you're riding. So my. My go to word in my martial arts was just relax and calm down and think chi, you know, Tai chi. Just think about meditation. The zone. I mean, when I meditate is the zone I try to get back in when I'm starting to feel tense, to go back into that zone of. Yeah, calmness and down and down, you know, not tense. I want the opposite. And I want to be calm. And even, even, you know, even when I've been on holiday to think of a nice place where, you know, whereas turquoise sea and blue skies and holiday I was on, I thought, just take yourself back there when you was on that sunbed and think about that, how, how relaxed and how lovely, beautiful place was and calm yourself down. Don't think about. Don't think about being tense. Don't go up the scale, sucking more and more tense. Try to go to the other way, go down, down the scale to be.

Yeah, not.

Not tense. That, you know.

And the reason why all of that's really good is going back to that sort of, you know, tension is a physical thing. So we've got to use our physiology. Reason why it's good to get to those places is because when we are tense, our cortisol level, our stress hormone, is through the roof and that's part of what's causing the tension. And so, as we spoke about previously with that model is the first. One of the first steps is getting the energy right. Absolutely. Because if we can get that cortisol down and increase that testosterone and oxytocin, your body will do most of the work for you. It will be easier then to take the right action. If your cortisol level's through the roof for anyone, they will respond in the wrong way. So you're absolutely right. It's. It's getting our physiology right, it's getting our body right, that we can slow things down. Because what we're doing is the cortisol level is going down. And you know what? It might take us a couple of minutes, it might not be 10 seconds. It takes a couple of minutes where you just start to notice it and the cortisol level keeps dropping, keeps dropping, keeps dropping, keeps dropping, keeps dropping. And then once you're there, now, we can respond in a bit, in a. In a better way. So when we think about all of that, what I'd like us to do.

Is.

We'Ve spoken previously about creating an identity that's associated with how we want to feel. What I'm going to do is create something which is the shift in physiology we need to make or focus what we need to focus on. And then the type of language we use. And this is a situation where we're talking specifically about the language we use. And so if we had something where we knew how to shift our body, we knew what we needed to focus on and we knew what type of language to use, then it gives you a lot of certainty that you can respond in the right way. Once we've got that right, I'd like to give that version of us a name. It might go back to Tony, the singer that we've spoken about previously. It might be something else, you know, it might be, you know, trying to. I'm trying to think of a bit of a alliteration with the words T that means calm. Maybe. Maybe I'll think of one.

Because we do Tai Chi. Because that's right, Tai Chi Tony, you know, get back into tight. Get your Tai Chi head on, keep your head on.

So it might be to do with that, that we label that, because that's very. So much easier if we. Instead of trying to remember a load of things in the heat of the moment, we're going to put in a few rules in place, a few things that Tai Chi Tony does. But in that moment, you can kind of go, you know what? Who do I need to be right now? I need to be Tai Chi Tony. And you just start. So even when you've got a name for something, you start to move in a certain way. You start to shift your shoulders move, your head moved, and all of these sorts of things start to move. And that just gets out all of the kind of anything that's stuck in the body and that's what usually is, is tension, is something stuck in the body against tai chi, Tony. And you probably just find yourself just moving ever so slightly and wherever it's stuck in the body, the energy, it sort of just gets released again. So you tell me to honey, you tell me what. Absolutely without question in terms of what you do with your body, in terms of helping you relax, if that's the word you have on in your mind, what without question would help you relax in that moment and get that cortisol level down? What do you know?

Yeah, well, I was going to call you, you go about something and I was quite nervous, you know, worried about how the outcomes would be and I just sat outside, cross my arms over at Tai chi, put my hand palms down to my stomach and we just say we breathe in good energy and exhale bad energy or brown smoke or black smoke, whatever you want to call it. And I just do that. I'll just sit there, breathe and think, just breathe in some good positive energy and breathe out some brand smoke or brand and then start breathing in the good energy and making actually physically trying to make my arms relax and then make my chest relax and work my way down my body. I'm going to do feel super tense. That works from. That works for me, you know, doing them exercises. Yeah, I could do them anywhere with them. You know, I've done the old night walking home and I thought, you know, just think about it and it takes you back to that training or that that time. Does that make sense in it? And I remember going to court about 10 minutes before we go to court. I'm not going to start here thinking about we can't do any more, the judge has got to read the reports and that. And what the judge is going to make up his own mind actually I won the case anyway, but. And I thought there was no point panicking outside the office, outside the call, getting tense and got into being an idiot, going there looking relaxed and confident about it and yeah, so that's, you know, that's how I do things, you know, even with the motorbikes, you know, I bet, yeah. Nearly drove off a cliff once with it and just stopped and I thought I was so close, I just sat on the bike and thought just calm yourself down, you can get out of this mud and all the crack and then get back on the road again. Someone's forced to throw the car for someone's the road. And I did it within 10 minutes. I was calm thinking, thank God I'm alive, you know, and being thankful for being alive. But you're thinking that was a near. That was a very near miss. I mean, I mean think they got over the edge of that cliff with a girl. The girl come on the wrong side of the road on my side of road night to get around her and she was so frightened. The edge of the mountain that pushed come on my side of the road and he took me out or managed to get off the road on the mud and keep my pipe upright. So I didn't have an accident. But you think, thank God I was a bit calm. Not calm. Yeah, your instinct kicks in. But if I got too super tense, I would have just grabbed that bike and grabbed the brakes and I wouldn't have to steer out that problem. I thought my survival mode kicked in saying you've got not be tense, you got to work this out. And then when you work that, you know, it's physical, it's actually feel you drain off. You know, it's just the physical, you know, your whole body seems, thank God, you know, you physically, you're exhausted for a couple of split seconds like, you know. But yeah, obviously about the finger this week, you know.

So great. And so, and that's perfect because you've got examples of where, you know, it works. So like we talked about on confidence previously when we talked about the visor and all of that stuff where we're using those things and those triggers that actually we know we do when we're most confident.

Yeah.

Because we're just doing the same thing here. So.

This week I'm not a petty thing but I put my brand bin out sort of all the rotary table. I didn't put it in the middle animal front or on a pavement trip over it and the bin men went past and left it behind. And I'm trying to get rid of a lot of rubbish and I thought, you know, suddenly it got bit tense thinking ain't all my brand in. And I thought no, get continental.

Don't be, I've been there.

Yeah, don't, don't get frontation with the guy. So I walked outside, rolled the bin down the road arch and said I'm terribly sorry, it's my mistake. Not put it out further out in the curb. Do you mind Empty for me. And I was being confident that I want it emptied and being confident it's my mistake. There's nothing to do with him. No blame. I'm not trying to start animosity It's a silly stupid thing, but get your confidence head on there, become what you want. I want to get this bin empty so I can fill up again this week off the me, off the country, tree down. I don't need a bin that's not empty, do I David? So I've got to think, if I start shouting like, oh, you've got my bid mate, come back and get it. I wouldn't got, I wouldn't have got the result I wanted. So I feel confident. Don't get tense about it, get the tense head gone and go out there and get things moving. Get, do what you want, you know, how come do I want at the end of this, at the end of this, this two minutes, you know what do I want a single bin so I could put me blood stained leaves in there, can't I?

So what's perfect about that? And again, another example where you're looking at, okay, where, and trying to find those common denominators, you know, what are the examples when I'm doing these things and it's working. And actually I have got plenty of examples of when I do get this stuff, right? And so just to start pulling some of this together now is firstly.

Let.

Me look at those two examples in terms of our body and getting that sort of being able to relax. Just out of curiosity, that sort of process that you spoke about does the breathing and your arms and all of that type of stuff, how long do you think that takes you to go through those steps and then to finally feel back in control and relax? Does it take you 30 seconds? Does it take you five minutes? How long does it take you to do that?

I used to just do a Paul McKenna tape, right, that just take me about five minutes. But now I have to do quite quickly because I can do, I'll say within two minutes, I can get myself thinking, oh, what you're doing. And then it's, I don't even have to do all the relaxation, not relaxing my legs, ankles and I can get to being relaxed. So because I can do it quite quickly now, you know, rather than years ago before I used to sit down, lay in the bed and go for every part of my body and I still feel myself being tense even though I'm trying to relax myself. But now the more practice I've done it, you know, you know, and just meditating because I got quite a stressful job. I said lunchtime, I'm gonna have my lunch and I'm gonna sit down and meditate for five minutes and Sometimes I think, well, you're in the.

Where you want to be.

You're so relaxed now for the second half of the day. So, you know, I'm not going to be tense. If I didn't. If I didn't do it, David, you know, it's like I'd get to be tense at lunchtime and I'd keep being tense.

Exactly, yeah.

If I've done four hours and then I stopped for a bit of lunch and I've nourished my body, and then I think, well, I'm gonna got another half hour for lunch. I'm not going to sit in the car and meditate, or I'm gonna sit and sit away from the office and meditate in the car. And then I feel. I feel, right, you've relaxed, you know, and then you can start again. Starting another day. Some extent, you're not carrying attention from the morning to noon. So, you know, I can do it. I could do. The only problem is, Dave, sometimes it makes me fall asleep. Certainly is. I relax too much.

So, so, so what's that? The reason I asked that question is a lot of what you're talking about is having the patience and the empathy and that sort of ability to be in control and slow everything down. And so in terms of your triggers, in terms of describing that relaxation process, if we were to come up with three little triggers, one of them might be to describe all of that rather than the actual actions, is to say two minutes to be calm and relaxed. Sometimes people put pressure on themselves that I've got to be able to respond. I've got to be my best self within the next five seconds. You don't. You might not feel not frustrated or not this or not that in five or ten seconds, that's okay. You just don't have to get involved yet. So the first part might be, you know what I've got to remember what does. So does Tai chi, Tony, do? Okay, two minutes. I've got two minutes, okay? Don't try and jump in and rush in it. Two minutes to get everything back down. And I don't. Might not even need all the two minutes, as you said, I might not need all of that, but it's that two minutes. Because what I do when I'm sort of in my Tai chi state, everything slows down. I don't have to do things the next three or four seconds, everything slows down. When we're relaxed and we're calm, not in a rush to do anything, we're composed and I've spoken To you on occasions where I can tell where you're more agitated and when you're more composed. When I hear you talk about your work, I hear you talk about that in a fairly composed way. Even when you talk about arguments and all these different types of things, or, sorry, not arguments, discussions that you have to have, unfortunately, in business, can still hear you talk about in a fairly composed way. Even if it's an intense thing. Maybe one of the triggers is actually, okay, it's two minutes, everything just slows down. We keep reinforcing the idea. If I just give 2 minutes, 2 minutes, 2 minutes, 2 Minutes all the time, just to slow it down. 2 minutes is the reminder that it's 2 minutes to get everything right physiologically. Okay, because body has ramped up, cortisol's gone up, and I'm going to use my body and those two minutes to just slow everything down. So that might be one of those three triggers that we talk about when we start to design. Okay, what's the Tai Chi version of me? It's two minutes. Because when I'm doing Tai Chi, I don't get the Tai chi. Or if I do a Tai Chi class, whatever it might be, you don't do it in 5 seconds, 10 seconds, you warm up into it, the idea, and then by the end of that, you're your absolute peak best. And that's when we should want to involve and engage with people. Because imagine what it'd be like if we engage with people when we're at our absolute peak. Conversations are better. You get more results, you get more solutions. Keep doing that often enough, then life starts to change very quickly.

So what you heard in that conversation was us using something that the client could already relate to. You heard them bring up Tai Chi. When it comes to understanding stuff in life, we always want to use the reference points that people already have. If you want to ever learn how to explain something complicated, someone else explain it in terms that they already understand. You know, if you think of trying to explain the solar system to someone.

But you, you showed them in the form of using like, fruit as the.

Various different planets, then they might actually get a deeper grasp or an actual understanding. Oh, at least I can understand it because I understand understand fruit.

I understand if you show me the fruit is moving that way and it's moving that way.

Oh, I can understand that.

So that's what we want to do.

And that's what we had in this conversation. He mentioned Tai Chi. He understood.

Actually, that's a place where I feel.

How I want to feel in this situation where I'm struggling, so why use anything else? He's got that reference point. He believes that that's a concept that, one, he understands, and two, that actually works for him. And then we just go into the specifics of actually, okay, what is it about that that we can now leverage and bring into these moments? And then how can we describe it? And what is the principle of any.

You heard him talk about actually how.

He moves his physiology, because that tension is physical. The best way to combat it is to combat in a physical way. So it changes the physiology. Even when you heard him talk about. And these are the little things I.

Try and pick up. Even when you heard him talk about.

The Tai Chi, you heard everything start to slow down. And he spoke about it very calmly because his physiology, just talking about it, adjusts. And then that's when we can also leverage a name, a version of us that's easily, you know, memorable, because in two or three years time, when you have that moment again, I know how to get back there. In his case, it was Tai Chi Tony.

Very catchy name.

And so it's about creating an identity that, that you can start to identify with, that can handle these situations. Because as you currently are, as we currently are, maybe we can't yet, but we can believe that a different part of us, a different version of us, a side of us can. And I know you will be able to believe this because you'll have had moments in your life where you've had to under extreme tension, extreme pressure, extreme stress, actually, you handled it perfectly well. But you brought out a different side of you. And you might be thinking, how did I bring out that side of me in those situations? So it's about defining it. Once you work out what the sort of solution is or the triggers or the principles or the foundations are, I create an identity so you can always go back to it, so you can always remember it. You don't have to be that person all of the time, but you have something to go to, a place that you can go to. My name is David Holman. If you change today, today will change your life.

So enjoy the rest of your day.

Enjoy the rest of your life, and I'll speak to you very soon.

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