In this video, we talk about shifting our mental and emotional state. Now, when we’re doing most things in the world, including having conversations around the topic of inclusion, we want to be in as humble, as curious, as compassionate state of mind as possible in order to have more effective conversations and make more effective change in our teams and our organisations.
Why might we get into a unhelpful or unresourceful mental and emotional state? Well, these are often triggered by threats we perceive out there in the world. So these can be, you know, receiving an email from a client or from a colleague that seems snarkily worded. We can perceive changes in our environment as a threat.
We could perceive exclusionary actions as a threat as well. So somebody talking over us in a meeting, for instance, or somebody showing, overt bias or stereotyping in their speech or their decision making. Now this is a hardwired kind of survival mechanism. So, when we see a threat out there in the world, in times past this would’ve been, you know, a russell in the bushes or something crouching behind a rock that would trigger the dump of cortisol, of adrenaline and would prepare us to get into a fight, flight, or freeze state. Now, this was useful for surviving those kind of encounters where we had to quickly escape or contend with a threat.
But they’re less useful when we’re talking about workplace scenarios. That puts us in a place of defensiveness of needing to be right. And in fact, these are some of the ways that you can help spot when you are in an unresourceful state, you hold beliefs like there’s not enough that, being right is really important.
We find we make statements that are very, black and white in, in their thinking. So, we must do this. We can’t do this. I’m right. They’re wrong.
So a lot of black and white thinking, going on. And in terms of behaviors, when you’re, when you’re in this unresourceful state, you can find yourself looking for information that confirms your opinion.
You can notice in your body, a, a tenseness, a tightness in the shoulders, butterflies in the stomach, redness in the face. And the consequences are that if we are in an unresourceful state that have less effective conversations around inclusion.
So what can we do about that? What can we do to shift?
Now, very simply, we can think about pulling two different levers. A mindset lever or a, bodily lever. So you can do things on the one hand, like talk to, somebody about what you, what you’re thinking and feeling. You can write it down. You can meditate. You can tell yourself a different story. You can focus on something else for a little while to, to take your mind off it.
These are all ways of, of potentially shifting your state that way. And we know we can do things with our body to shift our mood and shift our state. For a lot of people, that’s exercise. So that might be going for a run, going for a bike ride, doing some rowing, doing some yoga. Breathing is a, a really, really important one.
Lots of good studies about the power of breath, taking big, deep, diaphragmatic breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth to reset our parasympathetic nervous system and get us into a calmer, more relaxed, more focused state.
So, the important thing here to recognise for yourself is knowing, and having ways of checking when you are in, an unresourceful or unhelpful state.
And then having in your pocket the things which help you personally shift. Cuz it’s gonna be different for everybody, right? So thinking about and experimenting with ways to put yourself in a better mood and have, at the end of the day more effective conversations around the topic of inclusion and everything else.
