You’re Not Broken

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It’s not unusual for clients to call me and after giving me a run down on their issues asking “Can you fix me?”

My usual response is:

“No, because you’re not broken”

It may sound like I’m being glib and not listening to the person talking to me, but it’s neither. It’s simply a belief that stems from the NLP presupposition that nobody is broken no matter what their circumstances.

I don’t want potential clients adopting the mindset that something is wrong with them. I prefer to have them thinking they’re just great (because they are), but can be even greater with some fine tuning.

The reason I adopt the belief that nobody is broken is because all our behaviors are useful in some context or other. As human beings we never self-sabotage and I defy you to give me a single contrary example.

I mention this because the starting point with making change and overcoming shyness, social anxiety, panic disorders etc is accepting there’s nothing wrong with you. Your body is working just as it was designed to under the circumstances.

You may now be thinking I’m losing the plot, after all not many public speakers stand in front of a room full of people unable to talk, shaking like a streaker at the Winter Olympics and close to passing out thinking:

“Wow this is so frickin awesome, I am soooo normal, thank God for life coaches”

It’s important at this stage to differentiate between your body working correctly, as opposed to effectively.

I remember hearing Wayne Dyer tell a story once about a woman he had been counseling. She was married to a drunk and was complaining to Dyer about his disgraceful behavior.

Dyer asked her what he did when he was drunk and the women reeled off a litany of boorish acts from shouting and screaming threateningly to driving whilst intoxicated and falling asleep on the couch. Dyer then asked how long the guy had been an alcoholic and she replied, all their married life.

“I don’t get it then” said Dyer, “Because it seems to me this guy is a perfect drunk, he is doing what all good drunks do, so what’s the problem?”

As Dick Carlson pointed out in the comments to the previous post ‘When Panic Strikes’, my body was acting perfectly normally when it started to panic. It perceived I was in danger and kicked into action the fight or flight response.

I was working correctly even if it wasn’t very effective.

When you get anxious it’s likely that amongst other things, your mouth will dry up, you will want to spend ridiculous amounts of time in the bathroom without even checking your make-up, and your heart will start to race.

Saliva is there to guard the easiest access point to the body from coming under attack from malicious pathogens. It suffocates and neutralizes bacteria before they have chance to enter the body and do some damage. It also helps break down the fats and starches in food, keeps your mouth clean and acts as a general lubricant.

Consequently, when the fight or flight response is triggered the body isn’t thinking about breaking down food or warding off infection because it has much bigger fish to fry and needs all available resources to avoid death.

Therefore, your heart speeds up dramatically allowing your body to distribute blood and oxygen to your muscles in case you need to fight or head for the hills pursued by a Saber Toothed Tiger.

Similarly, your brain wants to evacuate everything from the body that isn’t strictly needed  (and it usually doesn’t care which end it uses) thus making you a tad lighter and possibly giving you that extra crucial edge over your hungry new friend.

The problem is, the fight or flight response was invented way back when even before the Internet and was really designed for when we come under physical rather than mental attack. It’s really Version 1.0 and has never been updated as promised.

Therefore, one of the things you need when giving a speech (a nicely lubricated mouth) disappears as your brain kicks into action age-old processes designed to help you either attack your audience or run away from them. Neither of these approaches help in getting re-booked by the way.

The really annoying thing about the fight or flight response is that it doesn’t recognize logic or common sense, in fact it laughs heartily at them both and kicks sand in their respective faces for good measure.

That’s because the response is hardwired and there’s little you can do to break that wiring, especially when you’re coming under attack.

And therein lies the problem. Most people try to deal with their fears by either avoiding them completely or trying to rationalize them away and neither approach is particularly effective.

Avoiding your fears will almost always exacerbate them and make you less able to deal with them if/when they do arise again.

Trying to rationalize them away during the actual event is a complete waste of time because your body is way too busy to be listening to you. And trying to rationalize under normal conditions that for example, flying is the safest form of transport, wont work either. It just confirms to your unconscious that there really is something to worry about, because if there weren’t you wouldn’t be banging on about it so much.

If a burglar entered my home through a bedroom window and as he did so a pair of dobermans rounded the corner snarling, gnashing and looking to rip his balls off, what do you think his response would be?

I’m guessing his heart rate would spike dramatically and could be dangerously close to the level where cognitive function breaks down and anything other than dribbling proves way too complicated, and he’d almost certainly be looking to leave the premises sooner rather than later.

What if we change one small aspect of the story and this time the burglar has kept dobermans for the last 20 years and even trains dogs when he’s not out making peoples lives misery.  Do you think he’d still be terrified?

I doubt it. He may still not want to mess with them, but it’s unlikely he’ll forget how to use his legs when he’s trying to climb back out the window like the previous guy because he’s used to handling big dogs.

This is the reason every soldier is subjected to extreme stress under managed conditions prior to being given the keys to the Humvee.

By replicating hostile conditions over and over and over again, the army are creating new default behaviors and increasing the likelihood that the soldiers fight or flight response wont kick in when the real shit hits the fan.

Having a bunch of freaked out loons running around with sub-machine guns killing each other is terribly bad for the armed forces recruitment business.

What all this means is if you have panicked in the past under certain circumstances there is a very high probability that you will do so again if the same situation arises. Unless that is you adopt a completely different strategy, one that I’ll share with you in the next post.

*There have been numerous distressing cases of people trying to dial 911 from their cell phone during a life or death emergency such as an armed invader in their home, only for them to fail to hit send. The belief is that these people had years of using a traditional phone where it wasn’t necessary to hit send and in their panic they reverted to previous patterns of behavior.

We had two of the coolest stories this week since we kicked off the How To Be Rich and happy project. You can read about them in a refreshingly short post called ‘Pay It Forward‘