Mirror, Mirror: Who’s in Charge?

Have you ever reacted in a way that surprised you?

Snapped at someone you care about for reasons that didn’t really matter?

Dug into a position you weren’t fully invested in?

Avoided something important?

In those moments, it can feel as if we are not in control.

The question is: Are you in command of your life, or is fear in the driver’s seat?

Are you reacting, or are you responding, to what life throws your way?

As we examine our thoughts, choices, and actions, in relation to these questions, we can begin to pry open the door to personal mastery. 

To understand this better, let’s clarify some of these terms.

When I use the word reacting, I don’t just mean those in the moment, knee-jerk, automatic reactions we all experience when triggered.  I am also referring to a broader state of being -- of moving through life from a place of self-protection, anxiety, or ego-defense.  A state of being on the defensive.  In tennis, it would be when you’re at the ready, furiously hitting back the balls being lobbed at you, but not really in control of the game. 

The driver behind a reaction, is always fear, and there is a constriction in our capacity to freely choose who we want to be.

Responding, in contrast, is about being IN CHOICE. When we are responding, we are in control of the game.  We are not just hitting the ball back; we are placing it.  Fear and self-protection are not driving, instead, we are guided by something bigger, deeper, more intentional and purposeful.  Our thoughts, choices, and actions are aligned with our chosen values and driven by a vision of who we want to be and how we want to show up in the world.  We are in self-command.

Reacting	Responding
Fear-driven	Values-driven
Automatic	Intentional
Defensive	Reflective
Narrow focus	Expansive thinking
In fear	In choice

When we go through life reacting – there can be an unconscious sleepwalking quality to it.  If we are not living in conscious awareness of the fear, we might believe we are in choice and in control when in fact we are living in defense. The more we are willing to look into the mirror of our choices and actions, the more we peer with clear, judgement-free curiosity at our own reflection, the more we can deepen our awareness of the forces driving our lives.

Let’s illustrate how fear shows up through some examples:

Example A: You and your colleague disagree on a direction for your team. In general, you value your colleagues’ input and believe in the power of multiple perspectives, but this is the first time you have been asked to lead the team, and the team has been charged with making a decision by end of day.  The approaching deadline, the potential impact on your reputation as a leader if you are late or wrong, the discomfort of a long-drawn out debate of the issues, all have you stressed.   Instead of creating space to fully explore the points raised by your colleague and team, you get frustrated, dig into your own position, and pre-emptively make the decision for the team.

Example B: Your deepest value is to be fully present when you are with your children.  They are your priority.  However, when life gets stressful and challenging - performance demands at work, a never-ending to-do list, the declining health needs of your parents, financial insecurities – you find yourself short, irritable, absorbed in worry, and barely paying attention to your children when they are around.  You’ve noticed they have begun to get wary of your moods.

Example C: You want to make health your priority, you even bought a gym membership, but you rarely find time to go. Anxieties around the direction of your life and stress about the state of the world has you consuming more sugar, losing hours to doom scrolling, and sleeping less. You cancel the membership you’ve been paying for but not using.

You might have noticed, the examples highlight stress, not fear; but stress and fear are in a deep, enmeshed, relationship with each other. At a simplistic level, one could say fear is triggered by a sense of immediate threat, but in modern times when threat is prolonged and more ambiguous, stress is how it gets expressed and experienced in the body. Understanding this relationship will help us understand why when we are in stress, it can be useful to ask ourselves, “What is the underlying fear?”

To see why this plays out the way it does, it helps to understand what is happening in the brain and body when fear is activated.

The Neurobiology of Fear.

Neuroscientists broadly understand fear as the conscious and acute emotional experience the brain constructs in response to a perceived threat. It is the felt experience, one that consciously alarms us of the presence of a threat. 

Importantly, the brain's threat detection system which is centered in the amygdala (a more primitive part of the brain), operates rapidly and automatically out of conscious awareness, triggering a cascade of physiological responses in the body before the conscious experience of fear is even formed. The felt experience of fear is therefore a cognitive construction, a higher-order mental process in which we create a story or meaning around a threat that the body is already responding to. (LeDoux, 2015, Anxious).  The body responds first.  The mind creates meaning around it after.  Keep this in mind as it also becomes an important lever in shifting out of fear.

The Changing Nature of Modern Day Threats:

The SCARF Model.

Threats can be real or perceived.  This is critical. 

According to David Rock (2008), the brain perceives and reacts to social threat in the same way as it does to physical threat.  It does not discriminate.  Our body was wired for survival against predators like the sabretooth tiger which threatened our physical safety, but today’s threats consist more of the ambiguous, chronic variety which threaten our social identity and sense of belonging.  

Rock developed a neuroscience-based framework, the SCARF model, an acronym used to identify five social domains – Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness -- which trigger the same threat or reward responses in our brains as our primary survival needs (see graphic below).

Graphic with permission from: bitesizelearning

The model explains why acknowledgement, clear expectations, empowering teams with choice and flexibility, connectedness to a group, and transparency can be motivating while being overlooked or publicly criticized, lack of information or uncertainty about the future, being micromanaged or not listened to, exclusion, and experiencing inequity can feel threatening. 

This is important because the way the body responds to threat is neurobiologically identical whether the threat is physical (being chased by a tiger) or social (being micromanaged).  However, while the threat response is often adaptive in addressing physical danger, it may not be quite so adaptive in managing social complexities. Let’s look at why.

The Threat Response: Fight-Flight-Freeze.

When the brain detects a threat, the amygdala (the body’s alarm system) triggers a rapid response setting off a cascade of physiological reactions through the activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the sympathetic nervous system (SNS).  This is the well-known fight-flight-freeze (FFF) response, and it is organized around one goal: survival. 

Breathing & heart rate increase circulating oxygen and fuel to where it’s most needed. Blood is redirected away from digestion and extremities (since they are not essential for immediate survival) toward the larger muscles of the arms and legs, preparing the body to fight or flee.  Pupils dilate to take in more light and threat-relevant sensory processing is heightened.  The digestive, immune, and reproductive systems, also non-essential in the moment, are suppressed.

Adrenaline and cortisol are also involved in the threat response: while adrenaline is the fast-acting responder preparing us for immediate action, cortisol sustains the response over a longer period by releasing glucose to mobilize energy, maintaining SNS activation, and continuing the downregulation of non-vital systems.

This system is incredibly adaptive for survival, keeping us alive in dangerous situations, but it comes with a cognitive cost.

In Fear or In Choice.

This piece is key to understanding why being in fear constricts choice; To further preserve resources, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is also taken offline. 

The PFC holds the capacity for our most sophisticated thinking:  planning, reasoning, perspective-taking, and more complex decision making.  When we are in fear, our amygdala essentially takes over the brain (what Daniel Goleman famously termed the amygdala hijack), narrowing our attention so it’s harder to see the big picture, shrinking our working memory so we cannot hold as much information in mind, and effectively stifling creativity, innovation, empathy, perspective, nuanced or complex problem-solving, as well as the ability to see new possibilities.

Intensifying the issue, stress in modern times can be chronic.  Which means cortisol can stay elevated exacerbating the impact on memory and cognitive functioning as well as other systems in our body over time.

When fear takes control, we lose access to the most resourced, creative, expansive, flexible, and connected aspects of ourselves. Without that access, we are no longer in choice, and no longer in command.

Personal mastery begins with pulling ourselves out of fear.  It requires recognizing when fear is in the driver’s seat and taking back the wheel.

Taking Back the Wheel

A full exploration of how to get from fear to self-command is beyond the scope of this blog.  However, some quick tools and techniques might be helpful. 

1.     Build Awareness:  Awareness and recognition are always the first step.  Start to recognize how and when fear shows up in your body and your reactions.  What is your embodied experience of fear?  Is it a pit in your stomach? An irritation?  A lack of focus?  Anxiety?  Anger? Disconnection?

2.     Notice & Name:  Once you notice, name the fear: “that’s fear talking.” Avoid identity statements regarding fear; Rather than “I am afraid” name it as an experience, “Oh, I am experiencing fear!” Naming creates just enough distance between you and the fear, so instead of being it, you can start to examine it.

3.     Understand the Fear:  What’s the perceived threat here?  Use the SCARF model to identify the fear trigger.  Journaling can help, or talking it through with a coach, or a friend who can hold space for unbiased exploration. 

4.     Reframe the Story:  Fear is shaped by the story we tell ourselves about a situation or experience. While reframing stories can be a powerful intervention, it may require the support of a coach or other tools (see positivity, presence) to create calm before reframing can be accessible.  Given that, once you identify the threat, ask: Is this the only story I can tell?  Remind yourself threats can be real or perceived, meaning, you can choose a better story: one that calms, holds more compassion, hope and optimism.

5.     Leverage Positivity:  According to Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build theory of positive emotions, while threat narrows our perception and focus, positive emotions widen our attention and cognitive capacity. They shift us out of amygdala hijacking into more open, creative and flexible thinking.  Activities which generate joy, awe, love, gratitude, or contentment (taking a walk, dancing to a favorite song, laughing with a friend, hugging your cat) can all pull us out of fear. 

6.     Practice Presence:  According to Shirzad Chamine (Positive Intelligence, 2012), fear is born from our negative judgments of things in the past or concerns about the future, even if that past or future is only a moment off.  Staying present-focused, fully in the now, helps to counter that fear.  Often, nothing is truly bad right in this very moment. We are alive, whole, and okay. Breath practices, mindfulness, and meditation are all powerful ways to practice presence and strengthen self-command.

Summary

Personal mastery begins the moment we notice fear at the wheel, and develop the skills to take the steering back. Many of us live in a semi-conscious trance where we believe we are in choice – living intentionally and moving with purpose – but often our lives are lived in defensive reaction.  Choice is an illusion there; fear is in control.  Becoming conscious and aware is the first step, building skills to live from self-command takes further exploration, time and practice. 

An Invitation to Journey Deeper

I’ve offered some quick tools, but if you are curious about moving to a place of greater intention and connection in your life, or deepening a sense of personal mastery, I offer workshops and coaching in support of that journey.

More immediately, I invite you to join me for a workshop on Sunday, March 22 where we will explore how to work more skillfully with our emotions, intentionally managing negative emotions (such as fear) and cultivating positive ones. Details and registration are here.

For a more deeply transformational experience, consider signing up for the Positive Intelligence (PQ) Program.  This program begins with a free assessment of your saboteur patterns demonstrating how fear may show up in your life.  Signing up for the PQ program after taking the assessment gives you access to a daily program of app-guided micro-practices to build self-command, as well as coaching support from me as your PQ coach. To explore this option, sign up for a free 20-min consult with me here. 

As always, questions, comments, insights, and shares are welcome