Successful people are typically viewed as possessing certain characteristics: high motivation, strong skills/abilities, and opportunity. In his book Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, Adam Grant says there is another component to success and that’s how you approach relationships.

In interactions with others, are you likely to give more than you get? Or do you believe that you have to look out for yourself first  so you make sure you get more than you give?

Outside the workplace, in personal relationships, most people behave like givers. With family and friends they don’t keep track of who gives what. But in the workplace, givers are rare. Givers are generous with their time, knowledge, and connections. They don’t think about the personal costs and help without expecting anything in return. Takers help others strategically, when the benefits to them outweigh the personal costs. There’s also a group of people called matchers. They attempt to keep an equal balance of giving and getting. They want fairness. They help others but expect reciprocity.

The lines between giving, taking and matching aren’t hard and fast. You may find yourself acting like a giver when mentoring an intern, a taker when bidding for a project and a matcher when exchanging ideas with a colleague.  But overall, the vast majority of people adopt a primary style of interacting most of the time.

The Style Most Likely to Be at the Bottom of the Success Ladder

Which style is most likely to result in success at work? You might guess that givers would be at the bottom of the success measures. You would be right. Across occupations, givers are just too caring and too trusting and too willing to sacrifice their own interests.  There’s evidence that compared with takers, givers earn 14 percent less money, have twice the risk of becoming a victim of a crime and are judged as 22 percent less powerful and dominant.

The Style Most Likely To Reach the Top

So what style do the people at the top of the success ladder have? They are  also givers. The best performers and the worst performers are givers; takers and matchers are  more likely to land in the middle.  The givers at the top of the ladder have strong interests in helping others and get satisfication from making an impact in that way.  They score high on measures of  caring about others.The difference between the givers who were top performers and the givers who are the lowest performers is that the givers at the top also had strong self-interests. They were ambitious as well as giving.  Self-interest and other interest are not mutually exclusive but two different characteristics.

The emotionally sensitive often have difficulty with balance and tend to  extremes. This can translate into being extreme givers, takers, and matchers. Extremes usually lead to misery.  Having both self-interests and other-interests would seem to create a balance that would lessen suffering as well as lead to more success in career goals.

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Emotionally sensitive people are known as compassionate and caring about other people. Their emotionally sensitivity means they are usually particularly aware of the emotions of others. However, sometimes being emotionally sensitive means you are completely off base and sometimes invalidating of others’ feelings.

You Respond Based on Your Own Emotional Intensity

You see, one of the ways people are empathic is by imagining how they might feel in the same situation. Imagine a friend  describes an argument with a boyfriend who broke up with her. You would feel incredibly sad if that happened to you. You  respond with deep concern and say something like “Oh no. How awful. Are you okay?” Your friend responds in an off hand manner saying, “Of course I’m okay.  It’s not that big a deal.”

Her response confuses you and now you are cocerned that she is upset with you when you are only concerned about her. You respond that you guess the relationship wasn’t that important to her. She frowns in an irritated way and replies that  it just wasn’t working. The interaction now seems awkward. You try again and say you admire how well she is coping and that you couldn’t handle it as well if you were in her situation. Obviously annoyed now, she informs you that break ups are just a part of life and everyone goes through them. She changes the subject.

The interaction starts to feel tense. You were trying to be compassionate and validating and you know it isn’t working. You might think judgmental thoughts such as how cold your friend is. At the same time the situation seems like you’ve stepped in quick sand and whatever you try only makes the situation worse. You worry about losing your firiend. Your perspective is that she must be hurting and devastated and that is a horrible situation. You want to be kind to her. Her view is that the situation is painful but normal and she knows she’ll get through it. Your efforts to acknowledge her pain are seen as invalidating by her. The intensity of your caring did not match what she was feeling.  She says you must think she is completely helpless, which offends her.

How You Imagine You Would Feel is Sometimes Not What the Person Feels

Your daughter, just home from work, calls you to announce she didn’t get a promotion.  You are sure her tone of voice is sad. You feel so badly for her. She must be so disappointed. You think about her at night and can’t sleep. You feel so badly and can’t get the incident off your mind. In fact, you quite sad because of how you know she must feel.  Later in the week you say something to her. She isn’t clear what you are talking about but when she realizes you are referring to her not getting the promotion, she laughs. She tells you that if you really understood her you’d know she didn’t care about that promotion. With the best of intentions, you’ve invalidated her.

Taking the perspective of the other person can be difficult.  Usually the emotionally sensitive are upset by others not understanding their sensitivity. But the emotionally sensitive can misunderstand and invalidate the emotions of those who are not emotionally sensitive as well. Though you can use your internal experiences to know basically how someone might feel in a situation, you also need more information to  truly validate and/or  be effectively compassionate. To be validating, understanding the perspective of the other person is key.

Survey:  I am very grateful for all your help in better understanding emotionally sensitive people. I am currently writing a new book and would like to learn more. If you are emotionally sensitive, please consider taking this survey about decision making.  Thank you! If you gave your contact information to be interviewed about being emotionally sensitive, thank you more than I can say. It may be a few weeks but I will be in contact.

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The emotionally sensitive usually have a particularly strong reaction to painful emotions. When you struggle with intense sadness or anger for long periods of time, have difficulty controlling your words and action, and these emotions are easily triggered, that is not a walk in the park. On top of the pain involved in having such intense emotions, there is also self-consciousness or perhaps shame about being so reactive. Sometimes you become afraid of your emotions. You also may be on guard or watching for whatever might upset you. You might learn to pay a lot of attention to what upsets you.

Sometimes you may be so alert to upsetting events and annoyances that you completely disregard the pleasant experiences you have. Gratitudes are easy to overlook when you are stressed or busy, yet paying attention to them helps increase our happiness. So what can you pay attention to today? Maybe some of the suggestions below will help.

Beauty.  Maybe there are lovely flowers planted in someone’s yard. Or perhaps there is a large tree with branches that drape out giving shade to the street. Maybe you see beauty in fruit or stones or in the way you have decorated your home. Notice that beauty and take it in. Let yourself appreciate it.

The Basics of Life. Did you sleep well last night?  Life is much easier when you are rested so sleeping soundly is a positive. Having enough to eat and cool water to drink are positives we often take for granted.  If you drink and eat mindfully you will notice the complex flavors of even simple foods and how much pleasure can come from taste without overdoing the amount you eat.

Treasures. Most people have special possessions that are dear to them for emotional reasons. Perhaps you have a shawl that belonged to your grandmother or a trophy from when you won a sports event. Maybe you have a t-shirt from your favorite concert. If your treasured items are hidden consider putting them where you can enjoy them each day.

Photos.  Photos of trips you took or events you shared with friends can bring back fun memories. Savor those times by taking time to look at the photos and maybe share them with someone else.

Kindnesses: Go through your day in your head and think about any kindnesses that might have been offered to you or that you offered to others. Let yourself take in the warmth that was included in each kindness.

Values and Meaning: Notice if you acted in accordance with your values and/or engaged in activities that have meaning for you.

Friends and Family:  Maybe you enjoyed talking with a friend or a family member today. Knowing they care about you is a positive, particularly if you have friends and family who you can count on when you need them.

Laughter:  Laughing is good for you in so many ways. Be appreciative of anyone who made you laugh today.  The day is not over yet–find reasons to laugh, big all-out full force laughs.

Pets:  Play fetch with your dog, scratch your cat behind his ear or find other ways to interact with your pet. Pets can be funny and adorable and loving. Count your pet as one of your gratitudes and pleasant experiences of the day.

Small Gifts: Getting to work on time, chewing your favorite gum, stars in the sky, a good book, music, finishing a project, wearing your most comfortable jeans, watching a television show, dessert and playing an interesting game are just a few of the small gifts you may have enjoyed today.

This list may not fit you at all. Make your own list. If you aren’t sure what makes you happy or what you consider pleasant in your day, pay attention each day to what makes you smile and what you appreciate. Make notes. You may be surprised.  Sometimes what we think makes us happy may not be the most joyful part of our days.

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Making decisions can be difficult.  Heath and Heath (2013)  propose a system to help called WRAP. WRAP stands for Widen Your Options, Reality-Test Your Assumptions, Attain Distance Before Deciding, and Prepare to Be Wrong.

Widen Your Frame

One of the main pitfalls in decision making is having a narrow frame. That means you don’t consider possible alternatives that might be better options.

Consider Opportunity Costs. Imagine that you are considering buying a new phone you want. If you just consider buying the phone or not buying the phone, you are more likely to buy the phone, regardless of whether it is the best decision. If you consider whether to buy the phone or keep the money for something else, you are more likely to keep your money. Just thinking about what else you could do with the money makes a significant difference in your choice.

Use Vanishing Options. Another way to widen your frame is to tell yourself that you cannot choose any of the options you are considering. You have to think of other alternatives.  When you imagine that you cannot have an option, you free your mind to shift your focus to new ideas and strategies.

Multitrack. Multitracking means approaching or working on a problem in different ways, thinking “AND not OR.”  If you consider different options at the same time you are less likely to become personally invested in a particular choice. Listening to feedback on multiple options is easier than for a single option, probably because you are less likely to see the feedback as personal. So if you are considering artwork for your home, bring home three or four paintings or other types of art that you really like. Consider how each looks in the room and get feedback from more than one person.

Find Someone Who’s Solved Your Problem. One way to generate new options is to find someone who has already solved your problem. For example, how have other people over 40 successfully changed careers?

Reality Test Your Assumptions

We tend to give more weight to information that is consistent with our beliefs about what is the right decision and discount information that contradicts the choice we favor. Because of this bias, we may misjudge the data even when we think we are being objective. The following ideas can help overcome that cognitive prejudice.

Consider the Opposite. Pay special attention to people who don’t agree with the option you are considering. Listen carefully to their logic. If you are only listening to people who agree, you may be missing important information.

Consider what would have to be true for each of your options to be the best choice.  This challenges you to imagine conditions in which you would choose a different option than you are considering.

Ask for specific information. For example, if you are interviewing for a job and value time with your family, don’t ask if the firm values work-life balance. Ask for more specific information such as how many times last week the interviewer had dinner with his family  before 8:00 pm.

Assume positive intent. Instead of thinking that others are disrespectful of your time or don’t care about your friendship, assume that they do. Then consider what their behavior might mean instead of what you assumed it meant.

Consider the “outside” view in addition to the “inside” view.  The inside view draws from your own impressions and assessments of the situation you are in. The outside view ignores the specific details of the situation and instead considers the bigger picture such as how other people have experienced a certain solution to that situation. For example you might be sold on a certain weight loss program.  That would be the inside view. The outside view would be the opinion of other people who have tried that plan.

Ooch. Predicting the future is impossible. When you make a decision, you may want to take small steps whenever possible and assess the results of each step. You might also run small experiements to test your ideas. For example, before launching a website to sell cars, try selling one or two cars on the internet to see the results.

Attain distance Before Deciding

Attaining distance means that you don’t make decisions based on short-term emotion. One way to do this is to consider the 10/10/10 rule. Ask yourself how you think you will feel about this decision in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. You can also ask yourself what you would tell your best friend to do in this situation.

Honor your core priorities by paying attention to long-term emotional values, goals and aspirations. By identifying your core priorities you make it easier to resolve present and future dilemmas.

Prepare to Be Wrong

When you’ve made a decision, anticipate and prepare for both adversity and success. Add in extra time for unforeseen difficulties. Anticipate problems and identify ways of coping. Set a tripwire. A famous rock band once put a clause in their contract asking for M & Ms in their dressing room, but with all the brown ones removed.  If they found brown M & Ms, they knew their contract hadn’t been read and they needed to triple check the complex set up they needed for their performance. Their tripwire was brown M & Ms.

Survey:  I am very grateful for all your help in better understanding emotionally sensitive people. I am currently writing a new book and would like to learn more. If you are emotionally sensitive, please consider taking this survey about decision making.  Thank you! If you gave your contact information to be interviewed about being emotionally sensitive, thank you more than I can say. It may be a few weeks but I will be in contact.

References 

Heath, C. and Heath, D. Decisive:  How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.  New York: Crown Business, 2013.

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For many emotionally sensitive people, decision making can be agonizing. Deciding what to wear to an important wedding, where to go on vacation, whether to break up with a boyfriend and sometimes even which restaurant to choose for dinner with friends can take painful hours. Worry about making choices can mean constant self-doubt. Which decision is the right one?  What could go wrong?  What if it’s the wrong choice?  The process can be so exhausting you wish you could just flip a coin and be done with it or avoid the process altogether.

Given that decision making can be unpleasant, we may avoid thinking through the consequences of decisions or adding any additional information to the mix. Sometimes we want one option so badly that we don’t want to hear any negatives about that option. There are many ways that decision-making can get derailed.

The Four Villains

In their book Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath suggest that to make the most effective choices we need to go beyond a pros and cons list. Just looking at pros and cons will not address all the problems people face in making decisions. They identified four “villains” of decision making that interfere with making good choices: narrow framing, confirmation bias, short-term emotion, and overconfidence.

Narrow Framing. Narrow framing means that you are not considering all the alternatives available to you–you are defining your choices too narrowly. Narrow frame thinking would be when you are asking yourself if you should take a certain action or not, or which of two actions would be better. For example, should you move to a new city or not? Should you go for a walk or read a book? Restricting yourself to two choices limits your alternatives. You may not even consider options that would be better.

When you are emotional, your thinking narrows. If you are deciding how to save yourself from an approaching tiger, this narrowed thinking can be helpful because it promotes quicker action. In other situations, narrow frame thinking is too restrictive. If you are deciding whether to buy a new car, choosing between buying or not buying would be a narrow frame. Considering other options for the money, such as booking a trip to Europe or putting the money into savings, may give you a better picture of  the worth of the car to you.

Being aware of narrow frame thinking is particularly important to emotionally sensitive people. When emotionally sensitive people face a decision, they tend to become more emotional than others and their thinking tends to narrow more than the person who is not emotionally sensitive. With awareness, the emotionally sensitive can take steps to widen their view.

Confirmation Bias. Confirmation bias means that when you want or believe an idea to be true, you pay more attention to the information that supports that belief. People naturally tend to select information that supports their preexisting attitudes, beliefs and actions. For example, if you believe that people with red hair are more likely to have a temper problem, you will notice and spotlight whenever you see a redhead angry. You may not even notice when someone with redhair doesn’t react or see it as a rare exception. An executive may believe his gut decisions are the right ones and give greater weight to the times this is true and negate information to the contrary.

Emotionally sensitive people sometimes fear the worst may happen if they don’t make the right choices or they may have other beliefs that are not supported by current facts. Having these beliefs means you are likely to see and interpret information to support your fears when that is not the case.

Short-term Emotion. Short-term emotion will pass and is not useful in making a long-term decision. Short-term emotion clouds thinking. When you are emotional about a decision, you might replay arguments over and over until you can’t think straight, even though the facts have not changed. You may also only be thinking emotionally, such as wanting a red sports car that is impractical for you in the long run. If you are emotionally sensitive, having to make a decision about something may trigger fear and worry that will interfere with your logic in addition to narrowing your focus.

Overconfidence. Overconfidence is believing that you know what the future holds. Some years ago people generally believed the Internet would never catch on and no one would pay for television programs. Many years ago people were confident the earth was flat. In everyday life it might be that you are absolutely positive that a certain job is the right one for you (even though you have never worked in that field before) or that getting into a certain school is the only way to achieve your goals. Being overconfident leads to not considering alternatives or what might happen if your choice doesn’t work out well. Being overconfident about the future can lead to unfortunate outcomes.

Heath and Heath propose the WRAP model for effective decision making.  I’ll discuss that model in the next post.

Survey:  I am very grateful for all your help in better understanding emotionally sensitive people. I am currently writing a new book and would like to learn more. If you are emotionally sensitive, please consider taking this survey about decision making.  Thank you!

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Mindfulness has been shown to improve our mood, reduce stress, improve our performance and reduce pain. Part of mindfulness is to accept the present moment as it is, to be fully present. Practicing mindfulness as we go about our daily routine can be a challenge.  One of those challenges is in accepting reality as it is. This is often particularly difficult for emotionally sensitive people who experience the emotions of life so intensely.

Wishing

More than one fairy tale is about having wishes that come true. We’ve all made wishes, some more important than others. Sometimes though wishing can become a daily routine. You wake up , turn over, and say, “I wish I didn’t have to go to work today.”  You stay in bed longer than planned and then wish you didn’t have to rush to get to work on time.  You walk into your closet and wish you had an outfit that fit and then wish you could lose ten pounds. On the way to work you wish the traffic would clear. You get to work and wish you had time to stop for coffee before you have to start your day. At your desk you wish you didn’t have to write that report and that you had a different boss. Your significant other calls and you wish he or she would be more serious about marriage or career. Maybe you wish you could take a vacation or that you could afford to pay someone to clean your house.

Many people wish at times that their life situations were different. There’s probably no harm in wishing unless you find yourself constantly wishing life were different and experiencing a chronic discontent.  Consistently wishing things were different is non-acceptance of what is. When you are wishing for life to be different you may be missing out on the life you have. In addition, for some people, wishing builds dissatisfaction and suffering.

Complaining

Chronic complaining  is also a way of not accepting reality as it is. You might complain because it is raining, too cold, or too hot. You might complain about your boss being too demanding or your spouse gaining weight. Complaining is about being dissatisfied with what is and that is not acceptance.

When you complain repeatedly, you are focused on what you don’t like about your world. Soemtimes that builds discontent and leads to more complaining. Over time you may find that you are focused more on what is wrong than what is right about your day. You may even ignore the positives and only focus on what didn’t go well. In that way your reality can become distorted and your suffering increases.

Shoulding

Another way of not accepting reality is to say that events or people should not be the way they are.  You might believe that your daughter shouldn’t quit her job to tour with a band or that you shouldn’t have to work so hard or that doctors shouldn’t make mistakes. The word “should”  implies that there is a set way lives should be lived and  the universe should operate and the situation you are talking about deviates from those rules..

Maybe what you truly  mean by saying your daughter shouldn’t quit her job to join a band is that she is taking a high risk that is unlikely to pay off and is likely to have negative consequences. She is more likely to have difficulty paying her bills if she quits her job, for example.  In that case perhaps you are using “should” to mean a better or safer choice.  You might use “should” to indicate that something does not fit our sense of fairness. For example, children “shouldn’t” get cancer or you shouldn’t lose valuable, irreplaceable photographs of your family.

Avoiding 

A woman once told me she did not go to the doctor for several years because she was afraid of what he would say. She believed she had a serious illness and did not want to know for sure. A gentleman shared that for several weeks he avoided being alone with his wife for fear she would ask for a divorce. There are many ways of avoiding and most if not all are ways of not accepting reality as it is.  When you are mindful, you notice your fear and do not let it control you in ways that are not consistent with reality.

Being aware of problems is different from shoulding, complaining, wishing or avoiding. If you notice a harmful situation and work to change it, that is problem solving.

Try going for an hour or a day noticing when you are  complaining, shoulding, or wishing things were different.  Notice  and bring yourself back to the presnt moment and reality. Acceptance is not about agreeing with the way things are, it is simply an acknowledgement that reality is what it is. You can accept what is and still work to change it.

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Many emotionally sensitive people seem to dislike and even hate themselves. The reasons vary but seem to fall into certain categories: self-blame, negative self-attribution, believing myths, not living values, treating yourself as if you don’t matter and experiencing emotional pain.

Self-blame

Many people look for someone to blame when things go wrong and bad things happen. If you burn yourself by spilling a cup of hot coffee, then someone made the coffee too hot or jostled your arm. If you don’t finish school, it’s because your teachers didn’t encourage you.

Blaming is different from taking responsibility. Blame assigns fault with a negative twist, perhaps a nuance of accusation. Responsibility means that the person played a part in what happened and has accountability for it. Responsibility seems more factual while blame seems more emotion-based.

Emotionally sensitive people sometimes blame themselves for all the negative events that occur in their lives. They don’t allow themselves any room for human error. Often the blame is based on the fact that the event occurred, not a factual evaluation of what happened. If your daughter is angry, it’s because you must have spoken too harshly to her or done something awful. If your boss rejects the report, it’s because you did a horrible job. Perfectionism can add to the problems here. For example, if the boss asks you to revise one paragraph, you decide you messed up the assignment.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to use personality-based explanations for behavior instead of situational explanations.  For example, when someone cuts in front of you in traffic, you decide he is a thoughtless, reckless jerk. You don’t consider the situation he might be in, you go straight for a character flaw. 

Doing this to yourself would distort your view of yourself. If you have a really difficult week and then berate yourself for being too lazy to do the dishes or if you are ill and judge yourself as a loser because you do not meet your deadlines that week, you would be ignoring the situation you were in and attributing negative personality characteristics to yourself based on the situation. You could develop a long list of negative characteristics for yourself in this way.

Some of you may see looking at the situation as the reason for the behavior as making excuses. The definition of excuses is a reason put forward to defend or justify a fault or offense. The issue is whether the excuse is accurate. It is not reasonable to expect yourself to function at the same speed and accomplish the amount of work when you are ill as when you are well. That is a fact. When excuses are factual reasons why something happened, then it is about accepting the truths of life. Looking at the facts and finding the truth is not letting yourself off the hook.

Believing Myths 

Your parents and your family members all had their own issues and values. Everyone does. You may have grown up with their views of you ingrained in your mind. You may not even be aware that some thoughts you have about yourself originally came from others. If you see yourself as a burden, maybe that idea came from a parent who had little to give or was overwhelmed with tasks. Maybe that view was more about them than you. Have you checked the facts of that idea?

We can have myths that come from our experience. If you don’t find a lifetime partner by a certain age, you might decide that you are unlovable and unwanted. If you weren’t skilled in softball or soccer when you were a child, you may have decided that you do not have coordination skills or the ability to do any physical activities well. Maybe your partner repeatedly tells you how worthless you are or how you deserve to be punished and you believe what he or she says.

You can view these as reasons to dislike yourself, when in fact these ideas are likely untrue.  Even if they are true, not everyone has the same gifts and therapy can help you learn to develop better relationship skills. Hating yourself accomplishes nothing and adds to the problem.

Not Living Your Values

Part of how we see ourselves comes from what we do, how we behave. When you don’t live your values, you may be disgusted with your own choices and hate yourself for your actions. Maybe you value family yet you rage at your spouse or your children. Maybe you value honesty and you are lying about important issues in your life.

Treating Yourself As if You Don’t Matter

Part of the way we think of ourselves comes from the way we treat ourselves. If you don’t take care of your physical hygiene, that’s a way of saying you don’t matter. Maybe you let others make your decisions or you are a doormat, always paying attention to the needs of others and ignoring your own. Maybe you hide from the world, believing that you don’t deserve happiness or sleep with people when you don’t want to. All these patterns create or strengthen self-hatred.

Emotional Pain

Emotionally sensitive people experience intense emotions that can be challenging to manage. The pain of life is magnified and some people hate that they are emotionally sensitive. Reacting with sadness or fear to events that don’t seem to affect others can be discouraging. Knowing they react more intensely than others is uncomfortable for many. They may get angry at themselves for being emotionally sensitive and have difficulty accepting the way they were born, even though there are positives to being emotionally sensitive.

This list is not exhaustive–there are many more ways to develop self-hatred. If you are engaging in any of these patterns, then consider whether these patterns are effective in your life. Is what you are doing helping you achieve your goals or experience peace in your life?

In a future post, I’ll discuss radical self-acceptance and give some ideas about how to give up self-hatred.

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Perhaps you agree to give a presentation, play the piano for your friend’s wedding, or go on a trip to a foreign country. Not long after you commit you are filled with anxiety and wish you had never agreed.  Maybe even leaving your house causes you anguish, worrying about what others think of you. In these situations you are worrying about an event that has not happened, but might happen.

When you suffer from a life event that could have been avoided, you may be angry with yourself. For example, whenever you lose a loved pet or experience the break up of a relationship, you might say, “Never again. It’s not worth it.” You worry about feeling that pain in the future.

Anxiety vs. Fear

Anxiety depends on the past and the future for its existence. If you think about events going wrong in the future, you will likely feel anxious. If you think about past events that have gone wrong you may be depressed or anxious.

Wilson and Dufrene (2010) point out that anxiety is really out of place in the present moment.If something is going wrong right now, it is unlikely that you are anxious about it. If the problem is in the present, you probably feel fear. Fear is a useful emotion. Fear helps you take action that you need to take, like running from  gunfire or getting to work on time when people who are late are being fired.

Fear based on facts is helpful for problem solving and safety. Anxiety about future events that have not happened and may not happen is usually not useful. Anxiety and worry typically increase your suffering and may lead you to avoid doing what you want to do with your life.

Why Not Avoid?

Why not avoid? Why would you adopt another pet?  Why would you agree to go on a trip with someone you love, when you know you will worry?  The reason may be that what causes you the most suffering in life is usually exactly what matters to you most. So when you avoid what causes you suffering, you may be avoiding your life.

If you are fearful of what people say about you, you may play each day safe. Instead of wearing the hot pink you love, you go for beige. You blend in rather than sing loudly. If you fear rejection you may hold back from friendships and not engage in opportunities to love someone. You may say you are keeping yourself safe, but there is a difference between keeping yourself safe and avoiding events that might involve painful emotional experiences and thus avoiding living your life.

Keeping yourself safe means you are not putting yourself in situations that are truly dangerous. Not walking into a store that is being robbed is keeping yourself safe based on facts.

You avoid when you don’t do an activity because something unpleasant might happen. If you go to the party, you might be rejected, so you don’t go. If you try an art class, someone might say you have no talent, so you stay home. You avoid even events or activities that  are important to you in order to not feel anxious. Once you decide not to do the feared activity, your anxiety goes down. Avoidance can become a way of coping with anxiety.

If you avoid situations that make you anxious, then you will feel less anxious. So sometimes the number of situations you avoid gets larger over time. You avoid taking an art class, you avoid going to the mall, and then you avoid going to the grocery store. At some point you may avoid being around people you don’t know well. You make decisions based on how to avoid feeling anxious.

Mindfulness and Anxiety

Wilson and Dufrene suggest that mindfulness can help you consider worry and anxiety as lapses in mindfulness, as being out of touch with the present moment. Anxiety cannot exist when you are living in the present moment. They also suggest that you separate yourself from the stories you tell yourself about what might happen in the future. Sometimes we take the stories we tell ourselves literally, as being the truth of a situation. Recognizing that what you imagine might happen is just a story you are telling yourself can help you not get absorbed in the story as being reality.

Perhaps you are thinking that someone could reject you and a pet could die. In fact, the things you worry about do happen sometimes. That is true. But how effective are your anxious thoughts in helping you live the life you want to lead?  It may be that you accept that you have the worries and that you stay in the moment, making choices that get you closer to the life you want.

References

Wilson, Kelly G. and Dufrene, Troy. Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong:  A Guide to Life Liberated from Anxiety. Oakland, California: New Harbinger Publications, 2010.

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Mark McGuinness, in his book resilience, points out that in your lifetime you will apply for opportunities and be rejected many times. You will work for goals you do not achieve. Even when you do succeed, you will be criticized, sometimes viciously. That criticism may be directed at you professionally or on a more personal level. Criticism is a part of life.

Most people have at one time or another kept themselves from going after what they wanted because they were afraid of rejection, failure, or criticism. For the emotionally sensitive, this is a common experience. Sensitivity to rejection and criticism can be paralyzing in both work and social situations. What you want to do may be simple or it may be a complex endeavor. Whether it is to enter a cooking contest or to go visit a friend across town, accepting criticism may be the price of going after your dreams.

Many of you may be familiar with the process that McGuinness describes. When you first think of something that you really want to do, maybe go to a special event, enroll in classes for a degree you really want, attend a singles event or go on a special trip, you might be excited. In the beginning you think of how much fun you will have or how good it will feel to have the career you’ve longed for. Then the fear creeps in. You think of all the disasters that could occur. And perhaps, as McGuiness says, the bigger the dream, the bigger the fear.

Fear of rejection and sensitivity to rejection can stop you from participating fully in life and rob you of your dreams. Putting yourself into a project, working for it and caring deeply about the outcome make the experience personal. When people criticize you or you don’t get the outcome you want, it seems like a judgment of your value as a person rather than feedback about the work. That’s difficult to face.

Going After Your Dreams In Spite of Your Fears

To get past that obstacle, McGuiness says you need to be connected to a powerful purpose, one that is more important than the fear of rejection, one that you are passionate about. If you are deeply committed to teaching young children, then the fear of being an older student in a classroom of young men and women will not stop you. While you may be uncomfortable about whether you can succeed in school, the strength of your passion will help you overcome that.

He also says practicing mindfulness will help you separate yourself from rejection. When you are mindful, you notice that the rejection is a part of the experience but not the whole of what you are attempting to do. Being mindful also allows you to separate the rejection from your value as a person.

Another tool is to know that getting rejected and criticized is normal and happens to everyone. If it is a normal experience, like learning to walk, then you may not see being criticized as such a horrible experience. You may stop avoiding it. It as a normal experience, one that will hurt, and one that you can get through.

Don’t make the experience of being rejected or criticized worse. You can make it worse by judging yourself harshly (How could I have been so stupid?), exaggerating the situation, and replaying the situation over and over in your head. One of the least helpful reactions is to give up, telling yourself that because that one situation didn’t work out that you can never succeed. Avoiding one rejection is likely to make it even more difficult to face rejection in the future.

When you are rejected, analyzing the situation for information on how to succeed the next time is different from replaying the situation over and over in agony. Focusing on facts and learning from your experience may help you be ready for the next opportunity.

McGuiness gives other ideas to support his message that you can learn to manage rejection and criticism and go after your dreams.

References

McGuiness, Mark.  resilience:  facing down rejection and criticism on the road to success.  Lateral Action Books, 2012.

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We all have different ways of viewing the world. Some may have a strong sense of smell and their experiences are filtered through aromas and scents. Others may be particularly visual and react primarily to what they see. A bed of flowers elicits calmness while disarray in the home triggers anxiety. The senses of touch, taste, and hearing can also be ways of connecting to the world and affect your experience of events, people,  and situations.

In addition to the senses, your worldview is influenced by the balance between your thoughts and emotions. Many people will look at a puppy and feel love for the puppy.  For some, that love will dominate and they will be filled with longing to take the puppy home. They may do so even though they have no room for another pet. Others may smile and appreciate the puppy, but think of the time and money it takes to care for an animal.

Emotionally sensitive people tend to see and experience the world primarily through their emotions. Some do so even though they cannot name their emotions or identify the reasons for their feelings. And sometimes, perhaps because their emotions are their primary way of experiencing life events, they may label their thoughts as emotions.  For example, someone might react to an event with the words  ”I feel so betrayed.”  In truth, betrayal is not a feeling but an action that you label in your thoughts. You may feel sad, angry, or hurt as a result of betrayal or even at the thought that you have been betrayed.

Thoughts and feelings are both part of the experience of being betrayed. Perhaps saying “I feel betrayed” is a shorthand way of relating that total experience, but neither thoughts nor feelings are accuately expressed.  If the  thought is left out it changes your experience and makes coping more difficult. Being able to accurately label the emotion you are experiencing is part of managing that emotion effectively.

When someone says, “I feel stupid,” both the thought and the feeling are masked. The thought is  ”I am stupid.”  The feelings may be shame, sadness, or hurt. If you feel emotions but don’t label them, you will have more difficulty coping. Accurate labels are part of managing emotions. In addition, you probably know skills to manage true emotions, but there is no skill for “feeling” stupid because it is not a feeling.

Leaving out the thought means you may not see the judgment and invalidation in your thinking. Because feelings just are, you  accept them without requiring evidence. You then check whether they are justified. For example, you might say that you feel afraid, accept that you are fearful, then check for the threat. If there is no true threat to your safety, you work on managing your feeling. So if you label stupid as a feeling, you accept that is the way you “feel” and you are likely to find a situation that justifies the “feeling”. Your actions based on “feeling” stupid could well make the situation worse. In addition, accepting the “feeling” that you are stupid could lead to your seeing that characteristic as part of your identity though it was actually an untrue thought and not a feeling at all.

Accurately labeling the experience as “I think I am stupid” leads to a different result. You can challenge your thoughts and check to see if your thoughts are accurate. If you ask yourself if it is true that you are stupid, then there are likely to be many situations that disprove that idea.

Consider the comment, “I feel broken.” If you believe that you feel broken, evidence to the contrary won’t change the statement and your feelings will be masked by the thought of being broken. One way to reword the statement to reflect both feelings and thoughts would be “I think I am broken because I see myself as abandoned by others,” and “I feel a painful sadness.” The statement about feeling broken could also be shorthand for other thoughts and feelings. Identifying your experience accurately will help you cope more effectively, react more from wisdom and less from emotion, and not distort your sense of self based on what may be inaccurate thoughts you’ve labeled as feelings.

Being emotionally sensitive can be a gift. Being mindful of what are emotions and what are thoughts can decrease the pain that is often part of being emotionally sensitive.

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