323: Christine Comaford: How To Increase Your Emotional Resilience In Uncertain Times

Subscribe: RSS

How Do You Exercise Emotional Resilience During Uncertain Times and Set Yourself Up For Explosive Growth?

Christine Comaford

For over 30 years Leadership and Culture Coach, Serial Entrepreneur, and New York Times bestselling author Christine Comaford has helped leaders navigate growth and change. She specializes in applied neuroscience, which helps her clients achieve tremendous results in record time. An entrepreneur, she built and sold five companies with an average ROI of 700%, and she was a software engineer in the early days of Microsoft and Apple. Christine is a human behavior expert, a leadership columnist for Forbes.com, and the New York Times bestselling author of Power Your Tribe, SmartTribes and Rules for Renegades.

Named one of the Top 50 Human Behavior Experts to Follow and one of the Global Employee Engagement Influencers, Christine is sought after for providing proven strategies to shift executive behavior to create more positive outcomes, enroll and align teams in times of change, profoundly increase sales, product offerings, and company value.

Her coaching, consulting and strategies have created hundreds of billions of dollars in new revenue and company value for her clients. The potent neuroscience techniques she teaches are easy to learn and immediately applicable to help leaders see into their blind spots, expand their vision and more effectively influence outcomes.

Christine has served as a board director or in-the-trenches advisor to 36 startups, and has invested in over 200 startups (including Google). She has consulted to the White House (Clinton and Bush), 700 of the Fortune 1000 companies, and over 300 small and medium-sized businesses. She has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, FOX Business Network, PBS, CNET and Stanford Graduate School of Business has done two case studies on her unconventional rise to success as a woman with neither a high school diploma nor college degree.

Christine believes we can do well and do good, using business as a path for personal development, wealth creation, and philanthropy.

What We Discuss With Christine Comaford In This Episode

Why it’s essential that leaders understand how to deal with emotions
The Emotional Wheel – how to identify the real emotion driving behavior
Maneuvers of Consciousness – how to develop emotional resilience in 12 minutes
The Outcome Frame – how to remove roadblocks and encourage insight and aspiration
The Five Organismic Rights – how to claim your rights as a human being

Episode Transcript Highlights

Navigating Our Emotions

One of the most important things we do as leaders as navigate emotions – our emotions and those of our people.

In the western world we are excellent at using our intellect but are not so good at dropping into how we are feeling. However, our behaviors come from how we’re feeling. We can’t understand why we do what we do – what gets us stuck – if we don’t first identify how we are feeling.

Acknowledge where you are on the Emotional Wheel (see infographic below). Instead of resisting it, feel the emotion for a moment. If it’s something unpleasant or causing you pain, take a moment and notice the story that you’re telling yourself about that.

We need emotional resilience right now, where we choose our state of being.

Follow along with the “Maneuvers of Consciousness” infographic below. This is a neuro-linguistic tool that helps you change your state in 12 minutes. You need to ‘go all in’ for this to work – don’t chicken out. Figure out what you’re resisting, for example, the COVID-19 shelter in place, job layoffs, etc.

Work with a buddy who times you. The first step is the Negative Evaluation, where all the magic happens. You have to purge all that stuff. Emotions have to move through your body or you squish them down and then you get a bunch of stress or you get sick.

After each step check the Emotion Wheel to see what emotion you’re feeling, and have your buddy write it down.

You also need to do a break-state in between each step because emotions have energy. We’ve had 3 reputable doctors who have measured this. Shake your body out.

The next step is Curiosity, where you witness what you are resisting. Refer to the infographic below for questions to ask. Start to step out and look at the thing you’ve been resisting and get really curious about it by asking a lot of questions.

Step three is Amazement, where you get absolutely fascinated by the thing you were resisting. (See infographic for questions to engage you in this process.)

Step four is Appreciation, where you express full appreciation for the experience you have been resisting, how you’re benefiting and growing as a result. (See infographic below for questions and statements to engage you.) For example, during this COVID-19 experience a lot of people are finding that it’s helping them to create their own exercise regime, get to know their body better, have more quiet time alone, change their diet, and purge their house, etc.

You can use this tool in a group. A lot of people we’re working with now are starting their meetings by having people say how they’re feeling. It helps whoever is leading the meeting get a reading of the room. You can do it at the beginning of the meeting and at the end to determine whether the group came together.

Once you’ve done the Maneuvers of Consciousness and you’re in a more interesting state, you can ground it and take it to the next level using the Outcome Frame.

The Outcome Frame

The Outcome Frame is a tool used to create your desired state. You do it in 15 minutes with a buddy. It’s a series of questions to forge your desired state and cause your brain to fire visual, auditory and kinesthetic cues so that you step into the future version of you and test drive it. (Refer to the infographic below for specifics.)

These tools are very versatile – you can use them at home with your family as well as at work with your direct reports or in a group. Outcome Frames are great for creating alignment within groups.

The important thing with the Outcome Frame is to do it thoroughly. You don’t want to be an overachiever can do it in 5 minutes, because it will stay as a fantasy. 15 minutes is ideal.

Bash the myth that we’re supposed to have it all together. We have an opportunity during this COVID-19 situation to embrace our humanity and the humanity of others.

How about asking people “how are you feeling” instead of “how are you” so you can get to the real emotion?

Each of us has a different map of the world based on our frame of reference. Rather than assume you know what they mean, ask them, “How specifically are you tired?”

The reason we use the word “specifically and not “exactly” and because in neuro-linguistics there is a term called complex equivalence, which is how we define a word. “How exactly” feels to some like a test, which they don’t want to get wrong.

Once they explain how specifically they feel a certain way, then you can co-create something together because they’ll feel heard.

The Outcome Frame has us do two things that we must do at work every day. We must have our own insights, not those handed to us by our boss, and we must have aspiration.

Claiming Your Human Rights

The prefrontal cortex – the part of our brain where we make decisions, plan strategies, have visions, language, tool-making etc. – is not fully formed until we’re 21 years old for women and 25 for men.

Between 0 and 3 years old, we look around our world and decide what rights we have, based on our family system and decisions that we make. (See infographic below.)

The right to exist – do I have the right to take up space, have a voice and be here? Start to notice if people play small. Or they may intellectualize like crazy which indicates that they are not being present, and not feeling. They’re hanging out where it’s safe in their brain.

The right to have needs – could it be that you’re feeling angry, frustrated, etc., because you didn’t speak your needs so somebody else isn’t honoring them? Many women are raised to smoosh they needs down and take care of everybody else first. Notice if you’re repeatedly “taking one for the team”, when you actually don’t know what you need. Or when you know your needs but don’t ask for them to be fulfilled.

The right to take action – if people have a hard time being accountable, keeping commitments, or procrastinate often, it’s possibly because they feel they don’t have the right to take action.

The right to have consequences – when we take action and things don’t work out, do we start pointing fingers, telling stories and blaming? Or do we say, “I messed up. Here’s how I’m going to fix it. Here’s what I’m going to do so that I don’t mess up in the future. Will you please accept my apology?”

The right to love and be loved – can we be around people that have a lot of emotion? Can we ask for affection, and can we let it in?

Holding Space For Others

Emotional intelligence is really about holding space for people and letting them have whatever experience they’re having and not trying to smoosh it down because you’re uncomfortable.

During this COVID-19 situation, a lot of people are grieving the loss of their life the way it used to be.

90-92% of our decisions of behavior are dominated by our emotional brain.

When you get upset, look at the Org Rights – what do you feel is not being honored?

It’s really key for us to understand our emotions but also to see ourselves beyond this role or transitory fleeting identity that we have.

When we are connected to nature, we are more at peace because we’re not in our heads anymore. Being connected to the earth is being connected to our body.

It’s time for us to start to be human beings vs human doings, which is what has, in part, caused this current situation.

Episode Resources

Free Mini-Course: 8-Week Emotional Resilience
Free Webinars and Resources: Join Smart Tribes Community
Podcast: Cracking The Behavior Code: Create Peak Performance In 20 Minutes
Retreat: BeyondYourBrain.com – October 1-4, 2020 in Petaluma, CA

Connect With Christine Comaford

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora or Stitcher.

Did You Enjoy The Podcast?

If you like this episode let us know! Reviews for the podcast on iTunes are greatly appreciated. This helps us reach more entrepreneurs seeking to make a positive impact in the world. If you received value from this episode, it would mean so much if you could take a moment and leave your 5-star rating and review. You can do that by visiting here. Thank you! Together we can make a difference!

Additional Episodes You May Like

Tags:

How Do You Exercise Emotional Resilience During Uncertain Times and Set Yourself Up For Explosive Growth?