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4 Tips to Prevent Emotional Hijacking

By | David Klaasen | Helping You Create Clarity, Inspire Your People & Drive Performance | Retain your best people | Changing Management Mindsets and Behaviour | Practical Behaviour Analytics

We are often very quick to judge the silly mistakes of others but we are all prone to making errors of judgement, it’s just your brain at work. It is easy to get wound up when you suddenly have to deal with an irate client because one of your team made a simple error, especially when the mistake should have been easy to avoid. But your emotions can just as easily trip you up. It doesn’t take much to hijack your brain just like what happened to the member of your team.

I’ve recently been asked to coach a number of Directors and Managers because they were having challenges with their work-load, making mountains out of molehills, and were beginning to undermine working relationships with others. The problem they have in common is that their brains are constantly being hijacked by emotions and this causes a number of things to happen.

Your Hyper-alert Brain

Our ancestral brain is designed to notice threats to our survival and is therefore hyper-alert to anything it perceives as a danger. If you had once seen a poisonous snake by the edge of a path your brain would keep a memory of it so you can be alert to a similar situation. However, in order to save thousands of ‘danger’ memories your brain reduces them to a simplified form, just like a low-resolution thumbnail, so it can respond to a threat in milliseconds. This means that if your brain notices a snake-like shape by the side of the path it will set off an immediate threat-response even if a moment later you see that it is just an old rope.

The problem with the threat-response is that it has an impact on your ability to use your Prefrontal Cortex. The Prefrontal Cortex is a very thin layer covering the front part of the brain just behind your forehead. It is only about 4-5% of your total brain mass and it was the last major part of the brain to evolve in humans. We use it to understand and make connections between contexts and concepts; to plan, prioritise and make decisions; to visualise ideas and be creative, and to inhibit impulses that come from our unconscious instincts.

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