Staying Calm

I’ve worked for many out-of-control tech companies either as a marketing executive or as an outside consultant. I’m sure most of corporate America suffers from disfunction, but tech is especially plagued by poor communicators, scope creep, contradictory goals, rash decision making and micromanagement. In that kind of environment, aggressive behavior is common and even rises to the top. There is a reason Elon Musk is a toxic bully. Tech didn’t make him so, but tech rewarded his damaged psychology.

Truthfully, I rarely enjoyed working for those companies even though I’m good at navigating them. I found a way to keep my calm through some of the weirdest situations. A company founder who constantly called his brother, “fat boy,” in meetings. Another who paraded female escorts through the building in an attempt to impress them (I guess). A CEO who would talk about his masturbatory habits in the boardroom. A CEO who would call executives at 1 AM while drunk and angry. A tech founder who had a habit of telling me which members of the executive team he thought he could kill with his bare hands. These are real situations I’ve navigated in my career and that doesn’t even get to the common passive-aggressive stuff that every tech company suffers.

A common bit of positive feedback I get from my clients and friends is that I can stay calm in surprising or difficult situations. I’ve been referred to as the Zen master, poker face, or cool headed. It hasn’t always been that way, and I still find myself losing my temper when my battery is dead. I’ve said things I regret. I’ve had time to reflect on those moments over decades, and I’ve consciously decided to minimize the amount of regret in my life. I wasn’t born calm; I learned to cultivate calm.

I’ve picked up some decent habits over the years that I want to share in case you also wonder how you be less reactive in difficult situation. Some habits I picked up through years of therapy. Others through random bits of advice from mentors. Unsurprisingly, the biggest change in my calm came from prayer.

Contemplative prayer has taught me that I am not my brain. One of the practices you learn in contemplation is that you don’t have to attend to every thought that crosses your mind. You don’t take the bait of your monkey mind. Some people think that entering the Cloud of Unknowing means that you have no thoughts. What is really happening is that you still have thoughts but you observe them, you don’t need to respond or add to them. One thing that can make our minds busy during prayer is that our thoughts can trigger other thoughts and emotions. This makes the mind race because one thought can turn into ten. In contemplation we learn to simply observe those thoughts and not respond. A thought or emotion comes up and I don’t need to explore it, I can just say, “huh, look at that.”  

When I say that I am not my brain, I mean that there is a deeper “I,” who is observing the thoughts and emotions of the supercomputer I call my brain. Whatever or wherever that “I,” is, it is operating my brain, not the other way around. In terms of staying calm, that means my emotions are just part of the sophisticated dashboard in my supercomputer, like warning lights in my car. I can choose what I want to do about those warning lights. Sometimes warning lights go off for no reason. Sometimes I get an email alert on my computer that I need to address right away while other alerts can wait. My iPhone pushes me alerts all the time for news, social media, text messages and more. One from my wife? I’ll respond right away. A news story about a new espresso machine? It can wait. Your job is to decide what you do with all those bells, whistles, alerts and warning lights on the dashboard of your brain.

Brain researcher Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor has popularized an idea that the immediate physiological urges you feel that come from an emotional reaction (sometimes referred to as your fight-or-flight response) flush about of your systems after 90 seconds. Everyone is different so don’t take this as a universal, but just an interesting concept. Someone says something that you think is negative. Your emotional warning light goes off on your dashboard. Your body releases chemicals to respond and so understandably most people respond, often in hurtful ways. But you don’t have to. You can observe the rush of adrenaline, look at your warning light and wait 90 seconds.

The feelings connected with anger are real and driven by these chemicals. Many of us just go through life thinking that it’s not our choice if someone makes us angry. Your heart rate goes up, you feel the adrenaline, you want to lash out and it seems out of your control. Those are just warning lights and you get to choose. And if all you do is choose to wait, the light turns off in 90 seconds anyway.

If we only had to worry about that 90 seconds we could just wait out the chemicals and move on. Unfortunately, while your chemicals flush out, your monkey mind continues to ruminate on offenses, real or imagined. Take something simple, like someone you don’t know cutting in front of you and flipping you off in traffic. Your chemicals are there for a reason, your supercomputer sensed a threat that at 60 MPH could be life or death. You need to fight or fly. Then you drive along and your body calms down, even though your mind doesn’t. You think about how careless, thoughtless and dangerous some people are. Of course, that guy had a MAGA bumper sticker, you should’ve known. Did you get his license plate? You were having such a great day, too, why did he have to ruin everything? Can you see that the danger is long from over and you’ll probably never see that driver again, so the rest of your misery is self-inflicted?

That’s what can happen with a random stranger. What about someone who knows you well enough to push your buttons? You must understand what those so-called buttons really are and realize that if they are your buttons, you can cut the wires. How were those buttons installed in the first place? You have some previous hurt or trauma and when you experience something that recalls that hurt, you feel new hurt in magnitudes that don’t reflect the current situation. One way to look at someone who pushes your buttons is that they’re helping you identify some old wounds that haven’t healed yet. You should thank them because the only way to heal from deep, hidden wounds is to recognize them. That button-pusher is doing you a favor.

I haven’t personally done this, but I know people who have kept a journal of the things that trigger them that can help them recognize it later. Through some trial and error, I’ve recognized a few of my own buttons and have tried to disconnect them – although frankly, the wires seem to reconnect from time to time despite my best efforts. I was the youngest in my family, so I never felt like the smart one. When someone questions a decision, it feels like they’re calling me dumb. They aren’t, that’s my own addition to their critique. My parents were both addicts so I assume that negativity means abandonment. I want to go to the worst-case scenario. I assume people don’t have loyal connections to me.  In fact, negativity probably just means the other person is having a bad day. I could go on. I have more buttons than a TI-30XS MultiView.

When you recognize these patterns, you realize something equally uncomfortable. Often anger is a response that is easier for you to accept than hurt, fear, or shame. Sure, there are many times that you should be angry, ICE raids for example. That’s a long term, rational and righteous anger. If instead you only associate anger with an immediate flood of emotions, step back and consider if that anger is simply the spokesperson for your deeper hurt and vulnerability. You’ve repressed those feelings and stopped listening to them, so anger must step up on their behalf.

You can try an experiment the next time a loved one makes you feel angry. Express your vulnerability instead of the secondary anger and see where it leads. Let’s say your boyfriend cancels plans on you at the last minute. Sure, it’s tempting to say something like, “you always do this because you don’t respect my time.” Because maybe your older sister did this to you so many times growing up that you feel disrespected. But what if you shared your vulnerability like, “I’m really disappointed because I’ve been looking forward to spending time with you all day and I don’t like feeling that our night wasn’t as important to you.” I don’t know how said boyfriend would respond, but it will be with a lot more depth and understanding because you showed vulnerability.

As I mentioned above, contemplative prayer taught me that I could watch my own thoughts and then choose what to do with them. That was a big revelation to me. I can observe the initial flood of emotions when someone says something hurtful or inaccurate. These thoughts and emotions are like clouds in the big blue sky of my mind. Sometimes those clouds gather up into entire weather systems. I can still decide what to do. I can open an umbrella or go inside if that weather system rains. It beats standing there just screaming at the clouds.

A trick I learned while running an educational center as a young man was to imagine that I’m watching a movie. Students in the center were under enormous pressure because they felt their college career, post-graduate career or even entire professional life in the case of licensing exams were on the line at that moment. They would often take that frustration out on all of us in the center. I would tell myself that I was watching a move scene so I could detach from what felt like personal attacks. Watching the movie made it easier for me to be compassionate as a Christian. I remind myself there is a Christ inside of the other person. I don’t have to wallow in the mud with them, I don’t have to jump into their negative talk, I don’t even really have to respond, I might say a little prayer for healing. In this movie, I am objectively observing someone in pain. This isn’t about me. This is about them.

Recently I wrote an article on how Dante changed my life. Dante showed me that suffering is a tool that brings us closer to the Divine. The journey toward Paradise begins in Hell. Since you are now going to sit outside of your emotional weather patterns, those clouds forming in your brain during difficult interactions with other people, you can also reframe the situation according to this more global philosophical perspective. What I mean by that is you can see difficult people as some God-sent suffering for you to learn and grow. God is a personal trainer sending that person into your life right now to help you grow and maybe disconnect some buttons. That person isn’t a negative idiot; They are a spiritual dumbbell that God racked up for you.

Reframing can work on a micro level as well, not just the macro spiritual level. One way I do this is to consider the emotional place that the other person is responding from. It is rarely because they care anything about me one way or the other, so I shouldn’t take it personally. Most of us are obsessed with our own issues and don’t spend a lot of time thinking about other people’s perspectives. If someone is negative toward you, step back and consider that this probably isn’t a personal attack. It’s a strained situation that is demonstrating that person’s own hurt, fear, and vulnerability.

Some people are concerned about whether their reframed stories are accurate. Maybe I’m too much of a postmodern type, but I don’t really care. What is truth anyway? We all see the world through our own lens. So why not change a lens in a way that protects your boundaries? Let’s say someone sends you a sharply worded email. There are any number of responses you could have emotionally. Why is this person always so negative? What did I do wrong to cause this? Am I going to be fired? Is this just the tip of the iceberg? What is the next shoe to drop? All these types of ideas cause you to spiral even further adding clouds to the weather system. Why not replace those ideas with something like, “this person is in a hurry, so they wrote this email quickly?” Does it matter if the reframe is true? Rarely.

Remember that you cannot control how other people act. That’s where boundaries come in. Some people think of boundaries as walls, but I think of them more like limiters. Limiters are used in music production to make sure that a signal doesn’t rise above a certain threshold. It limits the volume of an instrument, channel or the entire soundboard. Sometimes the loud instruments in a band, say drums or guitar, can drown out other instruments or worse, distort the entire mix. A limiter stops the volume of that instrument at a certain level and stops it from going past where it can distort. It does not mute the instrument entirely; it just sets up a boundary. For instance, if someone is yelling at you, you can just tell them, “I don’t allow people to yell at me or say disrespectful things, but I’m happy to return to this conversation when you are ready to have it in a calm manner.” Boundaries.

I was recently in a meeting at church where I held a minority position. I was fine with it, but someone on the committee really wanted me to be convinced of the other point of view. I could feel the emotional chemicals building up because it felt like they were disrespecting my own position. I finally just said, “it’s OK that we disagree, we’ve gone around this topic several times and I don’t think we’ll change each other’s minds. But I feel heard and I will support whatever decision we come up with.” Boundaries.

Remember that you are allowed to choose your moments as well. Just because someone interrupts you with a difficult conversation doesn’t mean it’s the right time to have that difficult conversation. You are very much allowed to say, “I’m not ready for this conversation and my battery is drained right now. This conversation is important to me, but I’d like to return to it later.” Boundaries.

You can also just not talk and respond all the time even in the moment. Often the person who speaks the most is the one who is out of control. Listening solves a lot of problems. Sometimes the person just needs to get things off their chest and feel heard. Staying quiet also ensures that you don’t say something you might regret later. Often in a difficult conversation, I will try to stretch the silence out. This is hard for people. Most people are uncomfortable with silence so they will fill the gap. That shows they lack control. Even when we ask someone a question, we want to fill in the gaps. If they take a long time to respond, our natural inclination is to create a response for them or guess about what they’re thinking. JD Schram, an early mentor of mine, taught me to count slowly to seven in my mind after asking any question. In difficult situations, it takes people time to come up with responses. Remember, silence is your control of the situation. Let them fill the gaps that you create with silence.

When I went sober, many years back, I never considered myself an addict. But I did recognize a lot of dependency that I had grown weary of and wanted out of my life. The first 90 days was difficult, and I knew that if I had even one drink, I’d be resetting my dependency all over again. Yet my brain wanted another drink and would tell me lies that one single drink won’t hurt, even though I knew resetting the clock on my sobriety would also involve whole new cycles of resetting my chemical dependencies. A friend of mine advised that I should, “play the tape forward,” when I was tempted. Let’s say I really want to have a drink before a comedy improv show on Friday night. I would instead think about how I would feel later if I allowed myself that one drink. Playing the tape forward means that I could see the negative results of bad decisions. By drinking, I would miss out on some of this improv show that I love because I am deliberately impairing myself. I’ll wake up Saturday morning not feeling sunny and sharp, but dull. Worse, I’ll feel regret for resetting my dependency clock for ten more days (the amount of time it takes to flush out and recover from alcohol) just for 20 minutes of extra dopamine. I now use this technique when I’m tempted by bad responses to emotional situations. Before firing off an angry email, I wait and play the tape forward and think instead about the future that I want to create and how to take steps today to get there.

I don’t know if this is helpful to you. You probably came here to read my thoughts on difficult Bible passages and living faith in a broken world. I’ll get back to that. But today I wanted to take a step back because the world is truly out of control. We are not giving each other the benefit of the doubt. Emotional responses are coming fast and furious and it’s driving a lot of chaos in all our lives. Maybe some of these techniques can help you short-circuit the pain cycles we’re all living through right now.