A Research Paper By Peter Verbansky, Life Coach, UNITED STATES
You vs. You Research Paper
Outmuscle the Fight, Outsmart the Flight, and Outlast the Freeze of the Adversary Who Knows You Best
Fundamentally, coaching helps clients go from where they are to where they want to be. “We all have goals we want to reach; challenges we’re striving to overcome and times when we feel stuck. Partnering with a coach can change your life, setting you on a path to greater personal and professional fulfillment.”[1]As a coach, our mission is to enable our clients to discover and embrace their innovative self, one that is equipped and empowered to be the new person their desired outcome ultimately requires them to be, to break through limiting beliefs, think new thoughts, and feel inspiring emotions. Most importantly, our purpose as coaches is to help our clients overcome who they are today and grow into the person they’re choosing to be tomorrow. To successfully evolve, we all need to face the reality of our status quo and the person looking back at us in the mirror, and learn how to outmuscle the fight, outsmart the flight, and outlast the freeze of the adversary who knows us best: us.
Napoleon Hill, the author of the book Think and Grow Rich, shared that “whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”[2] The sequencing with this idea is critical, once something new is created in the mind, mentally envisioned or visualized, it needs to be felt as realistically as possible, with the mental thought made certain by a strong emotional foundation that supports the idea of something new. Only then can it be achieved or made visible in a person’s life. Unfortunately, during the goal obtainment process, while the idea can often be connoted, the required emotions to support a new normal are often difficult to form, and a person is prevented from moving from where they are to wherever they strive to be. Worse yet, our natural tendency to assume the worst and fear the unknown creates a future that is far further and much harder to obtain, further eroding the heart’s ability to believe.
For clients to be moved forward, they need to slowly be helped in countering and overcoming their greatest adversary against their very own success: themselves. There is no greater enemy against our future self than who we are today! By gently creating a new normal where the new self is possible, by designing a simpler set of rules governing thoughts to trigger empowering emotions, and by then helping clients experience their outcome before achieving it, we can move even the most reluctant go-getter towards their desired destination.
The Amygdala Hijack
Clients feel “stuck”, and unable to move forward towards their desired destination because they are often proactively reacting to an imagined threat, a perceived new normal from a negative, disempowering perspective. Paralyzingly, they are viewing the next step with a lens that suggests future pain and consequential discomfort on the horizon. As motivational speaker Tony Robbins explains, “If there’s anything you want to do and you can’t figure out why you’re not doing it, there’s a simple answer: you link more pain to doing it than not doing it.”[3] On instinct, our brain fires up our amygdala to protect us from an undesirable outcome. Rather than thinking about the possibilities, we are emotionally reacting, erring on worst-case scenario ideation to fill the void of anything that’s still unknown.
Among its other capabilities, the amygdala part of the brain helps define and regulate emotions, and it instinctually activates a person’s fight, flight, or freeze response when faced with a stressful situation, a perceived danger that requires an immediate and unconscious reaction to ensure the body’s survival. As outlined by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence, “[an] amygdala hijack occurs when your amygdala responds to stress and disables your frontal lobes. That activates the fight-or-flight response and disables rational, reasoned responses.”[4] Given that these are imagined stresses from the future, the fastest way to often protect the body is to not fight, not run, but to simply do nothing and freeze. Maintaining the status quo, the amygdala reacts, might be the best way to avoid the battle tomorrow.
Clients who fear success often worry about disrupting their status quo, creating a tomorrow that is uncomfortably stressful. To counter this natural tendency, it’s best to move slowly towards a desired outcome, incrementally and systematically changing something small consistently to gently create and evolve into a new normal. A mindful approach to small and incremental improvements can often create far better outcomes than a dramatic or bold alteration to how things are done. Gentle nudges, delicate pushes towards a new normal, may go completely unnoticed until there’s a reason to look back on how it all used to be before the incremental changes began.
Even on larger, organizational scales, incremental change towards a desired result has proven to be an effective strategy for creating lasting change. Companies that have adopted an incremental improvement philosophy, often dubbed kaizen, have yielded superior results.[5] “The overall goal of kaizen is to make small changes over a period to create improvements… The kaizen process simply recognizes that small changes now can have huge impacts in the future.”[6]It doesn’t take much to do something a little differently and repeated improvements toward a predetermined outcome can outmaneuver, outsmart, and outmuscle even the most stubborn habits and routines.
The Tiptoe of Habits
It’s natural to hang on to the status quo, the routines that feel right, if for little more reason than to simply embrace what’s known over the unknown. People naturally do things in a certain way, within a certain sequence and following a specific syntax, because it works for them and has likely earned the reputation as the best way to complete a certain task. A common expression often shared when routines break from their norm is that “something feels off”, with an innocent deviation from a habit labeled as something akin to a sixth sense that has tapped into a deeper awareness. Things done differently just feel strange, weird, and even “off”, and this break-in routine puts the entire mind, body, and soul on notice thanks to the watchful eye of the amygdala.
Coaches need to explore habits that hold clients stuck in where they no longer want to be but then tread carefully to not upset the comfort and certainty these habits provide to even the most success-minded individuals. According to a recent post from PositivePsychology.com, changing habits comes down to three steps, including creating good habits that are obvious, easy, attractive, and satisfying; undoing bad habits by making them invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying; and then shoring up one’sstick-to-itiveness to their new habits by adding skills, support, strategies, and sagacity to their toolbox[7]. Through gentle alterations of habits, almost tiptoeing around the protection of our amygdala, clients can be helped to turn their backs against the rituals and routines that no longer work for them.
Tomorrow’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
We act based on how we feel, and we feel based on how we think, so improving our thoughts to trigger better feelings ultimately leads to far more rewarding behaviors. During the coaching process, the client is led to a new way of feeling about a challenge through careful examination of their current thoughts associated with a situation. With effective questioning, a client can start feeling more empowering emotions that can help cultivate actions more aligned with a desired outcome than their status quo.
Unlike therapy which looks backward into a client’s history to unpack a situation that has already unfolded and left its psychological impression, coaching is about unlocking potential future actions to address current needs. Assumptions about what will or could be are a natural part of that conversation since the client is projecting and imagining what will (likely) happen. To make this process more empowering, coaches can apply an effective therapy technique to help clients grow more empowered and do something that may have never been done by them before by utilizing, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy.
According to the Mayo Clinic, the cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) process encompasses four steps: “(1) Identify troubling situations or conditions in your life; (2) Become aware of your thoughts, emotions, and beliefs about these problems; (3) Identify negative or inaccurate thinking; (4) Reshape negative or inaccurate thinking.”[8] Simplistically, it’s assessing and rewiring the thoughts that trigger emotions filtered from global beliefs to align with a desired outcome.
As a client examines their future self, they’ll likely see a person acting differently than they are now. Systematically, the habits of the improved version of themselves will need to be broken down, examined, and even analyzed. They will need to understand the routines needed to create their new, desired normal, and then be led backward through the emotions required to behave that way, all powered initially by the correct thinking to elicit those necessary feelings in the first place. Said differently, to achieve certain outcomes, specific behaviors need to be done consistently, powered by empowering emotions that were triggered by the inspiring thoughts. Yet, to ensure that clients are not frightened by a potential reality that’s too different, any behavioral modifications need to be small, even benign and undisruptive, to keep a client’s natural defense mechanism at bay.
Applying Exposure and Response Prevention
While it’s used by trained practitioners to assist patients with obsessions and compulsions, coaches can also utilize the principles of exposure and response prevention to further help clients gently grow comfortable with the new normal their desired future requires. By gradually and repeatedly helping clients live through their future selves, the oddness and newness, and disconcertedness diminish and grow into a new status quo that’s accepted, tolerated, and even expected and enjoyed. “Exposure and response prevention is designed to gradually reduce the anxiety that feeds obsessions and compulsions. One way in which this is thought to happen is through a process called habituation, whereby people become less physiologically aroused by triggering stimuli or obsessions after being repeatedly and safely exposed to them. Further, clients learn over time that the stimuli, thoughts, and feelings that prompt compulsions are more bearable than anticipated and do not actually lead to feared outcomes. They come to recognize that they are capable of coping with the triggers without resorting to compulsive rituals.”[9] In applying this to the coaching process, clients can be led to diminish their negative, disempowering reaction to their new self by just continually being exposed to it.
As clients gradually learn to outmaneuver their primal selves and outsmart their amygdala, they’ll develop the skills necessary to prevent the paralyzing, negative response that kept them stuck before, within their less-than-desirable status quo. “An important challenge in ERP is the “response prevention” component—learning to not respond to the obsessions with the usual compulsive behaviors. With exposure to increasingly uncomfortable stimuli, clients acquire the ability to tolerate the distress they generate without having to resort to the rituals that only wind up perpetuating obsessive-compulsive patterns.”[10] When clients grow increasingly less interested in the safety of their present self and increasingly more comfortable with the habits of their desired self, change happens relatively quickly and painlessly.
The Path from You vs. You
To summarize, before change can happen, clients need to believe that it’s possible. Any change’s greatest adversary is the current habit that is locking it in place, and clients need to be helped past their own defense mechanism to break free from a potentially disempowering routine and embrace a new thought, feeling, and behavior that will ultimately move them forward. Through gentle examination, new thoughts can be introduced that won’t scare a client and paralyze their ambition, but rather feel possible and, eventually, normal. By then projecting new thoughts forward, supportive feelings can be elicited from that new way of thinking, creating emotions that will eventually lead to behaviors needed to create a client’s desired outcome.
References
[1]https://coachfederation.org/about
[2]https://selfmadesuccess.com/whatever-the-mind-can-conceive-and-believe-the-mind-can-achieve/
[3]https://www.azquotes.com/author/12429-Tony_Robbins/tag/pain
[4]https://www.healthline.com/health/stress/amygdala-hijack
[5]https://www.kaizen.com/what-is-kaizen
[6]https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/kaizen.asp
[7]positivepsychology_com
[8]https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/cognitive-behavioral-therapy/about/pac-20384610
[9]https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/exposure-and-response-prevention
[10]https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/exposure-and-response-prevention