Identify Your Triggers

SUMMARY

Triggers are things that happen to push your buttons and lead to a shift in behaviour.

I want to help you identify the things that tick you off and lead you to your unhealthy behaviour by introducing the five-step process of self-awareness:

1. Identify your triggers

2. Notice the physiology

3. Audit the psychology

4. Evaluate your behaviour

5. Name the feeling

Remember, there's no such thing as a negative emotion; it's just negative behaviour dependent upon what you interpret that emotion and the psychological process you take it through.

TRANSCRIPT

Are there things that go on in your world that tick you off and start a process of thinking and behaviour that you're not happy with?

Well, that's because you're human and you are an emotional being.

Stick with me because this week, I want to help you understand these things so you can use them to shift the behaviour.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, VUCA Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around all things Emotional Intelligence, in the second quadrant of self-management, by helping you to identify your triggers.

In the thumbnail of this blog, you can see that I am wearing my “R U OK?" clothes. It's the 1st of July here in Australia, and I have started working with this charity to help raise awareness and funds for "R U OK?" day.

The event is called “Ks for RUOK” so I have committed to walking a lot of kilometers with people sponsoring me, and the money goes to a good cause.

R U OK? is all about a conversation that could change your and other people's lives by simply asking that question and then listening to them with intention (as we have discussed before), so you can support them in any way you can.

So, let me ask you: “R U OK?”

By the way, you can find a link below to get involved and help me out to help this cause.

OK, back to this week’s topic.

Triggers are things that happen to push your buttons and lead to a shift in behaviour.

For me, a big trigger was traffic.

I live in Sydney, and when I started travelling a lot, I realised that the traffic here is not as bad as I thought it was. In fact, compared to the other places I have been to, the traffic here is pretty calm.

However, it wasn’t the traffic or even being stuck in traffic that triggered my unwanted behaviour; it was how I interpreted the situation and what I made it mean. Then, it took my thinking and my behaviour off track.

By the way, I don't do a lot of traffic anymore unless I'm sitting in the back and someone else is driving because with the way I work nowadays I don't need to.

However, I had to develop strategies to shift the behaviour because it wasn't good for me, for others, or the greater good.

If that is something that bothers you, that's great. However, I want to help you identify the things that tick you off and lead you to your unhealthy behaviour.

It’s a five-step process of self-awareness.

We're going to get this awareness today so that you can take it into next week where I will teach you a strategy to take back control of your behaviour.

Remember, you are not managing the emotion; you are managing the response to the emotion. Therefore, you need this awareness to develop a strategy to do so.

Number one is to identify your triggers.

So, for me, it was traffic, and there were also other things that did trigger poor behaviour.

Now that I am more aware, I’m able to navigate that a lot differently.

However, some things make me think and behave in a way that is not conducive to the results that I want.

For instance, I’m triggered by people being late or telling lies.

The first step is for you to identify the triggers that start your unwanted behaviour.

It’s ideal for you to come up with a list of half a dozen things however, for this exercise, I want you to identify just one.

Identifying it gives you a starting point and lets you know that this is what you need to work on.

Now that you’ve identified the trigger, the next step you need to do is to notice the physiology.

Remember, we’ve talked about emotion being a physiological cue and clue that something's going on in your world.

When your trigger is fired, what's the physiological change you can sense in your body?

As for me, in traffic, I could feel tension across my shoulders.

So, ask yourself: What goes on physically for me when that trigger is pushed?

Number three is to audit the psychology.

OK, you know the trigger and the physiological sensation you feel. Now, you need to look at what goes on in your thoughts, what you make them mean, and that whole process around your beliefs, values, and everything that goes on in your internal dialogue that brifges the gap between that initial trigger and the behaviour.

For me, in traffic, I would have a conversation around the fact that I'm going to turn up late, and I don't like to be late, because if I'm late they will think something negative about me.

So, what I needed to do when I had those thoughts was to audit them.

I love the word audit because it's a logical word. When you're doing an audit, you're not asking “Why?" you're just asking "What?"

For example, ask yourself these questions:

“What am I thinking here?”

"What do I normally ruminate on?"

“What thoughts and beliefs come into my mind?”

So, you are gathering data and not going down into the emotion of it.

Now that you've identified the trigger, you know what's going on physically, and you have done an audit of your thoughts (and all the psychology that's going on), you now need to evaluate your behaviour.

What do you normally do when that trigger is pushed, you go through that thought process, and that internal dialogue goes on?

In my case, it was hitting the horn.

For instance, when the traffic lights turn green and the car four cars in front of me doesn't move immediately, I'm thinking, "Haven't we got a colour you like?”. And I might even say it out loud, even if they can't hear me, and hit the horn.

So, there’s the unhealthy behaviour that came from that initial trigger.

As you can see, by taking you through this process, we are step-by-step, breaking it down to work out why and how you got to this behaviour.

But that’s me. Looking at your trigger, what do you normally do?

Make a note of it, call it out for what it is, and recognise that “this” trigger leads you to "this" behaviour with all this psychology in the middle.

Now that you've gone through the first four steps, step five, is to name the feeling.

Remember, an emotion is a physiological sensation in your body. It is a cue (a clue) to let you know that something's going on in your world. It's what you make that mean, how you interpret it and the psychology you go through, that creates a feeling that you choose to feel.

From there, the feelings can escalate, or they can go down.

So, the intensity is totally up to you based on what's going on in your psychology and it can shift really quickly.

In this fifth step, I want you to name how you feel.

If I go back to my traffic example, I would feel frustrated because the traffic was out of my control.

All these feelings were based on the fact that I thought I was going to be late, which led me to dip down into my “mini-me” negative thought patterns that later led me to beep my horn and go outside my normal behaviour of how I want to behave, and now I feel frustrated.

The other part of naming the feeling is asking yourself the question:

"How does it make you feel when you behave that way?”

So, the frustration I felt was also because I felt frustrated with myself for allowing something like traffic to take over and control my behaviour.

There you have it, a five-step process to get awareness to identify your trigger, to shift into understanding what goes on physiologically, psychologically, what you do, and then how that makes you feel.

With that information, we'll be able to then go into next week and look at how we can put together a different strategy so that we can circumvent and change some of the things that happened in that process so that you can then get behaviour that is more positive and gives you the result that you want.

Remember, there's no such thing as a negative emotion; it's just negative behaviour dependent upon what you interpret that emotion and the psychological process you take it through.

Every single emotion is there to teach you something about what's going on in your world right now so it is positive. It's what you do with each emotion that can make the difference.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around self-management by developing a strategy for behavioural self-control.

I'll see you then.