Putting COVID 19 Into Perspective

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SUMMARY

•  Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty person? Do you tend to look at the brighter side of life or do you talk yourself into the worst case scenario?

• Last week, we talked about how lighting up and bringing focus to that area of the brain will help us to find creative solutions for whatever it is that we need to navigate during this unprecedented time of COVID-19.

• Today, I want to give you another strategy that you can implement in whatever it is that you're wanting to navigate on that will help you to make better decisions and to come through and go beyond COVID-19.

• In particular, the area that I'm really wanting to help with here is our mental resilience. This is because we are now in a situation and environment, where  lots of people are locked away and/or are in a different environment or whatever it is, where they're separated socially from their friends, their loved ones. So it's really important that we get on top of this and protect our mind.

• The first thing we can do is to put everything in its right perspective. To be able to do this is you firstly need avoid and limit the amount of consuming anything that is negative.

• Let me take you through a process that you can use to sift through the negative and put things in the right perspective. Read my full article below.

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Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty person? Do you tend to look at the brighter side of life or do you talk yourself into the worst case scenario?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around going beyond COVID-19 by controlling our emotions by developing our emotional intelligence.

We are emotional beings. We respond to things emotionally. We filter what's going on through our emotional brain. We talked about that last week where our brain has the limbic system and the logical brain and the neocortex.

In particular, we talked about the prefrontal cortex, the executive command centre in our brain where we make good, healthy, creative decisions and regulate our emotions. We talked about how lighting up and bringing focus to that area of the brain will help us to find creative solutions for whatever it is that we need to navigate during this unprecedented time of COVID-19.

So today, I want to give you another strategy that you can implement in whatever it is that you're wanting to navigate on that will help you to make better decisions and to come through and go beyond COVID-19. Now, this is something that I do a lot of work in helping people to be more resilient and resilience is one of the 10 competencies in the self-management area of emotional intelligence.

So, this process will able you to create more accurate thinking regarding something that's going on for you and that's going to develop your personal resilience. In particular, the area that I'm really wanting to help with here is our mental resilience. This is because we are now in a situation and environment, where  lots of people are locked away and/or are in a different environment or whatever it is, where they're separated socially from their friends, their loved ones.

So it's really important that we get on top of this and protect our mind. Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to give you some more tips and strategies to be able to do that. I also want to give you the opportunity to keep the conversation going with me. If you do need to connect so I can answer a question for you, then please do so. Asking for help is a strength and we need to be there for each other right now and I want to be there for you.

So, I've got a scenario going on. Let's say for example, that you're someone like me who's in business and because of the pandemic, lots of things are changing. Clients are operating out of fear instead of operating out of faith. They're making decisions that create a different scenario to my revenue, to the work that I'm doing. I'm not able to travel, I'm not able to do things the way I normally do them. So, that creates uncertainty and when unchecked can very quickly drop down into fear and anxiety and emotions that are going to keep me stuck and not allow me to move forward. What I want to talk to you about today is putting everything in its right perspective.

To do this, we need first to be able avoid and limit the amount of negative things that we are consuming.

You can go on any social media, turn on any news program right now, and you can give yourself an unhealthy dose of negative as much as you can consume. And when you are consuming that, if you take whatever story that is and in your emotional memory, it links to something that you have doubt about, something that's strongly rooted in your emotions, then you can very quickly put yourself in that story and go, "Hey, that's going to happen to me”.

So, what I want us to do is learn to put things in the right perspective. So, let me take you through a process that you can use. The first thing you need to do is to ask yourself the question: What is the worst thing that can happen?

Take my scenario of clients leaving and looking for alternative ways of investing their money right now because of whatever they're allowing themselves to believe. So, here's the worst thing that could happen: I go out of business. That's the worst thing that could happen. Now, we've got to be really careful here and it's vitally important that we look at things that we know to be true. The rest is guesswork.

The second thing that I want us to understand what that question is that: it is a "what" question. "What is the worst thing that can happen?" So, it's asking our logical brain to come up with an answer rather than why is this happening, which we'll get down into the emotional brain. So step one, question one: What is the worst thing that can happen? The next question we want to ask and the next thing that we want to do next is assess the probability of the worst case. How likely is that to happen?

Assessing the probability is a logical process.

When assessing that probability from our logical brain, we're lighting up that part of our brain. So we're going to realise that the situation, in my case, going out of business, is not likely going to happen. Because I will look at it and go, "Well, Hey, Grant. You've got that going on. This is still continuing. You've pivoted here. You're doing a lot more online courses for people. You are working with companies and you have been for the last three or four weeks and you're doing calls on Zoom and all these things." , So when I look at it logically, I can come up out of the emotion and go, , "You know what? It's not 100% likely or it's not even 50% likely that's going to happen." , So once again, I'm working on a logical process. The next part of the process is to ask another "what" question, and that is:T What is one thing I can do to help stop the worst thing from happening? This is vitally important. Now, there's two parts to that. Firstly, we're asking a "what" question. So, we're asking a logical question. The second thing is we're looking at one thing.

One of the challenges when we are in a situation that we feel less than in control of than we would like to be, is a thing called overwhelm

When we've got all these things going on in our brain and in our thoughts and in our self-talk, what we're doing is not only are we coming up into the logical brain, we are focusing and narrowing in on one thing. So, we're removing the overwhelm. So, what's one thing that you can do to stop the worst thing from happening? So me, in going through that process myself, I enabled myself to come up with one thing that I can do. The first thing was to make sure that I make contact with my clients. So, what's one thing that you can do now? What we want to do now is look at the other side of the equation. Flip the coin and go alternatively, and on top of that, what is the best thing that can happen?

So, this is where we're allowing ourselves to be future thinking and once again, asking a "what" question. So, we're up in the logical brain. What's the best thing that could happen? The best thing that could happen is that we ride this out and the world gets back to its new normal. In fact, by what I've created going through this process, by what you've shifted and pivoted to do, going through this process is actually more beneficial to what it is that you're doing in the world and to your business or whatever it is for you moving forward beyond COVID-19.

Then we do the similar process again that we did on the other side of the equation and we go, "What's one thing that I can do to make the best thing happen?" Once again, we're focusing in on one thing. This time though, we're on a different part of the equation. We're on the positive side. Then, we can ask another "what" question: what is the most likely thing that will happen? What we will come up with in most cases when we are in the logical brain is somewhere between worst case and best case scenario.

The reason we've been able to get there is that we've stayed in our logical brain and we've narrowed the focus. We've removed that overwhelm, we've shut off the noise, and that's allowed us to go from a consumer of all that to a creator of our next step.

The last question that we want to ask ourselves once we've gone through that process: What can I do to handle that most likely thing that's going to happen? So now, we're in solution mode. We're in creation mode still. We're in logical brain and go, "What's my next step?" What's something that I can do today that's going to move me towards being able to handle that situation?

So, it's all about putting it in perspective. It's all about being able to look at things, experience the emotion, but bring it back up into the logical brain, and that's called emotional intelligence.

And I love the fact that I get to do this all around the world with people. Right now, I'm doing a lot of that online. So if you need some help with that, please reach out and I can help you to become more emotionally intelligent. Well, that's it from me for another week. I really hope that this practical strategy will allow you to be more creative in your thinking, remove that overwhelm, and see your way through whatever it is that you're navigating right now.

Next week, I want to continue the conversation by helping us to develop even more resilient mindsets. I'll see you then.