EP 73: Confidence in a Crisis
Welcome fellow confidence crusaders, neuro nerds and success equalizers. This is your podcast, Real Confidence, I'm your host, Alyssa Dver, and I'll be sharing a bit of basic brain science, some surprising social secrets, and a touch of tough love. Why? Because I believe confidence is everyone's fundamental right and choice. So, let's get to it.
Alyssa Dver: Crisis, just the word kind of makes me a little itchy. And I am excited to bring to you an expert who can help us deal with crises better. Her name is Christine Scott. Christina, welcome to the Real Confidence podcast.
Christine Scott: Thank you so much.
Alyssa Dver: Now you have experience firsthand experience as well as professional experience dealing with conflict and crisis. Can you give a little background how and why it happened?
Christine Scott: Oh, I was the most crisis averse person you ever met. But that didn't stop me from taking a job with AmeriCorps, working with young people who lived outside doing a meal program for them. And oh, my gosh, things got scary. And I got overwhelmed very quickly, when I realized these guys, these guys are in conflict and in crisis all the time. And I didn't know how to handle it. So that's when I started leaning in, like, okay, I've got to, I've got to figure this out. Because I'm either way too scared, or way too aggressive, or both, all the time around them.
Alyssa Dver: So, you used that scare word twice. And we talk a lot about fear at the American Confidence Institute as it relates to all our confidence issues. What was so scary for you? What was the, you know, what was that that was like, oh, I got to do something.
Christine Scott: Because they were in what I might call mammal mode all the time, their lives were under threat, all the time, they're living outside, they're having, you know, fights with each other with everybody around them. And so as this, you know, white chick from a small town, I was completely overwhelmed it to me, my body was telling me that I was about to die.
Alyssa Dver: Oh, my goodness. So, you said mammal mode. We call it caveman mode because it is a primitive brain part that is doing. Sure. Let's define crisis, though. Because not all of us are living outside at you know, in some foreign place. But there's crisis all the time around everyone, I think these days, let alone in the workplace. So, give us a little baseline, how do you see crisis showing up now, with your clients and for yourself?
Christine Scott: Yeah. Because the pandemic took such a toll on our mental wellbeing, the number of resources that we have on deck to handle some type of conflict or some type of disagreement, or even a sense that there's a threat to our status within the workplace. Those are just shot. And so, every little thing, every little coworker that's not happy with us, feels like it's a threat to our survival. So, it feels like there's a lot more, a lot more crisis thinking as people interpret just human interactions in the workplace these days.
Alyssa Dver: Yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at it. Because I remember many years ago, actually, I got in a fight with my husband, because he was like, why can't you just let things roll off your back? Right? And I thought, Well, maybe it's a female issue. Maybe it's that you know, I'm more empathetic or emotionally intelligent, or whatever label you want to shove on it. But I was like, oh, that person they're out to get me they don't like me. You know, that was like kind of instinctual you read an email or text and you write, so is it of female issue? Or is this gender neutral?
Christine Scott: No, it's gender neutral. threats to our status, our standing our value, feel in our body the same way as somebody holding a gun at us. I mean, our mammal self, our caveman self, doesn't know the difference between threats to status, and threats to life.
Alyssa Dver: Yeah, well, and again, it's this kind of right in my zone of love here because we talk about physical and emotional fear and the trigger into the amygdala and the decision point that needs to be made. So, I'm totally in line with you on that. But I also find it fascinating that you're noticing that it's an there's been an escalation and mess and the lack of cognitive maybe it's the net you know, where all of a sudden you don't have the ability to kind of say, oh, you know what, she really didn't mean that in that text, she was just writing too fast, right? Do you attribute it to the crises or the stress maybe of the last couple of years, do you think that it's gonna get better or we're stuck in this like, reverse devolution, ability to handle everyday stress?
Christine Scott: I see some people really leaning in and noticing this and getting curious about like, why am I stressed out all the time, right? And I see others just internalizing that message. And to get back to your earlier question about where gender comes from what role gender plays in that. Often women have had a longer time internalizing other messages around our value, and our role within the social group. And so, if you throw insecurity on top of insecurity, we might be more likely to go, oh, it's about me. And what's interesting is when I was running a shelter for homeless young people, I started getting curious about everybody who I thought was after me, every, every person I supervised every person that I worked with, and I would just say, oh, you don't look happy right now? Did I do something in your direction that I just need to clear up with you? 90% of the time, it wasn't it had nothing to do with me. So, I really encourage people just perception check before you assume, you know, because our mind is great at just filling in that blank. That lack of information.
Alyssa Dver: I'm 100% agreeing. And you know, there is this validation, checkpoint, right? Like, we live in our own set of truth. And oftentimes, it's just not even close to the truth from the other person. So, verifying or validating, if that's how they feel absolutely. What happens typically and I say what happens to you, but maybe more to the clients that you're serving, you know, they're in a situation where they're in that reaction mode, what kinds of impact do you see as a result? Like, let's talk about the ugly side of it for a minute.
Christine Scott: Oh, my gosh, yeah. And you know, you know, all of your physiological research on what happens when that when that cortisol and that adrenaline is running through your body, and how your mind is this problem-solving machine is now looking for the problem. And now adding a definition to how this person or how the situation is out to get you. And it's, it's just a self-perpetuating cycle. And people are worthless for about 20 minutes after that amygdala hijack at least 20 minutes, possibly more, because they then find new facts, right, new clues as to the situation. And so, it just spirals.
Alyssa Dver: Yeah, so it's that that moment where you go, you see, of course, she hates me, right? Or my boss really doesn't like me, right? Like, you just start finding additional evidence, right. But let's again, kind of call out that it is a psychological detriment, right? Like you're you start ruminating, you start going into a cycle of unproductivity. But there's some real physical impact you people constantly complaining about the aches and pains that there's so many doctors, there's so many researchers that will say it's because of the stress and not because your physiological deficiency. Right. So, constant crisis, obviously, or maybe we can call it chronic crisis. You see a lot of that now, or, or you think that this is something that somebody has created as a result of just being under stress, or what kind of when you talk to people who I mean, you get pulled into corporate environment, you do a lot of work with people who are in this kind of mode of crisis, and then subsequently conflict is oftentimes self-perpetuated.
Christine Scott: That's a great question. Um, I think we all have a lot of freedom and how we respond to our environment. And we're, you know, globally, we're going through this shift in our relationship to our workplace. Right. And our generation in those above us had a workplace model that was very top down very much like machines as bots, basically humans as bots, right? And that's shifting, thank goodness, but in that workplace dynamic shift is also a lot of this old school, I think kind of reasserting itself around no, you will show up to work and not work from home. No, you will do this. And, you know, and so the environment is extra tense right now in a lot of workplaces. And people are less resourced. And so, I see I see both of those things leading to leading to this increase in workplace crisis.
Alyssa Dver: So, can you pull out some specific examples of the kinds of things that get escalated to you. So that people know that this is, you know, they're probably going, oh, that's happened to me or that I'm close to that. But I think there's comfort in knowing that something's normal, even if it's not a good thing, right? So, what kind of scenarios? Or what kinds of situations do you see pretty regularly?
Christine Scott: See people who are so upset with their coworker that they have to go take a break in their car and just cry? Yeah, people who have long email threads, all about how this person did that wrong. And you know, shaming and blaming and fault finding back and forth in these incredibly long email threads that are not professional, not productive, huge waste of energy. You know, you see people who are elevating interpersonal conflicts to their supervisors or their supervisor’s supervisor in a way that they're looking for fault with the other party, but they're not looking for resolution. And, you know, the supervisors aren't often any better able to handle that. Right. So yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of disconnect. happening right now.
Alyssa Dver
Yeah, so some I call it finger pointing, but I actually look at it as that key person being very defensive, it's, you know, I'm not wrong. I'm not the one who caused this problem that person did, right. A lot of deferral or deflection. I, I'm hesitant to ask you this, but I'm going to does it get any better as we age?
Christine Scott: Yeah, it does. Because we become less identified with our role. I don't know if you remember, but your first, you know, in your 20s and your 30s, that job title felt really important. Once you start getting up into your, you know, late 40s, early 50s, you start realizing, oh, I'm so much bigger than my job title, hopefully. And that gives people less capacity to status attack, like when they do it just doesn't stick to you in the same way.
Alyssa Dver: Yeah, so I know you have some data around that, pull it out, and then I'll pull out some of the ACI data too.
Christine Scott: Okay. Well, for women, for example, we are much more likely to not believe that we're valued in the workplace, because of all of the internalized stuff that we've received as female identified people until we're somewhere in our 40s, then then that's when the confidence gap shows like, like, narrows. And there's this great thing by the Harvard Business Review that actually polled people, they did like, you know, 360 evaluations, like what do you think about your manager. And what they found is the 16 traits of leadership that the Harvard Business Review adopts and recommends, women outperform men, and like 12 out of the 16 really impressive stuff, right? Do we know that? Have we internalized that? No? Right. So it's really fabulous to look at? Oh, as you age, you get more confident?
Alyssa Dver
Yeah, so we, you know I laugh, because I actually, I think that Harvard Business Review study is actually in our resource library and some other places, and maybe even in the books, but definitely in the books, actually. But we know we've done it a bunch of times. Now the study that says that we don't really peak and we being men, women and nonbinary until we're 60 oh, yeah, as far as our confidence level, as far as our confidence level, but there is definitely a trough of doubt that actually happens early 40s. And then you're busy, maybe you're have kids, you're worried about your career and your last, you know, part of your life that you want, you know, your career extending, ascending and all that. But we start to realize, like you said, I am not my job, right. You know, like the old adage, you are what you are eat, you're not you are not what you work, right. So we start to finally realize that but I think another thing really happens too, is we realize that everybody has the same confidence crisis that we have all the time.
Right? So those stupid emails, you look at it and you start looking at least I did, and I was like, this person realize how foolish they look at adding to that I'm not contributing. I'd like to because I'm mad, but I'm not going to do it there. Right. So, I think we get a little bit smarter. So, to help everyone get smarter now we're gonna take a quick break. We're gonna give some time for our sponsor. And when we come back, Christine, I'm going to ask you for some of your best tips other than not reacting to those ugly emails. What can people do when they're feeling like they're in a crisis and they just they've, they literally do want to hit the keys hard. We'll come right back and do that.
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Alyssa Dver: All right, I'm excited, because I want to hear Christine your tips, things that when somebody's in that cortisol filled moment, they just literally want to bang, a nasty email or they want to scream or yell or whatever that reaction is, what should we do to avoid or deal with that crisis?
Christine Scott: Thank you. So. So if you're already in caveman mode, all of those hormones are already pumping through your body, sorry, it's too late. You do not want to engage, it's just like CPR first aid, the scene is not safe for you to proceed. So if you feel that amped up, you feel that energy flowing through you take yourself out of the situation, and allow for a good 20 minutes before you're able to be human again, that's how long is going to take to work through that. And if you can work through that with your body, like by moving your body by getting out of the situation, great. If you haven't gone down that path. Yet, if you haven't been totally hijacked by your hormones, there are a few things you can do in the moment, that will stop you from getting hijacked. One of them is the neurovascular hold, which is your hand on your forehead and the back of your scalp with gentle pressure. Do that with some deep breathing, about 30 seconds of that will tell your body you're in control. The other thing I recommend to people is engage with crisis on your own terms. A lot of times we assign false urgency to the situation. Somebody comes in says hey, I need blah, blah, blah, blah. And you feel like, oh, I have to drop everything. No, you don't, you get to say, wow, that sounds really important. I can give that my undivided attention in about 20 minutes does that work for you? So, you know, just be really mindful that you actually have a lot of choice and when and how you respond to these requests of you.
Alyssa Dver: I love it. I get my buy book confidence is choices. Like you could have written the book yourself. So thank you for making that statement about we do have agency we just don't always use it, you know, is interesting. Last week, I had a very big crisis in my business, it was somebody who had reacted like a cave person and all this and I was really hurt. And I was really angry. And a very dear friend of mine said Let it be and I was like, I can't I can't I can't she's like sleep on it. And I was like I gotta get out again and that that like immediate urgency to do something but you know, again, I was smart enough to realize that I was in that crisis reached out to her let it go next day I kind of said to the person I really would like to talk about this and we did and I also said you know what? Please don't do that again. That didn't feel good if there's an issue come and let's talk about it and he a younger person said okay, so you know, maybe even last tip make it a teaching moment and when you do get to be in control, celebrate it share that back with somebody and say hey, look what I did I didn't mean it because that's the way you kind of remind yourself next time it happens I can do this right? So yes, I can do this. I love your words today your advice your tips, and I know that you offer some free consultation so tell people how they can find you and what the next step in something like that would be like.
Christine Scott: Yeah, just find me on my website, which is www.SeattleConflictResolution.com I do offer a 30-minute consultation to folks about workplace situations and trainings for their teams. Just to like kind of inquire like what is your team most need and see if I can be helpful to you.
Alyssa Dver: I love it. Thank you so much for being here and sharing a little bit of this wonderful wisdom and I think I'm going to call you next time Christine when my one of my crisis bell goes off because not only have you been a soothing voice here on the pod but your advice has been wonderful. So thank you so much.
Christine Scott: Thank you Alyssa.
Alyssa Dver: Before we totally wrap up, I want to let you know that full transcripts and show notes for this and other Real Confidence episodes can be found on www.AmericanConfidenceInstitute.com/podcast. I also want to remind you once again that the best way to get confidence is to give it to others and you can do it just by liking and sharing this episode on your preferred podcast and social media channels. You can even give me some confidence by noting topics you'd like me to consider for the future. So for now, this is Alyssa Dver, thank you for helping to bring more confidence to the world.
Master editing done by Ben Weinstein with original music performed and composed by Jeff Mitchell. Real Confidence is a production of American Confidence Institute. All rights reserved.
