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Use Your Favorite Crime Show to Help You Manage Frustration
12 April 2016
Allison read Don’t Let Frustration Make You Say the Wrong Thing by Tara Healey and Jonathan Roberts on HBR.org and appreciated a useful tool for making sure your emotions don’t hijack you in the heat of the moment.
Tags: allison read, communication, conflict, mindfulness
I really like crime shows. They help me escape to an imaginary world where I have no responsibilities and don’t need to figure out what to say or do. My very favorite crime show was NYPD Blue which ended in 2005. These days I enjoy Blue Bloods and Chicago P.D. If I weren’t a consultant and coach, I think I might have been a detective.
So when I read Don’t Let Frustration Make You Say the Wrong Thing by Tara Healey and Jonathan Roberts, I was especially drawn to their advice to be a good detective, slow down and question the bystanders one by one when you get frustrated with someone.
The “bystanders” they are referring to are all the “…thoughts, feelings, and emotions buzzing around your mind.” When someone says something “snippy” to you and you feel an immediate need to react with something equally combative, the ability to be mindful and examine all the other things that are causing you stress will help you make sure those things, “…lose the ability to gang up on you.”
In their article, Healey and Roberts do a great job of explaining that too often mindfulness seems like something out of reach for regular people. By using this crime scene technique, you are actually practicing mindfulness and have a better chance of making sure your emotions don’t cause you to escalate the situation even further.
To help yourself take a breath and slow down at the scene of the crime (your snippy coworker, friend, or family member), you’ll probably need to have a meditation practice in your toolkit as well. However, the authors share my belief that meditation doesn’t need to be an intimidating or time-consuming activity.
If you do the breathing exercise I describe in this blog post two or three times a day for two to three minutes, you’ll be on your way to a meditation technique that can help you when life gets stressful. By doing it a few times a day, you can then access a more relaxed state very quickly just by going through the breathing pattern and these three statements quietly in your mind, “I am breathing in. I am breathing out. I am relaxing.”
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