Mental Choices and Emotional Consequences: Are You on Autopilot?

Our Feelings: The Emotional Consequences of the Mental Choices We Make.

That’s the premise on which I base my thoughts about what I refer to as Emotional Accountability.

Whether it's in your office, your school district, out in the field with clients or in your home, the implications of the statement above are broad and profound. Our feelings are not the emotional consequences of the people and situations we encounter. Yes, those factors do have impacts on us, but  people and situations do not create or cause our feelings.

Emotional Victimhood – The Status Quo      Here's the more common belief: “Our feelings are the emotional consequences of the hands we’re dealt”. Sound familiar? Probably not, since few of us have given it much conscious thought. But as a belief, it exerts tremendous influence over the quality of both our professional and personal lives.

Much of the suffering we associate with the “bad hands” we’re dealt is not so much caused by the hands, as it is by the mental choices we make about them. I’m not saying that there are no negative consequences of the setbacks we encounter. What I am saying is that the mental choices we make about those setbacks have at least as much impact on us as the setbacks themselves.

And that is great news, considering the uncertainty we face in every facet of our lives. In the changing world of people and situations that comprise our life experiences, setbacks are inevitable. People do not always behave in the ways we would like, our life situations do not always work out positively and  some of our goals remain unachieved. The hands we’re dealt are not always good ones.

Mental Choices and Emotional Consequences.

Here’s the way I see it playing out. The minute we become aware of negative situations, we begin making mental choices about them. And those mental choices do one of two things: They either compound or mitigate the negative impacts those situations have on us and on others.

Pay close attention to what I’m saying here. The mental choices we make don’t have any direct impact on the situations themselves, but they do have impacts on us. They produce emotional consequences, our feelings.  And our feelings either contribute to or detract from our effectiveness at dealing with the situations. Feelings like anger, frustration and resentment cloud our judgment, often leading us to say and do things that prolong and intensify the bad situations.

Disengage Your "Autopilot"                          

I would compare most of our mental processes to an airplane’s autopilot. When functioning correctly, the autopilot maintains altitude, airspeed and track. But what if it malfunctions? After engaging the autopilot, what if the plane went into a steep dive? The conscientious pilot would disengage the autopilot and take manual control of the plane.

Our minds function like autopilots. We do not consciously make or even acknowledge the mental choices we make, even the ones that create negative, limiting feelings. The question is: what can we do? First, let's disengage our mental autopilots. And then, we can acknowledge the mental choices we're making and the emotional consequences those choices are producing. 

Conclusion:

The hands we’re dealt do matter. The choices we make about the hands we’re dealt matter more.

Accountability in Action: Taking Ownership of the Situations You Encounter

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A company I’ve done work for provides a great example of this principle. This company’s employees are the people who close real estate transactions, the people who compile the mile-high stacks of documents that have to be signed by buyers and sellers at the closing table.

Several years ago, when interest rates went into a free for all, their business took off. That increase came from the thousands of homeowners who wanted to refinance their homes. During that “boom” the closers “didn’t have time” to maintain contact with their traditional sources of business, realtors.

And then the refinance craze was over. The pool of homeowners who were able and willing to refinance their homes dried up, and interest rates began climbing. I guess you could call this a situation the closers encountered. Some of them took ownership of that situation, and some didn’t.

Realizing that they could no longer rely on business coming to them, some closers began renewing their relationships with realtors. The ones who didn’t take ownership simply waited, wished and hoped for the real estate community to “come to their rescue”. The closers who took ownership of this situation still experienced dips in their business. But because of their timely, aggressive actions, those dips were relatively shallow and short-lived.

Here’s another way of describing this ownership principle:

Negative situations like setbacks and/or unexpected, unpleasant changes, provide excellent but difficult opportunities for leaders to model accountability and take ownership.

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Here are some suggestions for taking ownership of situations that you and your associates have encountered:

1. A situation does not have to be a crisis to justify your taking ownership. Remember, leaders don’t limit their attention to things that are “broke” and need to be “fixed”; they facilitate a Relentless Search for Better Ways

2. Identify 3-5 situations that you and your associates have encountered, ones that are either having some impact on your company or department’s requirements for success or could do so. Remember, they don’t have to be crises!

3. For each of those situations, complete the following steps:

• Specifically define the situation
• Describe the ways that the situation is impacting you, your associates and the requirements for your success, or the impacts it could have
• Identify the people who are most impacted by this situation—or the ones who are contributing to that situation
• List and define the benefits you would expect to derive from addressing the situation

4. Pick the situation you want to address and complete the following steps:

• The things that must be done in order to effectively address the situation
• The people whose efforts will be needed to do so

5. Invite those people to collaborate with you to create a plan for addressing that situation 

Next Article: Characteristics of Effective Leaders - Authentic Accountability

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