I watched, with a sinking heart, the English rugby team slowly wrestle defeat from the jaws or victory on Saturday. I couldn’t understand how this side which had started so well, and had been so commanding in the first half had sunk so low in the second half. There wasn’t a single defining moment when it began to change; it just slipped through their fingers like sand. This got me thinking, and reminded me of something a friend and associate often says “Only two things drive you crazy; not getting what you want…… and getting what you want!”

On first listening, this sounds just plain wrong, but as you think about it, it starts to resonate. We all have had moments, perhaps playing tennis or something like that when we think, “Just one more point and I win this game” only to double fault, and then the rot starts. We want it so much that the very wanting gets in the way of our performance. This is another and rather subtle outworking of the Flight / Fight mechanism.

People tell us to “Relax.. Calm down etc” but usually that only makes it worse! I wonder if we all have this distant but primal memory of fear of the teat being snatched from our hungry lips as an infant? This experience often triggers self-talk about never getting what we really want, and perhaps feelings of unworthiness about having the very thing that we crave.

So on Saturday, hundreds of thousands of English rugby fans joined their team in experiencing this bitter pill of positive expectation turning into nasty, real frustration. So what? It is only a game. However, most of us experience this see-sawing between the twin fears of getting it and not getting it. Unfortunately for us all, all I can offer is the advice of breathing, staying present in the moment, setting aside hope and expectation and just continue doing ‘your thing’; ever-ready to accept the natural outcome of this process, both the sweet fruits of success and learnings from each experience. Good Luck!

“No one ever won a chess game by betting on each move. Sometimes you have to move backward to get a step forward.” Amar Gopal Bose

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” Colin Powell

In yesterday’s blog I explained that despite all appearances to the contrary, we really don’t share a common Reality. Reality, despite the realness of its name, is a social construct. The fact that we share enough of this experience to work together and connect is good enough for us as human animals, but as human beings, we often suffer when something we thought was real and substantial crumbles before our eyes. Just remember some of those broken hearts and false promises that we have all suffered from.

If I can go back to yesterday’s model of how we experience events through a series of filters such as our beliefs, our values, our histories, our social norms etc, I think you can begin to understand that, by the time the tiny electronic packet of information actually reaches its destination neuron in our brain, it has been much tweaked, tailored and edited (just so that we can process and comprehend it.) The thing is that we are concurrently processing millions of bits of data so we don’t have time to ponder each and every one of them, so they are sieved and sorted and responded to, largely on auto-pilot. And that, as they say, is where the problem begins!

Someone else responds on auto-pilot and suddenly we feel like we have been torpedoed; it might be a relationship bust up, it might be a warning from the boss. The thing is that at this stage we normally just experience ‘being attacked’, so we naturally go into Flight / Fight. From that point on we have either ‘left the building’ (at a metaphorical level) or are joining in all guns blazing (which then reverses the experience for the other person, because now they are sure they are being attacked, so their mechanism is triggered too!)

So how on earth can you cope with all this? Well the first thing to do is realise that these mechanisms exist and understand the crucial impact they play in our lives. The next is to try, whenever possible, to try to synchronise understandings and expectations, to make sure that what you are saying is what they have heard and understood. Realise that we have different preferences and needs for how information is imparted (more on this another day) and that just because you have ‘told’ me, doesn’t mean I have actually processed it (especially if I need to see it!)

I hope this little explanation will help keep you all safe today, and help waltz, rather than clog dance through Life’s minefield!

“The tendency to turn human judgments into divine commands makes religion one of the most dangerous forces in the world.” George Harkness