Learning Early How to Overcome Failure

Emotional intelligence lessons from the youngest billionaire entrepreneur.

Sara Blakely, the overnight billionaire creator of Spanx, learned at an early age how not to be intimidated by failure.  Her father was a natural mentor in one of the key emotional intelligence skills necessary for young entrepreneurs.  As she told the story to Fareed Zakaria, her father encouraged both her and her brother to report daily any failures they had experienced.  And he rewarded them with praise for being willing and able to recognize and talk about the problems they had faced. 

Continue reading .....

Exercise Your Left Prefrontal Lobe for Emotional Fitness

If we can be motivated to exercise our bodies and our minds, why not try Emotional Fitness as well?

We know that exercising specific muscles causes them to grow stronger and that practicing physical skills like tennis or golf can help us improve those skills and make some of the movements familiar enough to be automatic.   We also know that regular practice of cognitive skills such as reading, writing, arithmetic or languages make us more proficient at those skills and "smarter" in terms of those valued abilities.  When it comes to emotions, however, we don't usually think of practice leading to proficiency despite the fact that such practices have been around for thousands of years in the form of yoga, meditation, and various forms of prayer.

Continue reading....

When fear directs my dreams.

I had a familiar dream recently.  It was near the end of the semester in my dream and I had not attended many of my calculus classes.  I knew I would fail and I was desperately searching for a way out of this mess.  As I woke from my dream, I realized that I had nothing to fear from calculus.  I had graduated in spite of it and would never have to pass calculus again.  But it got me to thinking, "What triggered that dream?"  My friend confessed to having similar dreams, along with the ever popular "locked outside naked" dream and the ubiquitous "running from something horrible" dream. 

I came to the conclusion that a basic emotion was at the root of it, that fear or anxiety that could have been triggered by any number of possible sources, real or imagined, was being expressed in that dream.  It was my sleeping brain's way of making sense out of the basic emotion of fear that was firing while I slept.  Read more ....

Why Not Worry?

Though worrying is a natural function of the brain, the costs outweigh the benefits in the long run.

If worrying is so natural and has so many survival advantages (See my article Why Worry?), you may say, why not worry?  The short answer is that it is well enough to worry for short periods when the crisis requires it, but it is unhealthy and unproductive to get into the habit of worrying all the time.  Continue reading .....

About Escape From The Situation Room

This blog has almost nothing to do with the CNN program hosted by Wolf Blitzer. Nor does it have much to do with the special place in the White House where national security activities are addressed.

Escape from the Situation Room is the working title of a book in progress.  It is a book about worrying, emotional intelligence, and what we can do about excessive and destructive worrying.

I am publishing short chapters here on this blog in hopes that readers will comment, criticize, contradict, and otherwise help clarify and improve the message so that the ultimate book will be a better, more helpful document.

So please comment as much as you can to let me know whether these ideas are helpful or need tweaking.

Why Worry?

We worry ourselves sick a lot of the time.  Some of us worry ourselves to death.  We worry over trivial things, as well as important things.  We worry about things that will never happen.  Why do we have to worry so much?

Worrying is a natural mental and emotional activity, an easy habit to fall into.  Our brains are designed (or evolved) to pay attention to danger.  When the lion or wolf attacks, we need to be prepared to run like hell, so fear prepares our bodies to do so by releasing hormones that direct the blood flow to the running muscles and change our breathing for the emergency state.  Our minds are also changed by the fear, so that we stay focused on the danger and the best direction to run for survival.  Memories of the dangerous circumstances become tagged with fear so that we recognize the signs of danger and become automatically alert.  When we hear the wolf howling nearby or smell the lion lurking unseen in the tall grass, some of the same fear alerts us to the possible danger and prepares us to run soon if necessary.  The fear also keeps our mind focused on the possible lion in the tall grass and keeps us awake and ready to run even if we can’t see, hear or smell the threat.  And we sometimes dream of lions or wolves and wake up in a cold sweat from a panicky run in the forests of the night....continue reading