Emotions Have Energy

10/19/19 • 7 min

Emotional agility and resilience give leaders the edge they need to quickly pivot during stressful situations.

Emotions Have Energy

Thanks to the late great David Hawkins, MD, PhD, we have proof that emotions contain measurable energy, which can either foster or negate actual cell life. Dr. Hawkins’s groundbreaking work, as explained in his book Power vs. Force, shows how a person’s log level - the measurable energy level in their magnetic field - increases as that person experiences more positive emotions.

Hawkins’s most interesting finding was that cells actually died when the log level was below 200, which is where the emotions of scorn, hate, anxiety, shame, regret, despair, blame, and humiliation reside. Clearly it’s key to regulate and manage our emotional state, not just for our overall well-being (and that of those around us) but also for our physical health and the life of our cells. Taking yourself through the Steps To Consent process is a great way to start caring for all aspects of your health.

Steps To Consent:

First, note what you are resisting, whether it is an experience, a person, a situation, or even a physical object. Pick something that you want to say “Grrr.. I don’t want this!” to. Use the Emotion Wheel to list all the emotions you are experiencing.
Now get present, or consent, to this discomfort. Say, “Ok, here I am experiencing this...”. Feel it without any resistance.
Next, determine your Desired State. Reframe by saying, “What would I like instead?”

Let’s look at an example of how shifting emotions reaped massive benefits for one of my coaching and workshop clients. You can head to today’s show notes for the Emotion Wheel infographic that will help with this as well.

Emotional Agility In Action

A market-leading food organization was in a bind. A fake news story on social media had spread like wildfire, and revenues of one of their top brands had plunged 27 percent. Whoa. It was crucial to stop the slide, stabilize, and then start to rebuild.

What We Did

We were brought in to train a few dozen leaders in optimal teaming and navigating change, rapidly engaging and enrolling large and diverse groups to come together, focus on outcomes, tell themselves and each other new stories about their situation, and get momentum going. Then we shifted our focus to the marketing team, supporting an initiative to reinvent how the organization marketed to consumers.

We started the day with an intense emotion-shifting exercise, maneuvers of consciousness. Fifteen minutes into it, half the team had shifted from victimhood and disaster thinking to empowerment and possibility thinking. Fifteen more minutes, and the other half were on board. Now it was time to teach them how to bring our tools to their teams.

The Result

The brand is safe and growing, and the leaders are stepping into new levels of accountability, meaning, and fulfillment - and they are bringing their teams forward with them. If a disaster ever strikes again, they’ll navigate it gracefully and swiftly.

The Net-Net

Emotions have energy: what we focus on, we fuel.
It’s key to consent to our uncomfortable emotional state, then ask what we would like instead (something, of course, that we can create and maintain).
Learning to release resistance increases accountability, emotional engagement, and productivity.

Resources Mentioned:

Emotional agility and resilience give leaders the edge they need to quickly pivot during stressful situations.

Emotions Have Energy

Steps To Consent:

First, note what you are resisting, whether it is an experience, a person, a situation, or even a physical object. Pick something that you want to say “Grrr.. I don’t want this!” to. Use the Emotion Wheel to list all the emotions you are experiencing.
Now get present, or consent, to this discomfort. Say, “Ok, here I am experiencing this...”. Feel it without any resistance.
Next, determine your Desired State. Reframe by saying, “What would I like instead?”

Emotional Agility In Action

What We Did

The Result

The Net-Net

Emotions have energy: what we focus on, we fuel.
It’s key to consent to our uncomfortable emotional state, then ask what we would like instead (something, of course, that we can create and maintain).
Learning to release resistance increases accountability, emotional engagement, and productivity.

Resources Mentioned:

Previous Episode

The 5 Organismic (Fundamental) Rights

We all have rights as human beings.

But if we don’t know or acknowledge our fundamental rights, or if we don’t understand them, we’ll often suffer, cause others to suffer, and worst case, self-sabotage (which in turn sabotages those around us that count on us).

To live in a state of emotional agility more consistently, we need to build the mental muscles of self-awareness. And one of the best ways to increase our self-awareness is to get in touch with our Organismic Rights.

Your Rights As A Human Being

The psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich observed a series of stages through which all human beings must pass on their way to full body maturation, referred to as Organismic Rights. Organismic Rights are our basic human rights that are established during our formative life experiences between approximately 0-3 years old. They determine where a person will have behavioral struggles as they move through life. They govern our behavior and can hinder our performance. The tricky part is we can be totally unaware of their existence!

Imagine a newborn baby entering the world. He or she is forced to adapt quickly. The more fully developed a person’s Organismic Rights are, the more that individual can express themselves with greater aliveness and creativity (and spend more time in their Smart State). The less developed, the more likely they will operate in the Critter State (fight/flight/freeze).

What Are Your 5 Organismic Rights?

Every child, every organism, is born with these rights:

The right to exist
The right to have needs
The right to take action
The right to have consequences for one’s actions
The right to love and be loved

In a perfect world every child would have these rights confirmed by the people around them as they grow and develop. But that doesn’t always happen. Our parents, even with the best intentions and most loving parenting styles, could only give us what they had--and chances are pretty high that somewhere along the line their organismic rights got a little wobbly. Most people struggle at least a little on a few of these.

Organismic Rights – Decoded

You can head to today’s show noted for the link to the Organismic Rights Decoder. It’s based on my experience of working over 10,000 hours with humans on changing their behavior. Note that you can use this on yourself or with others too.

For example, one of my coaching clients had a direct report that was struggling with accountability. So my client helped the direct report to increase their right to take action. Another client had a partner that would often blame others for their shortcomings. The partner needed help increasing their right to have consequences. See how it works?

Rate Your Organismic Rights

Now that you see how certain behaviors may reveal some minimal Organismic Rights, please take a moment now and rate your Organismic Rights from 0-5 where 5 is the highest experience of this right.

1.Your right to exist: ____

2.Your right to have needs: ____

3.Your right to take action: ____

4.Your right to have consequences for your actions: ____

5.Your right to love and be loved: ____

Consider your ratings. Where would you like to increase your rights? Where do you think your stakeholders at work stand? Your family members? Now revisit the table above. How would you like ...

Next Episode

The 7 Most Common Ways Leaders Unknowingly Sabotage Their Team

Sometimes leaders call me saying they want help to fix their team. That’s always a red flag for me.

A CEO of a west coast food company called me a while back. He said his team lacked accountability and he wanted me to “fix them”. As I asked him questions a disturbing trend appeared: his retention was some of the lowest I’d seen in my 30+ year career.

Even his executive team didn’t stick around—the longest tenure there was under 2 years, and the CEO had been around for over 15 years! What was happening here?

How’s the accountability in your organization? Would you like it to be stronger? If so, then please do this first:

Look at your company’s values – is accountability mentioned and sacred?
Look at your team’s emotional engagement – are they enrolled, aligned, engaged?
Look in the mirror – does your behavior support accountability? Are you a model of it?

I’ve Seen The Enemy—And It’s Us

It’s because a human isn’t a simple being. We all have parts of ourselves, and some are in conflict with one another. A part of you wants to hold others accountable, yet part of you doesn’t want to be the “the bad guy/gal”.

Here are the top 7 factors that I find prevent, or at best reduce, accountability:

Conflict Avoidance – if we don’t deal with what’s happening, like a missed deadline, then we “teach” everyone that accountability isn’t taken seriously
Organizational Values that don’t honor accountability – if it’s not part of our code of conduct, of what we hold sacred, people won’t take it seriously (again!)
An Absence of Process – if we don’t follow a standard process to ensure accountability, we’ll have communication misses that will set us back. Do you:
Delegate with a clear spec (and ask your direct report to echo back to ensure your communication was clear)
Empower them to succeed (give them what resources they need and check in mid-way to make sure they’re ok and on track)
Celebration or consequences upon completion (make it feel good to be accountable, and feel bad to not be—remember the human being will always choose the “best feeling” behavior on their behavioral menu... it’s your job to make accountability feel goo)
Leaders that don’t model accountability, so the team doesn’t take it seriously – yes, it’s up to us to walk the walk and talk the talk or nobody else will
Assumption others won’t be accountable – I see this in cross-functional accountability break downs. One team trashes or distrusts the other, telling their team that the other one won’t come through, and surprise, they often don’t... or if they do they’re perceived as having not come through due to the potent negative PR machine.
High staff turnover – back to the prospect at the beginning of this blog—he kept deeming people “disappointing” that he either fired them or they quit to find a better working environment. If your turnover is super high, look at how you’re causing it.
Deadlines and projects the responsible party hasn’t agreed to/are unrealistic, constantly changing priorities and incomplete communication overall– sometimes accountability is broken because a person didn’t agree they could deliver the deadline per the spec they were told, or they don’t realize the priorities have changed—they weren’t communicated to them by leadership. So they’re working on the old priorities. Or they’re scrambling, trying to figure out what exactly the priorities are because they’re hearing from other teams that the world has changed. Or they’re irritated and rebellious because they were told to do the impossible and weren’t given a chance to negotiate a more realistic deadline/approach.