How Do Our Emotions Limit Our Power? (Part One Of Four)
In this, the first of a four-part series, we begin to examine the question of how our emotions tend to restrict the actions we take that might enhance our life experience by expanding our ability to create desirable effects in the world.
For more information, please reach out to Tom at tom@dardickcommunications.com.
---
Listen to the podcast here
How Do Our Emotions Limit Our Power? (Part One Of Four)
The Eye of Power Model is an aid to help us gain a clearer view of how our perceptions, emotions, and actions affect our ability to produce desired effects in the world. We break the range of possibilities down into four categories or quadrants. Though the quadrants are interrelated and elements in one affect the others, we gain useful insight by examining the dynamics particular to each one.
As a reminder, the quadrants are derived by mapping our actions and attitudes against the subjects to which they're directed. Our actions and attitudes may be directed either inward to pertain to ourselves or outward to pertain to others. In this episode, and part one of the four-part series in which we'll examine the emotions that limit our power in each of these quadrants, we'll concern ourselves with the first quadrant.
We define quadrant one by the actions we take that produce desired effects for ourselves. We do all manner of things all day long that fit into this category. Hitting the snooze button, choosing our breakfast, exercising or not, meditating or not, and reading or not. Also, picking up our phones to check messages and headlines or scroll through social media, brushing our teeth, taking a shower, dressing in a manner of our choosing, and whether to leave enough time to arrive at work as scheduled.
They're all examples that we may face only at the very beginning of our days. Each day brings a fresh cornucopia of possible actions. We can choose to build our power or we can continue to do things that keep us in place or even cause us to bleed our power. What are the emotions that direct us either toward growth or, its opposite, withering?
To answer that, we need to first look at another question. What are the forces that define the limits of the actions we can take to build our power? How we feel about ourselves specifically about our abilities and prospects is a logical place to search for an answer. Confidence is a crucial ingredient to success in anything we do. What is confidence? It's belief in ourselves. It's our evaluation of our ability to perform to at least an inadequate level relative to reasonable expectations.
Confidence is a crucial ingredient to success in anything we do.
For actions we've successfully performed before, especially if it's routine, it's not a question. For actions we've never taken or that we've underperformed, confidence can be fleeting. What are the emotions that build or diminish our confidence? Let's look at the forces that pose limits to what we can do and the things that give us good reasons to either be confident or not.
A big part of that question comes down to what we can physically and mentally do. We borrow confidence for something new from past successes in some other but related actions. Among the attributes that expand the spectrum of our confidence are general capacities, whether physical such as strength, speed, coordination, and endurance, or mental like intelligence and empathy. Others are specific such as talents and skills.
In the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, players create characters that represent their avatars. The game is played by breathing life into your assigned character, inhabiting them to the best of your ability as you face challenges and pursue goals. Those are determined in cooperation with the Dungeon Master called a DM. It’s the player who creates the imaginary world and referees the action that ensues.
In the original version, you roll dice to determine the relative strengths of your character. The higher the number, the more capacity the character has in each of six attributes like strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma. A character has increased probabilities for success in taking actions in which the pertaining attributes are high. Likewise, they're penalized in areas where their scores are low. Since the relative values were all determined by rolling three six-sided dice, the range of possibility is 3 to 18. Eighteen thus defined the maximum level of competence a human could possibly be.
D&D being a fantasy game, there were plenty of non-human actors and they sometimes exceeded humans in this capacity or that. However, the game forces you to consider what the limits for humans were, at least in these six general attributes. I would often ponder, “What does eighteen look like in reality?” You can picture strong-man competitions or NFL linemen when you consider the limits of human strength. There are other kinds of strength too.
I think of the movie Thirteen Lives which dramatically portrayed the rescue of a boys' soccer team trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand. The men who performed that miracle had a kind of strength both physical and mental that I can hardly picture. The other physical traits like constitution and dexterity, I also picture with standout examples. Constitution is how physically hardy we are. I picture Iron Man athletes Cal Ripken or even Rasputin. For dexterity, I picture NFL defensive backs and wideouts, acrobats, magicians, surgeons, or jewelers.
The other three, the mental attributes of charisma, intelligence, and wisdom are even more interesting to me. We'll talk about those in future episodes. Novice players generally want their character attributes to be maximum across the board. If the DM allows it, which if you follow the rules of the game and you play characters with no deficiencies, you quickly find that it's not as fun. It's not realistic and it's not as interesting.
What makes the game fun is being good at some things and vulnerable at others. This has a few important ramifications. First, players must be more creative in how they apply their advantages and compensate for their shortcomings. Second, it encourages teamwork among players as some are better or worse at tasks than others. Strategy and team dynamics build dimensionality into the experience. Characters come more to life.
I share all of this because I believe it's analogous to our lives. We gain power and improve our life experience by identifying and fueling relative strengths while we creatively compensate for deficiencies, perhaps even forming mutually beneficial relationships with others to create teams that are more than the sum of their parts. Since we can't strengthen every attribute, at least not at the same time, we most effectively increase our power by training to increase in the areas we have relative strength.
How Emotions Limit Power: We gain power and improve our life experience by identifying and fueling relative strengths while creatively compensating for our deficiencies.
When you wish to build skills, strength, or endurance, you train, but we can't train all day. We can't lift 10 pounds X number of times now, 20 pounds tomorrow, 30 the day after, and so on. We reach limits. If we're training ourselves mentally, we tire. We can cram for an exam, but we can't cram for all the exams of life. What determines the physical and mental limits of our capacities? Our bodies tell us the answer. They give us feedback. Our bodies give us warnings that say, “Caution. Something is going wrong here. Pay attention.”
This feedback is a great boon. Without it, we hurt ourselves, sometimes seriously, but the feedback is not delicate. It's insistent. The more we ignore it, the louder its voice grows. It won't take no for an answer. Once we activate it, it's slow to go away. What is that feedback? Pain. It is vital and important to us. Some people have neurological dysfunction that results in them not feeling pain. Do you know what happens to them? They lose their fingers and toes. Often, their injuries are even worse than that.
It’s because they don't have a helpful feedback mechanism, they don't know when something they're doing is causing them real damage. However, there's also a paradox involved in this loop. When we want to grow, we must destroy the old to make room for the new. That applies whether the growth is in the area of ideas, relationships, or cellular structures in our muscles. We build strength by replacing older cellular structures with stronger newer ones. That process doesn't feel comfortable. It hurts.
When we want to grow, we must destroy the old to make room for the new.
That's why in building strength, a coach's mantra is, “No pain. No gain.” We don't seek out pain. The thing about pain is this. It does hurt. Thank you, Captain Obvious. That sensation for good reason makes us pain-averse. We saw in Episode 6 how we place far more of our energies avoiding things to which we are averse than moving toward things to which we're attracted. Avoidance of pain is consequently one of the greatest limiting factors of our power.
That's why we call the first quadrant of the Eye of Power Model the pain quadrant. Pain aversion takes many forms. We might avoid situations where we feel uncomfortable. That might be a tough conversation with an employee or boss, a cold call for a salesperson, or asking someone out for a date. Those who excel in some pursuit push through pain, at least in the areas in which they have cultivated relative strength.
When we don't, what stops us? We're now back to the original question. What emotions direct us to or away from our power? In a word, my short answer is consternation. This is a particular kind of fear. It implies anxiety, doubt, and a disoriented, uneasy confusion. It can be intense, but it is often simply strong enough to keep us from taking the action that would build our skill, accomplish our goal, break a habit, or get the help we need. Consternation feeds our aversion to pain. This benefits us where it keeps us safe from harm, and it limits us when it keeps us from taking productive and painful actions that increase our power.
How Emotions Limit Power: Consternation is strong enough to keep us from taking the action that would build our skill, accomplish our goal, break a habit, or get the help we need.
In future episodes, we'll discuss what we may do to get past the limits that happen to be upon us at the moment. For now, I'll simply ask you to pay attention to what are you pain-averse to. What actions have you been taking or avoiding that are not leading you in a positive direction? If you're so inclined, please reach out to me to share your thoughts on this. Remember, together we're all more powerful. Let's go.
Important Links
Episode 6 – Past Episode