Disarming Your Hot Buttons

SUMMARY

• Are you able to keep the safety on your triggers and your hot buttons or are they open and ready to be pushed all the time?
• Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence and our Behavioural Self-Control by learning to identify our triggers and our hot buttons.
• We all have things that set us off. We all have things that trigger our poor behaviour. We all have things that set us on a path of going down that emotional reaction, rather than staying in the logic and behaving the way that we want to behave.
• Today I want to share to you the 8 steps that will help you recognise and regulate your hot buttons and your triggers:
• Step one is to identify what are the things that trigger you.
• Step two is to look at how that trigger makes you feel.
• Step three is to identify, in those moments, what's your self-talk doing?
• Step four is to look at what your reaction is.
• Step five is to identify how you feel just after that—half an hour later, an hour later, later on in the day.
• Step six is to ask yourself, "When I go through this process, what's the damage that's done?"
• Step seven is what would be a better response? What can I do differently next time?
• Step eight is to go, "How will I feel when I respond that way, as opposed to how I felt when I reacted?"

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Are you able to keep the safety on your triggers and your hot buttons or are they open and ready to be pushed all the time? Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence and our Behavioural Self-Control by learning to identify our triggers and our hot buttons.

We all have things that set us off. We all have things that trigger our poor behaviour. We all have things that set us on a path of going down that emotional reaction, rather than staying in the logic and behaving the way that we want to behave. Have you ever asked yourself the question, "Why am I behaving like this?" Why am I doing what I'm doing here when I know that it's not good behaviour? It's not good for me, it's not good for others, and it's definitely not good for the greater good. It's because you're human. It's because you're an emotional being. It's because this critical set of skills around Emotional Intelligence that we've been talking about need to be learned.

So, the first thing I want you to do today is cut yourself some slack. Give yourself some space to incrementally change and grow in these competencies we've been talking about.

Today, as I said, I want to talk about your triggers. I want to talk about you being able to identify patterns of behaviour that you currently have so that you then can employ the strategies we taught last week before the unresourceful behaviour happens, before that trigger is pulled and you go down that path of reacting.

For me, traffic is one of the major challenges that I have in being able to control and manage my emotional behaviour. For some reason, I can go from being mild-mannered Eric Bana to the Incredible Hulk just by getting stuck in traffic. I do a lot of travel around the world and in some countries, the traffic is an absolute nightmare. And indeed, when I went to India for the first few times, I never complained about Sydney traffic again. We've got that element of people honking their horns and people just going everywhere and not looking at the signs and doing all those things.

So, what I had to do was learn to use what I'm going to teach you now so that I could enjoy being in traffic and get to the destination that I wanted to go to without being all flustered and totally disengaged because I was emotionally drained.

So, the first thing we need to do is we need to identify, you need to identify, what are the things that trigger you. Some of the things that my clients talk about, people not telling the truth or people not doing what they say they're going to do, for me, it's being in traffic, people raising their voice at me, people not listening to me, whatever it is. So, those things that might happen, those situations you might find yourself in that would trigger you going down the path of your self-talk and your thoughts, and then your behaviour, your reaction.

So, the first step is to identify the triggers. Now that we've identified the triggers, the second step is to look at how that makes us feel. Emotional Intelligence is our ability to be able to know, in the moment, what the emotion is that we're going through. So, we want to be able to know how we feel physically. For me, in traffic, the feeling in my body is that I would tense up on the steering wheel and I would feel my body tensing up.

The third thing that we want to identify is, in those moments, what's your self-talk doing? What inner dialogue is going on? For me, I go, "Why did you bring the car today? What are these people doing? Don't they know how to drive? Where did you get your license from? Out of a cornflakes packet?" These things create more and more emotion.

Now, we want to look at what it is that you would normally do. Step four in this process is to look at what is my reaction. I'm in the car, I've got this self-talk going on, the trigger is definitely being pulled, and I'll either toot the horn to let them know clearly what it is that they're doing wrong or if they're sitting at the lights and they're on their phone and the light changes to green, I might say something really intelligent like, "Haven't we got a color you like?"

The fifth part of this process is to then identify how do you feel just after that—half an hour later, an hour later, later on in the day. For me, I was very good at having a stern talk to myself and going, "Oh, Grant. You idiot. You did it again." So, instead of feeling better about myself, I was actually feeling worse.

Now, we want to do an audit on what's the damage that's done. Step six is to ask ourselves the question, "When I go through this process, what's the damage that's done?" The damage for me is around my identity, how I feel about myself. Also, when I get to my destination, I'm not my best version anyway.

Now, we can have a look at how can I do it differently going forward. The seventh step here is what would be a better response. For example, I could turn the radio up a little bit, put on a podcast, do something that's going to distract me. Or I could say to myself, "Hey, 10 seconds isn't going to make any difference."

And step eight in this process is to go, "How will I feel then when I respond that way, as opposed to how I felt when I reacted?" Step eight is to look at how is that going to make me feel. And then we can ask ourselves the question, "Is that an empowering feeling or a disempowering one?"

So, what we've talked about today is being able to recognise and regulate our hot buttons, our triggers. Change our thinking around them, change our behaviour around them and therefore, get a better result and feel much better as well.