Last week we officially launched Not Sustainable with a session with a group of fellow sustainability professionals looking at how to deal with difficult people in our roles. If you are faced with climate change deniers or doomsayers, those that think businesses should just focus on making a profit, or others that challenge your role or trigger you in other ways, this will hopefully help you find a better way to deal with them…

What do I mean by ‘being triggered’? This is when someone says or does something that makes you suddenly very emotional, really anxious, or frustrated. This can happen in any environment but, in this case, we are generally talking about in the workplace.

What happens when we are triggered

What happens when we’re triggered? – our body goes into flight or fight mode. If we stay in this mode for too long, or keep going into it throughout the day, then we become exhausted and over time perhaps our immune system weakens and we become ill. Or we simply tell ourselves that we can’t stay in this environment or working with this person who keeps triggering us and we leave our jobs.

However, there is another way! We can remain and understand what is happening to us in that moment, and then take some new actions to come back to calm.

How do we get triggered?

We are still animals that can be attacked and eaten! Our entire system is designed to watch out for danger and then go into flight or fight mode to protect ourselves and this is the body and mind we take into the workplace.

Here the trigger (no 1 on the diagram) is something or somebody who says or does something we perceive as dangerous at some level. We then run thoughts about the situation (no 2) and feel certain things in our bodies (no 3). This could be faster heartbeat, clammy hands and emotions. We then act from that physical state (no 4) and this is often not the way we would ideally like to respond.

This sequence of events (from 1 to 4 on the diagram) can happen so fast that we are not really aware of it until after we’ve already reacted. The challenge is how do we change what we think and our state so that we can respond differently?

How can we respond differently?

1. We need to be very aware in the moment that we have been triggered. We asked everyone participating in our launch to write down who and what triggers them so that they have self-awareness before the work day has even begun.
2. When you have been triggered, take a deep breath. Even if you are in a meeting, you can just stop listening for a moment and decide to breathe and calm your physical body.
3. Then place your hands on your thighs if they are hidden under a table, or place a hand over your heart to get reconnected to your body. People who start to get emotional, often unconsciously place a hand on their chest.
4. Thirdly we need to have prepared already a list of new thoughts (no.2 in the diagram) so that we can decide to read this new list and remind ourselves that all is ok, even though our usual pattern would be to run thoughts that make us feel anxious or frustrated.
   Examples of these new thoughts could be ‘I am ok, this is just work’, ‘they are angry with me but we will work this out’, ‘I am good at my job so this is probably a misunderstanding’. So, if you sit and build a list of thoughts that you could run instead of your usual ones at this moment, then keep this list on you and you can actually get the list out and read it in that Zoom meeting if you’ve been triggered. Note the new thoughts, must also be true about you and your capabilities in your role.
5. Then you are in a position to respond in a new way from a much more resourceful state.

Shifting to calm

Doing this exercise takes a few minutes. Maybe you’ve not been concentrating on what the person who has triggered you has been saying, but that happens to people all the time. Now that you are feeling much calmer you can simply say ‘sorry I got distracted for a second, please can you repeat that?’

During the launch we were sharing this exercise with sustainability professionals who have the job of persuading people that they need to change the way they work, in order to create more sustainable organisations. These roles face their own unique challenges and we will share in our next blog, some of the different ways you can respond to challenges of this nature once you are in a calmer place.