You listen to the stock market reports as if rubber necking a car accident. And when you hear about that 150 point drop in the Dow, you’re not merely disappointed, you feel a kick in the stomach and get nauseated or light headed. Your boss reassures you that there will not be any more layoffs, but his voice seems tentative. Nauseated and light headed again. You’re speaking less and less to people around you. You’ve lost your sense of humor. Even if you’re a calm person, you have to struggle with your own road rage if someone cuts you off in traffic. Your drinking is up. And as far as dieting, exercising, taking care of yourself or having a healthy happy sex life? Forgeetaboutit.
What’s going on? You are continually being traumatized and re-traumatized, can’t get your footing and instead of becoming stronger, you’re becoming more anxious. And if the following hold true, there’s a good chance that you have Financial PTSD.
Re-experiencing the traumatic event
Intrusive, upsetting memories of the event
Flashbacks (acting or feeling like the event is happening again)
Nightmares (either of the event or of other frightening things)
Feelings of intense distress when reminded of the trauma
Intense physical reactions to reminders of the event (e.g. pounding heart, rapid breathing, nausea, muscle tension, sweating)
PTSD symptoms of avoidance and emotional numbing
Avoiding activities, places, thoughts, or feelings that remind you of the trauma
Inability to remember important aspects of the trauma
Loss of interest in activities and life in general
Feeling detached from others and emotionally numb
Sense of a limited future (you don’t expect to live a normal life span, get married, have a career)
PTSD symptoms of increased arousal
Difficulty falling or staying asleep
Irritability or outbursts of anger
Difficulty concentrating
Hypervigilance (on constant “red alert”)
Feeling jumpy and easily startled
Other common symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder
Anger and irritability
Guilt, shame, or self-blame
Substance abuse
Depression and hopelessness
Suicidal thoughts and feelings
Feeling alienated and alone
Feelings of mistrust and betrayal
Headaches, stomach problems, chest pain
What can you do? You can actually seek the same treatment that soldiers with PTSD or rape victims (and doesn’t a part of you feel raped by the economic events of the past couple years?) including support groups, seeking out a therapist or psychiatrist and checking out resources such as those at the bottom of this blog.
You also might do well to heed and follow the famed Serenity Prayer (so embedded in the fabric of 12 step programs): “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”
Too inspirational for you? Need something more concrete?
Then how about:
Each day when you wake up say to yourself and write down the answer to: “What do I need to do today (or the next week), to make my company/department/organization a better company/department/organization and my marriage and family happier and my health healthier?”
Then “Just Schedule It.” Either for today or the next few days, because you haven’t made a commitment until you’ve scheduled it and you haven’t kept a commitment until you’ve checked it off after you have done it.
You haven’t fully let go of a grudge
until you have apologized to the person you’re feeling it toward.
Until you do, it will continue to eat away at you and make you sick
and unless you do, it will turn you into a bitter person
just like the parent you learned it from
and then you’ll make others sick when they’re around you.
I think what holds us back from letting go of anger is that we don’t forgive as long as we need to blame. And we need to blame as long as we are unable to admit and feel the hurt from being injured by someone else. And we are unable to feel the hurt underneath, because doing so makes us feel vulnerable and fearful of a second attack that we are convinced would be too much to bear.
Apologizing to someone you have a grudge against who has hurt you is about letting go of your anger at them. It doesn’t mean giving a hurtful persona a second chance to hurt you again. It also doesn’t mean doing this with a violent or abusive person, who you’d do best to steer clear of.
One of the best approaches I know to short circuit your emotions when you’re upset and before you become angry (which is the prelude to a grudge) is to:
Say to yourself, “I’m reacting!”
Answer the question to yourself: “What am I feeling hurt or disappointed about right now?” (If you can’t get through the anger to the hurt or at least to the disappointment, it may be because the narcissistic part of your personality is too strong).
Answer the question to yourself: “What is my evidence that the other person meant to hurt or disappoint me? And might I be taking something personal that wasn’t meant that way? And if I am taking it personally and it is not meant that way, I need to let it go.”
Another approach to nip anger in the bud comes from one of my friends, Bob Pratt, President of Volunteers of America Los Angeles, is one of the least grudge holding and most even tempered people I know. I asked him his secret. He told me, “Whenever somebody does something hurtful to me, I assume innocence and that they are doing it, because someone has done something hurtful to them. So, the person who acts with Road Rage to you is behaving that way, because something bad happened to them. My view is one should stop evil people when you encounter them, but there really are very few evil people in the world. Everyone else is flawed including you and me. And just as I would like people to cut me some slack because of my flaws, I have a policy of doing the same to them.”
I converted a Road Rager to a friend some years ago by virtue of the lesson that Bob has learned (i.e by having them see that my bad driving was because I was having a bad day). I was having one of the most frustrating days of my life where it seemed that everything I did went wrong. I was driving on Sepulveda Blvd. in Los Angeles as it enters into the San Fernando Valley in a place called Sherman Oaks. I was so preoccupied that I cut off this older 6 foot 5 guy in his pick up truck, not once, but twice. After the second time, he pulled in front of me and stopped and I was so dazed I just stopped when he did. I could see that his wife was telling him not to go out to confront me. He didn’t listen and stormed out of his truck to start a fight with me. He came over beside my window and started swearing and yelling at me. I was so out of it, I opened my driver side window to hear what he was saying. He continued to make threatening gestures at me.
When he paused for a moment I said to him, “Have you ever had such an awful day where everything has blown up in your face, and that you just wish someone would come along and shoot you to put you out of your misery? Are you that person?”
He immediately changed and said, “What?”
I repeated, “Have you ever had such an awful day where everything has blown up in your face, and that you just wish someone would come along and shoot you to put you out of your misery? Are you that person?”
He then said in a calming voice, “Hey, it’s okay, calm down, it’s all going to be alright.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” I blurted back, “you haven’t had a day where everything you have done turned to crap. Really, I’m not kidding.”
He then proceeded to try to calm me down and reassure me some more. After a couple minutes he went back into his truck, and waved to me in the rear view mirror as if to say, “Now settle down, it’s going to be alright.” And then he drove away and in a few moments I did the same.
Is the kind of person you’ll avoid if you possibly can.
One of the reasons that most jerks get to you is that first they appall you, then they frustrate you, then they anger you and then they outrage you. And if you’re not comfortable with feeling outraged (as is true for most people), that is when they push you off balance and get the better of you.
* Mental Real Estate – When you can name something that already has emotions attached to it in your customer’s or client’s mind, you own a piece of their “mental real estate” and have the beginning of traction (Familiarity + Emotion = Traction). When you twist or tweak or re-purpose that name in a certain way that surprises them, the Traction + Novelty deepens your connection to people’s emotions and in the end, their minds. For instance, the word “pirates” is kind of sexy in the minds of children, therefore “Pirates of the Caribbean” (and Disney) owns that mental real estate connected to “pirates” in children’s minds. Similarly, “jerk off” occupies some mental real estate in the minds of many adolescent and young adult men. So, voila, “Jerk Off Kit” may have caused many of you to open this when you normally wouldn’t have. On the other hand, because of that same embarrassment/shame laden mental real estate, it triggered a number of you to not open the email and furthermore to unsubscribe from my list. If that is the case, that’s too bad, because if you had opened it, you may have learned something that would be useful to you.
Hell hath no fury as a relationship between a narcissistic man and a borderline woman.
My colleagues and many of you would deem it inappropriate for me to imply that Mel Gibson and his ex-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, or for that matter John and Elizabeth Edwards (as the book Game Change would have us believe) are dyed in the wool narcissistic and borderline personalities if I have not met and evaluated them (and then of course I wouldn’t tell you), but the title of this blog probably got your attention.
And I am not saying that either Gibson, his ex-girlfriend or John and Elizabeth Edwards do in fact have these personalities. But from what any of us read and hear in the media (which has its own opportunistic personality), we might view them in that light.
Perhaps a better view of this relationship made in hell that is in the public domain and was captured best in the iconic movie, “The War of the Roses,” which starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.
What it comes down to is that one thing that narcissistic and borderline personalities have in common is that they are both capable of a rage that is chilling to behold and terrorizing when it is aimed at you.
The rage however is triggered in different ways in each of these personality disorders. For the narcissistic male it is triggered when their partner refuses to feed into and psychologically conform to their grandiose, entitled core. For the borderline female the rage is triggered when their partner attempts to control or abandon them.
Another thing that both personalities have in common is that they are both primitive and immature. By that I mean that the measure of how evolved and mature you are is how deeply you can feel disappointed, angry, frustrated and/or hurt without striking out at the person doing it to you or to yourself in self-destructive behavior. In other words, the more you can feel and “take the hit” from life, without hitting back, the more grown up you are.
What is the takeaway from this for the Mel Gibson’s, Oksana Grigorieva’s, John and Elizabeth Edwards’ among you? Marriage is for grown ups not for children. And the good news? It’s never too late to grow up.
Addendum: One of my clinical focuses is “Recoupling Therapy” working with couples who are separated or living separately (as in one in a hotel and the other in the family home) who want to give their marriage one last chance before they call it quits. In fact, I won’t see couples who are not in that situation. That is because as long as you are still reactively, immaturely and hatefully living in the same house, that situation alone can bring out the narcissistic and borderline tendencies that lay within people who are not those personalities through and through. But when you have reached the point of sleeping in separate addresses, the possibility arises with that “time out” (which is what we do with immature acting out kids) of each person realizing that there is more to life and love than having to be right and get your way all the time.
Wife: “Before I become a burden on my kids, I’m going to take a bottle of pills.”
Husband: “Too chancy, I’d go with a couple of guns.”
- husband and wife after caring for two parents with Alzheimer’s for three years
This is a response I am hearing from an increasing number of white middle class* baby boomers as they face the prospect of becoming old, enfeebled and a financial and emotional burden on their children.
It may also be that they are projecting the burden, drain and resentment they are feeling or have felt towards their own aging parents who have become enfeebled and require nearly round the clock care. And knowing how they have felt towards their own parents, they don’t want their children to carry the burden of taking care of them and feeling the same way towards them.
It may be prescient of them that knowing how impatient** they have been with their own parents and that their Millennial kids have no patience whatsoever, the idea that becoming mentally and physically enfeebled and dependent on these children portends an absolutely horrendous quality of life for both them and their children.
Is there a solution so that baby boomers might go “gently into that good night” instead of taxing their patience challenged adult children? Most likely what will happen is that when the middle class Millennials grow up and are in the position of having to take care of their elderly baby boomer parents, they will find a way (as their baby boomer parents have) to help pay for their care and delegate their caring to third world caretakers who still retain God’s gift of patience towards those in their care (which is why many a middle class baby boomer declares such caretakers “Godsends”).
One highly unlikely alternative is that Millennials will somehow develop patience to calmly follow the admonition of Cicely Saunders, founder of the hospice movement in caring for dying and infirm parents: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” Why so unlikely? Maybe it’s because their baby boomer parents who were the last generation to abandon patience in favor of the race to get more, sooner have been such effective role models.
In closing I am reminded of a quote from Dr. Milton Greenblatt from the 1970′s:
First we are children to our parents,
then parents to our children,
then parents to our parents,
then children to our children.
But then again that was in a galaxy far, far away and a time long, long ago when patience was not just a virtue… it was actually possible.
* This phenomenon may be more of an issue for the white middle class baby boomer, because family is everything for Third World people and the wealthy can and do pay for everything from people (often Third World) to raise their children to caretakers to provide care and loving caring to their aging and infirm parents.
** Another factor involved with the people I have heard these complaints from is the combination of Impatience + Difficult Parent (difficult as in “high maintenance, as in difficult to please, easy to upset). It’s easy to be patient with parents who are “low maintenance” (easy to please, difficult to upset), generous and gracious even as they lose much of their physical and mental faculties. The takeaway from this is that what goes around, comes around and if you are the one who is “high maintenance,” you might want to change that.
I start with a disclaimer that what follows is empirically based on thirty years as a practicing psychiatrist and psychotherapist. It has been verified by formerly enlisted and senior officers from the Armed Forces, but has not been validated by any research or double blinded studies.
How does PTSD happen?
Central to nearly all the people I have treated or spoken with who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (in preparation of my book, “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for Dummies”) is the “fear of re-traumatization” and their efforts at any and all costs to avoid it often results in the symptoms they develop.
Soldiers enter basic training as “loosey goosey” enlistees whose minds and personalities are broken down and built back up into fighting machines devoted to fulfilling a mission and the well-being of their fellow soldiers. Imagine those recruits as a “green” rattling Ford pickup truck that can’t take a corner safely, being torn down and rebuilt into a turbo-charged Porsche that can handle any curve thrown at it and you get an idea of what the process is like.
Even Hollywood has jumped on this metaphor with the popular Transformer movies where rattling cars and trucks are broken down and reconfigured and rebuilt into monsters of good and evil. Get the idea?
After they finish basic training, it’s pretty heady, adrenaline driven stuff that can make soldiers feel nearly superhuman. Add to that the notion that they are going to fight evil and they can feel like a band of superheroes out to rid the world of villains.
But then they hit the reality of war face on or rather it hits them in the face. In the process they see horrors and create collateral damage no training can fully prepare you for. Imagine being ordered to run over a young child who will not get out of the way and you can’t swerve to avoid them because of the mine-laden side of the road and hearing the thump of their body as they hit the bottom of your Humvee. Or imagine following orders to take out a sniper nest in a house in a village and then entering it, only to discover a dog, a grandpa, a mother, and two children “shredded” or incinerated by you.
What happens to you when all your training for war runs head on into the debasement of humanity that you perpetrate in waging it?
The trauma cuts you to your core. The horrors that you see and the horrors that you caused won’t leave you alone. You don’t tell anyone else, because you think they’re handling it better than you and that you are just weak and missing the “right stuff” that your fellow soldiers have.
Although you never fully get over that trauma that rips you to the center of your being, as in human being, your training is good enough to enable you to get past it through the days and weeks and possibly even the tour of duty you are on. However the damage is done and the crack in the porcelain of what was once your soul remains.
You don’t let the world know about it and you do everything you can to not feel that fragility. But even though you don’t think about it, you believe that if you were re-traumatized that crack would cause you to shatter from the inside out and like Humpty Dumpty, all the king’s horses and all the king’s medics would never be able to put you back together again.
So you live your life avoiding anything that might re-traumatize you. You numb yourself with alcohol or drugs; you withdraw from family matters especially the yelling of your spouse and young children. Every now and then a car backfires or something catches you by surprise and you jump out of your skin, because you had temporarily relaxed your guard and that temporarily removed the paper thin veneer protective graft above your crack. It’s like someone pouring acid in an open cut, except this cut is in your mind.
If you are put in a situation in which you feel you will be re-traumatized, you can go into a state of near panic, in which you resort to your most basic “fight or flight” instincts.
Why does PTSD happen?
Have you ever passed a cut tree and seen all the exposed rings? Each of those rings represents a year in the life of that tree. Some of those rings may look thick and healthy indicating and good year; some may look very thin indicating a drought; some may look darkened indicating a forest fire that the tree survived; some may look nearly rotted indicating some fungal or insect infestation. In your minds eye you can also imagine that those years will have a lot to do with the eventual health of that tree and its overall resilience.
Trees are not the only living creatures that develop from the inside out. Imagine your brain as actually having three brains. Like the rings of a tree layered one upon the other, imagine your human (neomammalian) upper brain is layered upon your paleomammalian middle brain is layered upon your most primitive reptilian lower brain.
Now imagine figuratively that a recruit’s brain and “loosey gooseyness” is due to their three brains being loosely wired together. Then imagine that during basic training, those loose wires are stretched and even broken. But then those three brain are built up in to a tightly wired machine specialized for waging war.
When a highly trained, tightly wired and molded for war brain suddenly runs face to face into horrors perpetrated upon you and that you perpetrate on others, soldiers show that they are not Transformers, but rather, that they are too human an animal.
When does PTSD happen?
In the face of trauma, your three brains lose the way they are wired and coupled to each other. That feeling of being lost (especially when they return home without a mission, a squadron or an activity that creates and lives off the adrenaline they have become accustomed to during war) causes them to feel at a lost. Being used to being tightly coupled their brains will spontaneously recouple around a new mission. But this time the new mission is to avoid re-traumatization at all costs and that is the world in which someone with PTSD now lives.
Addendum: I did not serve in Vietnam, but two of my high school classmates are on the Vietnam War Memorial wall; my children did not serve in the current conflicts, but my friend Jane Bright’s son, Sgt. Evan Ashcraft and she started the Evan Ashcraft Foundation after he was killed.
I believe sacrificing oneself to protect others you have never met is the highest virtue in human beings. Our young men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan — as well as all the other veterans who have served in past wars — deserve much better than to fall between the cracks of all the organizations that try as they might are not doing the job and are falling further behind the challenge. Helping our young men and women successfully return to civilian life is the war after the war and if we do not do that better, it will in the end claim more lives than the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.
To address the challenge of transitioning the military to civilian life I along with Lt. General Marty Steele (USMC retired) am organizing a group of “can do, will do, failure is not an option” decision makers from the military and government to meet as part of Big Task Weekend in Los Angeles that will take place September 30 – October 2, 2010. Big Task Weekend brings together top decision makers from a variety of companies, organization and NGO’s to learn the process of “collaborative action” by actually taking on and solving “big tasks” that affect national and corporate well being. This year’s big tasks will include: The Future of Education, The Future of Corporate Learning, America’s Health and Wellness, Health Care Reform, Financial Literacy, Military Transition to Civilian Life.
The measure of a civilization is how it treats those who have hurt it, and those who are hurting in it.
Me: What? You have a hospital names after you. You’ve created an industry and thousands of jobs.
Patient: I have all the admiration, love and respect that money can buy and that’s all it’s worth. I’m not really close to anyone… not my wife, not my ex’s, not my children from three marriages and not my friends. I always played it close to the chest and never let anyone in and now I’m paying the price. Maybe, just maybe, I out-smarted myself.
Getting to know people like the patient above can teach you a lot about life and what a good life means. Granted there are many people unlike my patient above who are able to feel fulfilled by great accomplishments that benefited others even if it was at the cost of feeling close to anyone. However there are many who like my patient feel a sense of emptiness even after a life of great accomplishment.
Something that I have noticed in a number of those in the second category suffer from what I call the “Syndrome of Disavowed Yearning.” Read the rest of this entry »
The measure of true independence
is how self-reliant, resourceful and coachable you are.
I work with many successful CEO’s, executives, senior managers to become even more successful. Something they have in common and in spades are self-reliance, resourcefulness and coachability. Read the rest of this entry »
They just turned age 18, what will your child look like?
Many parents may disagree on how to raise their children, but few would disagree that Child A below entering college or the work force has a much better chance for a good life than Child B. Read the rest of this entry »
Especially in a time where the “know-it-all’s” seem to have outsmarted themselves, it seems truer than ever that “people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” And that is especially true in sales.
You can have self-confidence without having self-esteem.
Self-confidence is believing in your ability to do something;
self-esteem is believing in your worthiness as a person.
More and more frequently I run into people who know they are intelligent, but don’t believe it; know they are attractive, but don’t believe it; know they are successful, but don’t believe it; know they are good people, but don’t believe it and/or know they are worthwhile and don’t believe it. Read the rest of this entry »
By your words and more importantly your actions, you taught, guided and inspired me to have:
- the WISDOM to know the right thing to do
- the INTEGRITY to do it
- the CHARACTER to stand up to those who don’t
- the COURAGE to stop those who won’t.
You not only made me want to be a better son (or daughter), “You made me want to be a better man (or woman)” and that as the movie says is, As Good as It Gets.
I love you and I’m proud to be your son (daughter).
What do you wish your parents had told you as a child?
What difference would it have made to your life and how you feel about yourself?
I have been having wonderful conversations with Phyllis Hendry, CEO of Lead Like Jesus, the Ministry founded by Ken Blanchard and Phil Hodges. Recently she told me of an exercise that they use to help people get in touch with and come from their hearts, before they start coming from their heads.
In this exercise you ask people: “What do you wish your parents had told you as a child? What difference would it have made to your life and how you feel about yourself?”
I recently asked that to a client who was raised in the not so unusual setting of one parent who was overly critical and one who was overly emotional.
He paused for a good chunk of time and responded: “What I wanted to hear is different than what I needed to hear.”
I asked him to explain. And he did…
“What I wanted to hear more of was ‘It will be okay,’ when I messed up or was upset about something and ‘That’s terrific, you’re great!’ when I did something well. That would have helped me feel protected and certainly would have been better than feeling put down which happened a lot.
But what I needed to hear was, ‘I see that you’re upset about something, tell me what happened (said with compassion),’ or ‘Wow, I see that you’re really excited about something, tell me what happened (said with enthusiasm). By having my feelings seen and validated and by being able to tell the entire story of what led to my feeling that way and then have my parent talk with me about it, I would have learned to be competent.
I think the reason I have low self-esteem is not that they didn’t say great and reassuring things to me, but that they didn’t care enough to take the time to listen to me.”*
Caring comes not from what you say to your child, but what you enable them to say to you that’s weighing on their minds, hearts and souls and and then how you hear them out so that instead of their feeling dismissed and not worth your time, they feel understood, feel felt, feel less alone and feel worthy.
* I can’t think of a better story to emphasize how important listening is. It’s another reason I am so glad that I wrote “Just Listen” and am so pleased that it is being translated into Chinese (this month), Russian, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Turkish, Vietnamese.
From the early reports, I think others are more upset about the Gore separation than they are. Why? Because we’re all looking for people as role models and marriages as models for how something healthy can last. And when we discover that people and marriages turn out to have feet of clay, we feel let down.
“When you fall in love in your 20s, you’re swept away by all the passion. However you often don’t know who it is you’re going to grow up to be. And if the two of you grow up to be people who are merely different and simply not compatible as a married couple, it makes no sense to make the other person wrong and destroy what was once good.”
This was told to me by a very wise woman who discovered this with her first husband. He agreed and not only did they amicably divorce they have remained very good friends and successful business partners. And because of the cooperation, mutual respect and not making each other wrong, their child has thrived much more than kids from many conflict ravaged, intact marriages.
I also think that possibly in the case of the Gores ambition can become a very jealous mistress. When both partners have a taste of professional efficacy and success, it is often difficult to keep their personal relationship strong, because each partner is busy relating to fulfilling their professional aspirations. At that point each person begins dancing to and even racing towards a different drum. That may be the case with the Gores in which Al and Tipper have each enjoyed separate successes and may be feeling closer to those supporting those successes than to each other (we will of course be severely disappointed if we discover that one of those supporting either of them has crossed over into an affair since the last thing we want to think of the Gores is that they have descended into the sordid ranks of John Edward/Rielle Hunter).
Ironically it may be that what has kept the Clintons together is that they have been so supportive of each other’s professional ambition and success that their personal/emotional relationship has lost its importance to either of them.
Another contributing factor might be that the identities of men and women have spread out to women being much more driven to achieve professional success than in prior generations. In the past the man’s “mastery” in the world didn’t conflict with the woman being the “master” at home. In a sense the man was the CEO in the world, the woman was CEO in the home. With this division of labor a wife could support her husband’s role in the world just as a husband could support his wife’s role at home with minimal conflict. But now with women wanting to have their own role in the world, you have two CEO’s trying to work together at home. And just as co-CEO’s rarely survive in the work world, it may be that they are not surviving at home.
One way to not only survive but thrive in a marriage in which each of you grow into different personalities is if you share core values to which your commitment is much more powerful than your personality incompatibility. If for instance your love, devotion and commitment to God or family in your actions vs. words is much more important than getting your way, there is more than enough room to live happily ever after regardless of who each of you grow up to be.
If you and your partner are in danger of drifting apart, one great preventive strategy is to formally schedule a time every month to sit down with each other and each share what is going on in each other’s personal and professional life and in their marriage and family and where each would like it to go in all those areas and how to each can help the other.
1. When people are sending email, their brains, bodies, and minds are all keyed to interaction not with a person but with a machine, because what they have in front of them is a machine. Thus, they easily say or do things that they would not normally do with a person, including firing off thoughts with thinking. You can yell at a machine without fear of consequences and you can treat a machine unthoughtfully without fear of consequences.
2. The speed of the technology creates a false sense of urgency. People feel that they have to act and react with the same speed of the technology. Thus, instead of taking time to think about a reply (as they would with a letter), they just dash something off as quickly as possible.
3. Closely linked to #2 is anxiety generated by not responding quickly. As emails come in to one’s inbox, there is a definite sense of relief (probably linked to brain chemistry) connected with disposing of emails: one has responded in the conversation. Thus, hitting the send button is connected with experiencing relief, again, a stimulus for getting them out as quickly as possible.
Rx: to prevent premature emailulation:
1. First email it to yourself without sending it to the intended party. That’s because you gotta send it somewhere (according to everything Ken McLeod laid out above).
2. My friend and business partner, Bill Liao, then suggests that upon receiving the email from yourself ask yourself, “What is the intended outcome that I wish when the recipient receives this email?”
3. Bill then advised you to ask yourself, “Do I really believe that this email will move the recipient towards the intended outcome that I desire? If so, what is my evidence for that? If not, what could I do differently to achieve that outcome?”
