How Our Minds Work When We Are at Our Limits

By Guest Contributor Michael Stanford
Author of Leadership Transition, Michael Stanford, shares how our minds react when we are faced with challenging changes and transitions.

Leaders sometimes find themselves operating at the edge of their mastery over the chaos they face. If it is true that we are better able to shape the chaos outside of us once we have taken care of the chaos inside of us, it’s worthwhile for leaders to know how our minds operate when we are at the edge of our ability to cope. Here are six ways to think about our psychological reactions to when we are at our limit.

From generative to protective

Our mind’s first reflex when we are at our limits is to protect us. Our brains are designed to survive. Two categories of emotion serve the task of survival: positive emotion, which supports creativity and growth, and negative emotion, which protects us.

The threat of being at the edge of our ability to cope unleashes a host of negative emotions which are designed to help us deal with perceived danger: fight (anger, hate, rage), flight (fear, shame), freeze (pessimism, depression) and fawn (ingratiation, especially to the powerful). It’s normal to feel these emotions when we are at the edge. And it’s helpful to think of them as important survival responses that have served us well, generally, over the hundreds of thousands of years of our evolution. When we are at the edge, when we feel under threat, negative emotions rule.

Evolutionary programming

A second way to frame our psychological response to being at the edge is to remember that in the world of modern leadership, our threat management instincts show up in interesting and not always useful ways. Our minds are primitive organisms designed for survival in what has been, over the course of our evolution, an overwhelmingly threatening environment. They have not been designed to operate in the nuances of today’s world.

It’s helpful to pay attention to two instinctive threat responses that might show up in us when we are at the edge of our ability to cope.

First, we are designed to imagine threats that don’t exist. This is especially true once we start to feel overwhelmed and our threat response mechanisms overheat. We see threats even when they don’t exist simply because we are more likely to survive when we imagine that there’s a tiger hiding in the bush when there isn’t than to imagine there isn’t one when there is. When we are feeling overwhelmed, it’s useful to reflect on which of the threats we imagine we’re facing are worth the concern we’re giving them. This is easier said than done, since threat tends to shut down our ability to reflect in favour of our ability to act.

Second, you’ll notice that our protective instincts show up in ways that we might not be proud of or recognise in ourselves when we are operating under normal circumstances. The instinct to diminish others, to threaten, to act aggressively, to shrink away, or to undermine some of the people around us are all normal reflexes. They might not always be appropriate in today’s world or in modern leadership, but they have been useful instincts in our evolutionary past. So, if you notice that you’re acting in strange ways when you are at your limit, think of your unusual behaviours as your brain’s attempt to draw from our collective evolutionary history for solutions.

Reawakening of old anxieties

The first two points come from evolutionary psychology. Point three comes from existential psychology. The existentialists observe that we humans deal with four essential anxieties or fears – the fear of death, of isolation, of meaninglessness and of freedom/choice. They also observe that we can choose to face these fears head on, openly and honestly, or that we can hide behind comfortable but insufficient answers to our existential fears. Organisational life offers us all sorts of false answers to our existential fears. It can make us feel special, it can give us a sense of community, it can provide us with a sense of purpose, and it can provide us a solid structure that comfortably limits our choices. Our feeling of being up against the limit often happens when the false answers of organisational life become too obvious to ignore and our existential fears awaken. In these moments it’s useful to identify which anxieties might be at play, and to turn our attention to finding deeper answers to our fears.

Emerging shadows

A fourth way to think about our psychological responses when we feel at our limit is that it is in these difficult times that our shadows are most likely to show up. Think of your shadows as the dimensions of you that you like to hide or downplay because you believe they don’t fit well with your strategies for being conventionally successful. A shadow might be the rage we feel but don’t express when people in authority misbehave, or the suppressed envy we have for a colleague who captures the prized promotion, or the little bit of gossiping that helps us undermine a rival even though we don’t think of ourselves as gossipers. Our shadows are artifacts of our evolutionary history (see point 2), and like our anxieties, they are best dealt with honestly. Analytical psychology tells us that if we don’t ‘integrate’ our shadows – understand where they come from and what they are trying to achieve and let their voices be heard – they will show up in unhelpful ways. A useful way to handle our ‘at the edge’ experiences is to identify which of our shadows might be acting out, and to begin the process of integrating that aspect of ourselves into our conscious behaviour.

Failing narratives

Our mind operates from a rich tapestry of narratives that articulate what we believe about how the world works and how we should work in the world. These narratives are the focus of narrative psychology and the subject of our fifth point on how our minds operate when we feel we are edging up against our limits. Our narrative world is often unconscious. It leads us without our awareness. Some narratives seem hardwired into our mental operating systems and are so vital to how we operate that we will react violently when our experiences invalidate them. The narrative we hold about how the world should be fair to us, about how good things should happen to us if we are good people, about how we are worthy players on the stage of our lives are all shown by research to be critical to our psychological structures.

Think of your core narratives as any story you tell yourself, even without thinking, about what success is, about how the world operates (or should operate), about who you are and who you should be. When you feel that you are working at your limit, think as well about which of these narratives might be in danger of becoming invalid in the face of your experience. The invalidation of core narratives is a common source of the deep psychological stress we associate with being at the edge.

The reflex to reconstruct

The sixth and final way to think about our psychological reflex is that while we don’t always grow when we are pushed to our limits, edge experiences are often rich occasions for self-exploration and for profound changes in how we approach life. It isn’t easy to shift from protective emotion to growthful emotion, but if we can manage the pivot – if we can construct wiser narratives in the wake of those that have been destroyed – we might find that our time spent at the edge has enabled us to rethink what’s truly important to us, which values and beliefs matter most, which relationships are really worth nurturing, and which of our talents need to be developed and expressed. Limit experiences are testing experiences, and if we are intentional in our reflections about what they are telling us, we can become an even better version of ourselves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Stanford is the founder and Managing Director of Summit Leadership, a boutique leadership development organization which supports leaders and their organizations through significant change. He was the head of the Transformational Leadership Practice (EMEA) at Korn Ferry. Prior to that, he worked as a business leader and consultant in a leading business school. Michael resides in Switzerland.

How Our Minds Work When We Are at Our Limits with Michael Stanford

How Our Minds Work When We Are at Our Limits

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