by Tony Schwartz
Think for a moment of the last time you felt triggered — pushed into negative emotions by someone or something. Here, for example, are several of my triggers: feeling taken advantage of, not getting a response to an email I've sent to someone, and not being acknowledged for good work I've done.
Think for a moment of the last time you felt triggered — pushed into negative emotions by someone or something. Here, for example, are several of my triggers: feeling taken advantage of, not getting a response to an email I've sent to someone, and not being acknowledged for good work I've done.
We move into negative emotions — what we call the "Survival Zone" in our work at The Energy Project — when we feel a sense of threat or danger.But what is the threat exactly? Over the past decade, my colleagues and I have asked thousands of our clients to describe something that consistently triggers them and then explain why.
Remarkably, we've found that a trigger can almost always be traced to the same root cause: the feeling of being devalued or diminished by someone else's words or behavior. Consider my triggers above.
The struggle to feel valued is one of the most insidious and least acknowledged issues in organizations. Most employees are expected to check their feelings at the door when they get to work. But try as we might, we can't.
How we're feeling — and most especially whether or not we feel acknowledged and appreciated — influences our behavior, consumes our energy and affects our decisions all day long, whether we're aware of it or not.
Our core emotional need is to feel valued. Without a stable sense of value, we don't know who we are and we don't feel safe in the world.
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