Did something ever happen to you that made you so angry you felt like blowing up like an overblown balloon?
Yes? Okay, think back to that situation, and imagine what it was like.
Now stop. Pause for a second, and imagine James Bond was in your place, in that situation. After you shake off the giggles from imagining James Bond working a cubicle job and getting shouted at by his boss for completing a project late (or a similar ridiculous situation for good ole 007), notice how James Bond acts in the situation.
He stays calm and cool, huh? He might whip out his gun, shoot the whole office, set a bomb there, and drive off on a rocket-propelled skateboard as the building explodes in the background, but he stays cool.
The point is, it isn’t the situation that made you mad. Your own reaction to the situtation is what made you mad.
Really. All your emotions are going on inside your body. The external events are going on outside your body. For them to make you feel anything, you need to filter it through your perceptions. That’s where the negative emotions come from.
Keeping your treasure intact
Imagine you are the lord of a castle, and your self-esteem (the sum of all your positive emotions), is a treasure inside your castle walls.
Every person or situation that tries to make you feel negative are bandits trying to steal your treasure.
Now, if you routinely get angry and annoyed, that means you’re letting the bandits in right through the front door. You leave the moat down, the gates wide open, and invite the bandits to come right in and steal all your hard-earned treasure.
Keeping your cool is like closing the gates and not letting the bandits in. Instead, you always first look who’s coming through. If they’re merchants, offering a win/win deal, you let them through. If they’re bandits, you keep the gates closed, and tell them to bugger off.
Now, if you’ve been in the habit of letting bandits just squander your valuable self-esteem, you might find that just saying no doesn’t always go smoothly. You manage to turn off some bandits, and then you suddenly a group that busted right into your treasury, and is running off with sacks full of loot.
You send out your advisors, and find out you’ve left your castle without repairs for a long while, and there’s a hole in the outer wall. So you patch up the hole, and go rest in peace… only to get woken up early next morning by warning bells, because another group of bandits got in through another hole in the wall.
This might seem like a lot of effort, but at least you’re not letting the bandits run in right through the front door. And although it might take you a while to patch up the holes in your vast castle walls, once you patch up a hole, the bandits won’t get in through the same place again.
Slowly, you learn to keep your self-esteem intact, and stay cool in more and more situations.
One more thing. What do you do when you’re low on treasure, and want to get some more?
The easy solution would be to send out an army to steal someone else’s treasure, and bring it back. But that’s exactly what the bandits do.
When you do that, you will temporarily have more treasure. But you will soon squander it, and have to send out an army yet again to get more. You’ll always rely on stealing treasure from others to keep your treasure levels reasonably high.
That’s exactly what emotional vampires do. They let bandits rampage through their castle, and then they go steal other people’s treasure when their treasure levels are low. They constantly need new people to steal treasure from, which is why they feel clingy and needy.
Instead, the real solution is to set up durable trade and commerce. By working on what’s going on inside your castle walls, rather than outside, you will find a natural way to replenish your treasure where everybody benefits. Win/win.
So remember:
- keep your treasure safe (only you can let the bandits in)
- don’t stoop down to stealing other people’s treasure, it will only leave you feeling worse in the long run. Set up durable win/win trade with them instead
- James Bond wouldn’t get angry, so why should you
Have a cool day!
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s nice timing. This Christmas, I won’t be able to avoid spending some time around an emotional vampire. In fact I’ve recently come to suspect that he has Narcissistic Personality Disorder. (If that sounds paranoid, consider that 1-3% of the population has NPD, and they each have quiet a lot of family, neighbours and co-workers. That’s a lot of people rubbing shoulders with an narcissist.)
I’m getting better at not rising to the bait, but thinking of James Bond will definitely help. Thanks.
@Sheila:
Funny thing, I just recently found out I won’t be spending Christmas with an emotional vampire of my own. Merry Christmas indeed!
Hmm, and you just got me thinking…
Sheila is sitting at a dinner table. The emotional vampire starts annoying everyone again.
“Calm down, calm down, what would James Bond do?” she thinks.
Sheila takes out a time bomb, places it under the dinner table and sets the timer to 20 seconds. Then she dives out of the window into a conveniently placed helicopter, and flies off into the sunset, as the building explodes behind her.
Yeah, there’s unfortunate limitations to “What would James Bond do” thinking :p
So to translate it to a practical level, what would poor Ms. 007 do?
Great post as always, BTW
@Gabrielle:
What would James Bond do? He would say “Why, yes, you’re absolutely right my dear!”
(Actually I’m pretty sure he would work some pun into that sentence. But I spent 5 minutes racking my brain, and came up with nothing. Then again, I don’t have a full team of writers to create dialogue for me
)
On a related note, I went to the post office early in the morning a few weeks back. Just as they were opening. So I got in the queue, got my ordering ticket and guess what, I was the 7th customer! So my ticket read in big numbers:
007
I keep it pinned on my noticeboard at home
Maybe I’ll put a bomb under him at new year.
I’ve noticed that most statistics tell you something like 2-3 percent for EVERY disorder, and if you take into account how many there are, then either everyone has something or a small group of people have everything (or some mild combination of super-freaks and mildly retarded people).
Lol, just my holiday thoughts.
Bai =D
@Sheila:
Report back on how that works out
@Anon:
Good point. Those damn low percentages of life coaches, bloggers, linux users, esperanto speakers,…
Wait, damn. I think that supports your second hypothesis. Does that mean I also have cancer, will get attacked by a polar bear, and will get hit by a lightning?
This reminds me of when i was younger, I would always throw grand temper-tantrums. My Dad would then sit me down and ask me,
“Do you like feeling like this?”
This always made me angry because I couldn’t answer yes and mean it (and keep it up!), but admitting no would be admitting that my current behaviour was unreasonable.
Since those days though, there is very little that ruffles my feathers and I’m very grateful to my Dad for teaching me to reason through my emotions. =)
Excellent post =). WWJBD?! lol.
@Mo:
That’s a great story!
Even though you probably didn’t answer your dad (because that would be admitting you’re wrong), he did make you realize internally that your behavior didn’t make much sense. And seems like it’s worked out really well for you
WWJBD ftw!
Awesome post, man. The castle-bandits metaphor resonates, and gives me another way to understand my tendencies (and one easily remembered – a call to action!). Thanks!