Minimizing Workplace Drama in the New Year

While skiing at Alta Ski Area, Shasheen Shah found himself caught in a small avalanche caused by a skier-released snowslide that funneled through the chute he had just skied. “I never saw it coming. It launched over the rockface and landed on me like wet concrete. Within seconds, it felt like I was buried alive and then swept me down the slope. I was disoriented. I didn’t know which way was up or down. I didn’t have light and I couldn’t breathe. Panic.”

In his new book, “The Kid and the King: The Hidden Inner Struggle High Achievers Must Conquer to Reignite and Reengage with Life,” Shah compares this real-life physical experience with how we feel when we experience an emotional avalanche. “The amygdala gets hijacked and the kid takes over,” he writes. “The goal here is to develop the presence of mind and become an observer during the real-time event as the king so that you can take appropriate action that’s consistent with a desired outcome rather than doing something that would move you closer to danger.”

In the case of the avalanche on a mountain in Utah, Shah was able to move past the panic to a calmer place where he could figure out that he was on his side and could pop his head out of the snow in the right direction to find oxygen.

As CEO of Coherent Strategies Consulting and Coaching, Shah helps high achievers reach business and personal goals by helping them through the emotional mastery process. He maintains that we all have this duality with the kid and the king inside us. The goal of developing emotional mastery, he says, is to acknowledge both personalities, understand how they’ve helped us arrive at our current level of success and then use tools to move ourselves to a better quality of life, professionally and personally.

He says when we, associates or employees become “triggered,” our kid takes over, which can wreak havoc on the situation, get in the way of productivity and resourcefulness and cause us to lose sight of our intended outcome. He offers the acronym OCEAN, which breaks down any situation into five key components to guide us through steps when confronted with a situation that makes us want to react out of emotion.

O is for Observation. “What we want to actually address is what were the facts,” he says. Report the facts of the triggering incident without adding adjectives or opinions. “Note who was there and what was said, but don’t get hung up on interpretations. Often this step alone diffuses the intensity of the situation.”

C is for Conclusion. “There are a ton of factors that condition our experience and we often jump to conclusions.” Shah suggests that we take a moment to understand how much of our own experiences and opinions get mixed in with the conclusions we reach.

E is for Emotion. “What feeling resulted from your conclusion? If I concluded somebody was being reckless and disrespectful to me when he cut me off in traffic, I might feel anger.”

A is for Action. “If I’m a road rager, I might get really aggressive and take on actions that probably were not connected to an outcome that I had for the day.”

N is for the Net Result. “Did that action move me closer to, or further away from, my intended outcome? Most people don’t go through life with outcomes in mind. We wake up and have expectations and the moment we come across someone who may have a different idea, we might become triggered.”

Shah suggests we go through these OCEAN steps the moment we recognize we are having an intense emotional response to cut down the time we spend on negative emotions, learn to see reactions coming, let them pass like a wave and visualize possible responses that would lead to a desired outcome. An effective exercise he uses as an executive coach is to suggest the client imagine a powerful personality, either real or fictitious, that he or she respects, and then consider how that person would handle the situation.

“I wrote the book to end the confusion by organizing myself into two distinct identities, the kid and the king, and rather than trying to fight with this part of me, rather than try to squash this kid, I’ve actually gotten to know that part of me so well that I can anticipate the times and the circumstances, the kinds of people, the tonalities, the conversations, the topics that are going to bring that little kid right to forefront and want to start barking like a dog or running away or feeling insecure, or whatever it might be. And that is the goal, to just allow this space for part of that to come in, meet it where it is, look at it and just kind of move on and just think about what that king would do.”

To hear more from Shasheen Shah, visit Zonie Living: Business, Adventure and Leadership on StarWorldwideNetworks.com. “The Kid and the King: The Hidden Inner Struggle High Achievers Must Conquer to Reignite and Reengage with Life” is available in paperback and audiobook through Amazon. QCBN

By Bonnie Stevens, QCBN