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THE LAST WORD

December 2011/January2012 www.esb.ie/em

MAKING SENSE OF A CHANGING WORLD

Stress, anxiety, depression, feelings of helplessness and inadequacy – these maladies are all too familiar at the moment. Falling incomes, rising prices and taxes, uncertainty in relation to the future are just a few of the causes but there are many more. Indeed, the only real surprise at the moment is that the health services haven’t been overwhelmed by people suffering from stress related conditions. EM speaks to Loren Duffy who is an Associate at Advanced Organisation and is President of the Empowerment Code Institute.

Loren Duffy is an Irish psychologist who now spends much of his time working in the US. He believes there are some fairly simple things that we all can do to deal with these feelings and to cope with the changed circumstances in which we might find ourselves.

“Many people are struggling to cope with change at the moment,” he says. “And the difficulties they are facing are usually common to most other people. They include the economy, work, relationships and so on. But what we must remember is that stress is often a healthy response to a sick environment. The individual is not the problem; the problem is the ideas we are living with.”

If you are expecting psychobabble or new age remedies from Duffy you’ll be disappointed. His approach is extremely down to earth and grounded in commonsense. “The majority of people spend most of their waking lives at work so if we can help with their work situation we can benefit both them and their employer,” he notes. “And most people know more about their PC than themselves. They are not interested in their own basic fundamental psychology.”

“Many people are struggling to cope with change at the moment”, he says. “And the difficulties they are facing are usually common to most other people. They include the economy, work, relationships and so on. But what we must remember is that stress is often a healthy response to a sick environment. The individual is not the problem; the problem is the ideas we are living with.

Duffy usually works with groups of employees in client companies to help them gain a better insight into what makes them tick and has worked with some of the world’s leading companies on employee engagement strategies and programmes. “I don’t tell people what to think, it’s about how to think,” he explains. “I try to help people do what they are already doing but better. There are simple practical things that can be done if you have a better understanding of what’s happening. It’s less what’s happening than the response that makes the difference.”

Chief among those practical things is working with people’s confidence and control. Duffy helps people believe in their own ability to do something about what’s happening to them, that what they do will actually make a difference; empowerment in the true sense of the word.

When it comes to organisations he believes that there is such a thing as emotional contagion. “Depression is contagious just as enthusiasm is infectious,” he claims. “But positive thinking on its own doesn’t work. You can’t wish things away. You need the skills to deal with the issues as well as positive thinking. And these skills and tools can be taught to anyone, they are not for a special few.”

Among the tools he helps people acquire is the ability to rewrite their own story. “We all make sense of the world by telling a story about ourselves to ourselves”, he explains. “We tell ourselves why our lives are the way they are through these stories. They are authored subconsciously but we can affect them. We get people to take a look at their story and ask if it serves their best interests or merely reinforces comfortable misery which is often perceived to be less stressful than effortful joy.”

This is literally taking people out of their comfort zones. “The fear for people is not knowing what else they can do. If we can make them aware of their narrative we can help them rewrite the story and revise the genre from a tragedy to novel with a heroic ending.”

Another tool helps people with what he describes as the “fear response.” “Why is it that so few people give their best all the time?” he asks. “It’s because of fear. They are afraid they don’t have what it takes to do something or that they won’t be appreciated if they do or they just say that life sucks and there’s no point in doing it anyway – the ultimate existentialist copout.”

He tries to get people to see where they have been shortchanging themselves. He does this by getting them to look at the questions they put to themselves. “The brain is an indentured slave to the mind. Whatever questions you put, the brain is required to answer. If you ask questions like ‘why can’t I?’ or ‘why don’t I? you will always get a comfortable miserable answer. This deprives us of empowerment. Instead, we should be asking ourselves what we need to do to get what we want.”

By putting the questions in the positive self-negation is taken away. “The answer is often led by the question and sometimes we need to sit and ponder the seemingly unanswerable question for a while for the solution to come up.”

He is quick to point out that he is not trying to change people, just the way they see and think about things. “I am not there to change people. You can’t go to a square and ask it to be a circle. But you can transform a square into a cube. It’s alright to bitch and moan as long as you are aware of the possibilities to change things. Every cloud doesn’t have silver lining, what about a nuclear cloud? So we don’t try to say that everything is good or better than it seems. We try to put people in control of their own narrative so that they can make sense of the world. This is not a skill that can be learned in ten steps, it is acquired gradually over time and can help reduce the anxiety and stress that people can feel during times such as these.”