How can we be calm from a guy in his 30s?
Before we come to understand how we can induce calmness, we must know how it feels.
When was the last time you had a feeling where things were running smoothly. Everything you were doing just happened with grace. You spoke to people and accomplished tasks with grace.
What do conversations opposite to calm sound like? They can be worse than a world war.
What do tasks look like when your world is in chaos?
A story:
I remember a time when my day started out really stressful. I was getting ready for an interview. As I stood before the mirror, I started laying down a beard of shaving cream all over my face to get rid of a real beard. I put the blade against my face and I started shaving. I got the bottom of my face, but as I came up, it became tough. My blade just digs in. I dont know what happened because I have done this a million times. After a minute or two, I realized the crazy state of mind I was in. My face was actually stiff because I was stressed out.
In this same state of mind, I have damaged other things too.
Do you agree after reading this how important it is to be calm?
Now comes the real meat of the topic.
You have to understand that its a mindset. You must want to be calm with all the life difficulties. You can't be between two modes. Its either you want to do it or not.
In relaxation therapy, there is a technique called cue-controlled relaxation, which can be found in "The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook" by Martha Davis et al. In the next second, I will lay out the steps to accomplish this relaxation.
1. You want to keep your arms on your lap and feet on the ground while you exhale your worries out. You want empty your lungs and relieve your ab and chest muscles.
2. You want to relieve your whole body from top to bottom in 30 seconds using the release-only technique.
3. Breath deeply in and out while gaining the feeling of relaxation. In this step, you will feel peaceful.
4. You want to do this out loud. Say " Breath-in" and then breath in deeply. Say "Relax" before you breath out. You want to do this five times.
5. You want to do step 4, but you want to repeat the words in your head. Also, close your eyes.
6. Repeat step 4.
7 Continue Step 6 and breath in with peace and breath out worries.
8. You can do all the steps again after 10-15 mins.
You want to attach Cue-controlled relaxation to words. This process is called anchoring. Joseph O' Connor and John Seymour discuss this in their book: " Introducing NLP: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People".
Here are the following steps for that. With anchoring ,you are able to induce an emotional resource in this case calmness after you remember how you saw , how you heard and how you felt in the moment.
1. Identify situation at hand as chaotic.
2. Find out the resource you want. In this case, you want state of calmness.
3. You want to make sure if calmness is really needed in this situation. You want to ask yourself a question. If I could have calmness here, would I accept it?
If the answer is yes, you want to move to step 4.
If no, then you need some other resource besides calmness.( eg. cleverness)
4. You want to pull memories of times when you have used calmness. You can pull out memories when you do cue-controlled relaxation above.
5. Select anchors or sense words, something you see, hear, and feel. ( eg. I saw, heard and felt calm in the past)
6. You want to recall the calm point in the past and break your attention from this moment.
7. You want to re-experience the calm past and connect the anchors. You want to connect the experience to the anchor.
8. The fun begins when you can accomplish this. You want to use the anchors.
When you use the anchors, does it bring you into that state of calmness in the previous 2 steps?
If yes, move forward
If no, then you want to go back to reconnect the anchors.
9. At this point , you are ready to use anchoring. The only thing is you want to make a signal that reminds you would need to use this resource. (eg. In my case, I use my uncalm body as a signal.)
You want to transfer this feeling when your mind is in mental randomness. If you want to be in a relaxed state of mind you want to throw out the tension. There will be a thing that will piss you off but be angry for a second and for some time.
If you don't have time to take a break, be calm and think that the other person is not understanding something. Explain to them later.
