I heard a story from an acquaintance of mine who told me about a friend of his, Cliff Klein, who encountered a burglar in his home. Their eyes met, and the intruder ran for the back door from whence he came.
Cliff called out to him, “Wait, don’t run — maybe I can help you!” The burglar stopped dead in his tracks and looked at Cliff. Cliff walked over to him and said, “Come in and have a cup of coffee with me, and tell me why you want to steal from me tonight.”
The man explained that his girlfriend had left him and he had lost his job. They spoke over their cups of coffee that Cliff had made for them. After a bit, and once the burglar had shared all he had to share, Cliff pulled out a $20 bill and said, “Come see me anytime you want to talk.” The burglar thanked Cliff and walked out-the front door.
This story could have ended with many different, terrible endings – we see everyday examples of this in the news. Cliff approached this man from a place of compassion rather than fear and changed the outcome dramatically.
While this is an extreme-but I guarantee you-a true example, what can this teach us?
Think back to the last time you were in the grocery store (especially over a holiday weekend like Easter) when someone unknowingly cut in front of you at the checkout counter. That’s right – angry!
Many psychologists agree that anger comes from feelings of underlying fear or threats to control. Let’s explore the alternative: what if you thought, Poor guy looks really harried; he probably just drove several hours to get here in the pouring rain and has a houseful of people waiting for him to get back with the groceries? Do you still feel angry? The story you tell yourself may or may not be true; it really doesn’t matter, because now you have changed your reality by changing what you thought about the situation.
So how do you do this in the heat of the moment? First, take a long, deep breath. Be aware of the anger in you and decide to throw it out of your mind or put it in “time out,” as I like to do. Take another breath and create a story that comes from love. The beauty of this technique is that you both end up feeling a lot better. The alternative is to either suppress your anger—only to release it to your unsuspecting spouse when you get home and you regurgitate the story-or, even worse, to verbally attack the guy. Either way, you are the big loser, because you end up feeling wronged and carry that negativity with you for who knows how long.
I was at the hairdresser recently. A woman sat down across from me in another seat and was pleasant enough. She was from the United States and shared that it had “mostly” been a good visit here in New Zealand. The hairdresser inquired further to find out what that meant. The woman shared that, while in Queenstown a couple of weeks back, she was walking down the street and approached a woman with a cute dog. She bent down to pet him and then remarked to its owner, a New Zealand woman, what a cute dog he was. The woman was not nice; she basically heard her accent, asked her where she was from, and upon confirming her suspicion that she was American, yelled at her and voiced her distaste for the current President.
The American visitor was stunned and felt incredibly wronged and angry, which we can all understand. However, this had been over two weeks ago, and the woman had been visiting all over New Zealand with, I’m sure, lots of incredibly happy experiences. But what was the one thing she shared? The one negative experience she had. Think how often she must have thought about it over the last two weeks and held onto that anger that she couldn’t help but share it at the local hairdresser-and who knows where else.
I know we are all human, but that gives us an upper hand. We can control our reality simply by controlling our mind. Awareness is key. If we can start to become conscious of the possibility of a different outcome, there is hope for a different reality. Fear is contagious, but so is love-which are you going to choose?
Hi everyone
I have been a resident on The Coromandel for four years. I love it and am thankful to my husband, a kiwi, for bringing us here, from Canada. I am also thankful for my career in sales, leadership, and consulting within the healthcare sector, and raising our two daughters.
As part of giving back to this special community, I have started a weekly column with The Informer that I hope will be encouraging and inspiring. This is my second “Inspiration Alley”. It reflects my being very much a person seeing life as “a glass half-full”
I look forward to sharing a different perspective each week. Please feel free to write to me your response or your own journey.
Email: ananda.laberge@gmail.com
Clarification
In my previous column, I described the amygdala, a structure in the brain often referred to as our “emotional centre,” as the prefrontal cortex. While these regions function in an interconnected fashion, they are two separate and distinct structures in the human brain. The peanut-sized amygdala is in the center of the brain and controls our “fight-or-flight” response. In contrast, the prefrontal cortex makes up a significant portion of the frontal lobe and is responsible for planning, reasoning, and emotional regulation.
