RESET Your Buttons
A Guide to Better Relationships at Work and at Home
by
MARY ELIZABETH MURPHY
Copyright © 2009 by Mary Elizabeth Murphy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.
ISBN 978-1-4490-0624-2
This book is dedicated to my parents John Patrick and Elsie Murphy, my husband Gary Erdakos, my brother Michael Patrick Murphy and my sister Kathleen Mary Gulch for all their love, commitment, support and willingness to learn alongside of me while I continue to "RESET my buttons."
RAVE REVIEWS FOR RESET
YOUR BUTTONS
“RESET Your Buttons carries importance to the business owner and executive looking to get back to basics in today’s economy, speaking to the human nature of the individual. Mary Elizabeth’s writing style is also functional for everyone, regardless of their background in personal and group dynamics. Caveat: Much like Cliff Notes, if you don’t hire S.T.A.R. Resources, you are missing the beauty of the literature!”
Bob Abeel, Regional Manager – Noteworthy
“I was anxious to go out and buy this book after reviewing the first few pages. I immediately wanted to send it to my children who are now in the adult world of relationships, both personal and in the work world and say ‘see, it’s OK not to know how to do everything perfectly; not to know what to expect; not to know exactly how to be ready; it’s really OK NOT TO KNOW!!!’ As Mary Elizabeth points out, we have never experienced the next moments of our lives before----so how can we possibly know how to live them?? Mary Elizabeth reminds us that our reactions to situations at home, at work and other social arenas are all
based on our core values and how we respond to challenges to those values. The goal is to be a self-directed person, not an “other directed” person; the goal is to be someone who sets, or re-sets our own buttons – taking away the power of others to ‘push our buttons.’ We can learn to be a person who says ‘I choose to’ rather than a person who says ‘I have to.’ This book is a ‘how to’ for all of us to learn how to be the kind of person we want to be and know we can be…and have the tools to be. We just have to do some work to get there!”
Jay Polzien, VP of Marketing – Artwear Embroidery, Inc.
“I really liked reading RESET Your Buttons... it was as if Mary Elizabeth Murphy was having a personal conversation with me. It was a lot of fun! I jotted down
some terrific ideas I picked up while reading it. Great job!”
Keith Ayers, President - Integro Leadership Institute
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One: Recognition
Chapter Two: Expectations
Chapter Three: Sense of Self
Chapter Four: Emphasize Core Values
Chapter Five: Take Stock
Chapter Six: DISARM
Afterword
Prologue
One of the worst things we can do to ourselves and our self–esteem is to utter the words, “Somehow I should know.”
Much of my youth was spent listening to my mother’s sage advice and wisdom. She used to say things like “Why do you let them push your buttons? You need more self-esteem.”
She would say it so often that it got to the point that I began to wonder if self-esteem was a product I could find in the canned goods aisle at my local grocery; peas, beans, corn, self-esteem, beets, pickles…
If only it were that easy! Over the years I have given a good deal of thought and contemplation to my mother’s advice, and I wondered what letting someone “push my buttons” has to do with my self-esteem levels. One day while driving down the road and listening to a tape by one of the leading authorities on self-esteem, I heard him say something that really stuck with me. I’ll paraphrase here, but the core and heart of the matter was his contention that one of the worst things we can do to ourselves and our self–esteem is to utter the words, “Somehow I should know.”
I pulled the car over. It was as though the skies opened up and manna from heaven was falling upon me. How often do we walk through a day thinking that thought? After all, as adults who have spent a certain amount of years on this planet, shouldn’t we know? Shouldn’t we know the right decisions to make, without having to be told? Our parents, teachers, ministers, and all other manner of authority figures taught us that, once we reached adulthood, we should just know. We should know the right decisions to make; what to say and what not to say; what to wear and what not to wear; how to discipline and reward children, coworkers, spouses; and generally what to do at every second of every day.
The truth is – and it may be tough to accept in this world of ours – that you don’t know everything. Every time you tell yourself “Somehow I should know,” you are doing yourself the worst kind of harm. You are belittling and impugning your own ability as a human being to function by supporting this impossible belief with your thinking, feelings and actions. You thereby diminish and destroy your self-esteem.
Please tell me if when you were born you were given life’s manual. You know, it’s the book you believe everyone else received. It spells out for you step by step every move you should make for every moment of your life. It explains in complete detail how you should prepare for adversity and how to handle it when it happens. It tells you how to raise perfect children and how to care for elderly parents. It even gives you a flow chart on how to best deal with that difficult boss who didn’t tell you that his wife just left him and his children won’t speak to him and he is waiting for his doctor to give him the results of his latest colonoscopy, opting instead to tell you what a terrible job you did on that project last week. You know the one: everyone else who looked at it regards it as the best work you’ve ever submitted. In fact it’s the best work that anyone in the history of the company has ever submitted – but you laid awake last night because “somehow you should know” how to please your boss. Somehow you should know how you could have possibly done it any better.
That’s ridiculous. It is absolutely nonsensical to believe that “somehow you should know” how to successfully manage one hundred percent of your life one hundred percent of the time. Instead, you should ask yourself, By whose standards am I measuring my success? The standards that live in your head because other people put them there? The standards that you strive to achieve when by golly they forgot to give you the book that everyone else received when they were born? The standards handed down by your parents, your preacher, your teacher, and all the rest of your life’s overlords? It makes no sense to me that we continually do this evil thing to ourselves. I say it needs to stop now!
That is why I am writing a book on buttons – your buttons. I want us all to know how to recognize them and how to reset them. It’s these buttons getting pushed everyday that cause our self-esteem to go spiraling out of control. Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, refers to it as the “amygdala hijacking.” It’s when you actually have a chemical reaction in your brain that causes you to “see red” or even black out in extreme cases.
Some people refer to button pushing as Taking It Personally. You’ve heard it asked and may even have asked it yourself: Why do you take things so personally? I have something to tell you. You are a person. These things that you are Taking Personally are being said about you or about someone you love or about a project in which you invested yourself. You are personally involved, and it is only human to take them personally.
It is absolutely nonsensical to believe that “somehow you should know” how to successfully manage one hundred percent of your life one hundred percent of the time. Instead, you should ask yourself, By whose standards am I measuring my success?
My goal is to teach you how to recognize when your buttons get pushed and to learn how to reset those buttons. I won’t promise that the buttons aren’t going to get pushed; that’s life and life happens. We are expected to handle it. What may be keeping you from handling it well is the fact that you allow the old rule – Somehow you should know – to govern your reaction.
The first step in correcting this reaction is to question the rule. The very next time you hear those words in your head, stop and ask yourself why. Why should you know the correct answer, the appropriate response, the absolute right thing to do every single time? Why should you know, when you have never experienced the very next moment of your life before. How can you possibly know what to expect from that unknown moment or how to deal with it?
Can you remember when you bought your first house, met your best friend, saw your child for the first time? In remembering all of those first moments, ask yourself if there was any way you could possibly have known exactly what to do or how to react. Time changes everything; each individual moment changes what you know and the experience from which you draw the appropriate reaction. Even now, as you read this, you are taking in new information, changing your frame of reference and therefore changing you.
My mother taught me a great many things. I’m sure that yours did, too. We are all taught a great many lessons by those people older and wiser than ourselves. Many, if not most of these lessons are good ones, but there are some that we must unlearn if we hope to be emotionally healthy.
One of the lessons I have been trying to un-teach myself lately is that old axiom, “Somehow, you should know.” I have been trying to reset my own buttons. In the following pages, I hope you will find a method of resetting that will work for you. Not everyone resets in the exact same way; what works for me won’t work for you three-quarters of the time. Each individual personality reacts in a different way. My hope is that by using my RESET model, you will be able to find yourself in this book, and in turn be able to find a suitable way to reset. So if you’re ready, let’s go!
Chapter One: Recognition
Chapter One: Recognition
Most people simply don’t know why they’re burned out. All they know is that they no longer want to do what they do …
We as working people often have major problems with motivation, productivity and the ever-popular diagnosis of burnout. When asked why we’ve hit a slump in workplace output or have displayed a somewhat negative attitude, our first – and most of the time, honest – answer is, “I don’t know.”
This not knowing can sometimes be a source of desperation for those of us in high-pressure, high-expectation positions. Most people simply don’t know why they’re burned out. All they know is that they no longer want to do what they do for a living. But think about this:
One Monday you get in the car to go to work and it’s a little harder to get the car up to speed than usual. On Tuesday you smell something burning, and by Wednesday the engine is burnt out. An entire tank of gas is gone when it usually takes you a week of city driving before you need to fill up. Something must be wrong with the car, so you take it to a mechanic, who is also baffled. Weeks go by, and because you don’t have a car, you’re not getting anywhere. Neither you nor your mechanic noticed that the emergency brake handle is pulled, and that you have been driving with it on for a week now.
The solution to the problem above should have been simple, shouldn’t it? And yet the driver I just described will soon be on the hunt for a new car, even though her old one probably would be fixable upon diagnosis. What is the problem here? Our driver wasn’t able to look for a cause – however simple – for her car’s poor performance. She could not recognize that something which could cause her automobile to burn itself out had occurred, and failing to recognize that caused her car to burn out.
This scenario can easily be applied to what any driven person goes through in the workplace. No matter how strong-willed, how optimistic and positive, or how motivated you are, there are times when outside influences cause you difficulty and rob you of your enthusiasm for your work. Somebody or something has pushed your buttons, and you must reset. However, it does no good for you to learn how to reset your buttons if you do not recognize two things: first, that a button has indeed been pushed and second, what outside factor has pushed it.
It is a volcanic effect: the build-up of pressure eventually causes an eruption of red-hot lava and you lash out …
In this chapter we’ll examine the R in RESET: Recognition.
The Volcanic Effect
A button getting pushed doesn’t have to be a major monumental event. In fact, quite often that first button is pushed during a rather mundane occurrence or exchange. That little tiny mundane occurrence – because it really is so very insignificant, isn’t it? – gets pushed aside, as does the next little tiny occurrence, and the next, and the next, until there’s no room to put those button-pushers anymore. It is a volcanic effect: the build-up of pressure eventually causes an eruption of red-hot lava and you lash out – often at the very same type of little tiny mundane occurrence you had originally pushed aside.
So let’s look at our volcano of internal reactions.
Physical Reaction
The lowest or bottom section of the volcano is also the largest. That’s because, as humans, we can internalize a great deal of outside stimuli and ignore those things which push our buttons. The key to recognizing those small stimuli at this stage of our internal volcano is through our minute physical reactions.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “Well, that really got his hackles up!”? Pet owners reading this recognize when their cat or dog feels threatened, because the skin and hair around their shoulders and the back of their necks – their hackles – raise and the fur puffs out. This physical reaction is mainly a visual effect; it is naturally designed to make the animal look bigger and more threatening, in order to frighten off whatever animal is threatening it.
But in humans that reaction occurs physically, as well. When somebody says or does something that really pushes a button with us, our shoulder and neck muscles tighten. Chiropractors and massage therapists speak of “storing stress”; that is, we store stress in our necks, shoulders, upper backs and pectoral muscles. We tighten those muscles up the tiniest bit when a button gets pushed, but we don’t release. The next time a button gets pushed, we tighten those muscles up even more. We don’t release. Before long, we can’t get comfortable, can’t relax, lose sleep, and experience headaches.
Another physical reaction which occurs is also animalistic in nature. When a button gets
It’s not as if we go from 100 beats per minute to 225 in the space of a second; mid-level executives would arrive in the hospital with cardiac arrests at the rate of five per minute.
pushed, our heart rate elevates. Fight-or-flight kicks in, and our hearts literally beat faster than normal in anticipation of some conflict or in preparation for an escape. As with muscle tightening, this happens gradually and incrementally. It’s not as if we go from 100 beats per minute to 225 in the space of a second; mid-level executives would arrive in the hospital with cardiac arrests at the rate of five per minute. But your heart does begin to work harder and your adrenaline does release, making you more edgy, more prone to overreact to outside stimuli, especially unfavorable stimuli.
Confusion
The next section in our volcano of internal reactions is Confusion.
Quite often in the workplace, we are confronted with situations that confuse us because our personal value systems don’t include activities we witness or attitudes we experience.
A business colleague once told me a story about change that helps to illustrate what I mean by confusion. I’m not talking about change in the sense of changing your route to work, or the kind of car you drive, I’m talking about pocket change. Paul was in a meeting with several coworkers, and at the end of that meeting one of them asked him for three dollars for the bus. Not having any ones in his wallet, Paul simply gave the coworker five dollars. The two of them left their office building and went their separate ways. Over his shoulder Paul saw his coworker approached by a person begging for change. To his disbelief, he overheard the coworker say, “No, I don’t have any extra money.”
The mathematics of the situation imply that Paul’s coworker did indeed have extra money; he needed three dollars for the bus and received five, giving him an extra two dollars, out of which a quarter or two would probably not be missed. This was Paul’s thinking, anyway. Incensed, he approached his coworker and asked him very pointedly about his refusal to give the beggar some change. His response? “It’s my money.”
Paul tried to point out the fact that it was, in fact, his money all too recently. He didn’t understand his coworker’s set of values regarding possession, ownership and charity. What his coworker had done confused Paul, because it didn’t jibe with Paul’s worldview.
Quite often in the workplace, we are confronted with situations that confuse us because our personal value systems don’t include activities we witness or attitudes we experience. This confusion pushes our buttons; it causes us to question our surroundings and, if the answers to our questions are not satisfactory, can trigger frustration and anger which block out sensible thought and judgment.
The other major form of confusion we find in the workplace is what I call the persecution confusion.
Persecution confusion can be summed up most easily with the phrase, “Why are they doing this to me?” It is the feeling of being singled out, the feeling of helplessness and powerlessness, and the lack of understanding as to why you are being treated so poorly. That feeling of persecution, of helplessness can be just as powerful and just as vision-clogging as frustration and rage. “Why should I even do my work,” you might think, “if everybody else is just going to undermine it?”
We often hear the phrase “deer-in-the-headlights” used to describe a person who has been caught off guard. Deer, opossums and other nocturnal animals see oncoming headlights and the brightness and directness of the beams both frightens and confuses them. Although logic might tell you to get out of the way of an oncoming mass much larger than yourself, instinct takes over in instances of fright and confusion. Instinct tells any animal – humans included – that movement is dangerous. Predators notice movement. Instinct tells animals to remain still so that the predator will not attack.
This happens in pushed-button situations that involve value confusion and persecution confusion as well. It is only natural when this confusion button gets pushed that you should think, “I don’t know what to do. I’m confused and this situation isn’t making sense to me. I’ll just stay still.” In this case, instinct may be natural, but it can also be deadly. Let’s not forget what happens to the deer or the opossum that gets “caught in the headlights”: eventually the car hits them.
Overwhelm
So these first two levels of the volcano have been activated. You have your initial physical reaction before you even realize that a button has been pushed. That subconscious reaction happens first, and then the realization of your confusion occurs. A button has been pushed! And we all know what happens when we actually realize that we have been wronged: our emotions kick in, and “amygdala hijackings” occur.
You are not alone, and you don’t have to be a robot to get through it. You are allowed to feel.
There is no shortage of feelings that can rush through us all at once when a button gets pushed. Our behavioral styles determine our reactions, but at one point or another we have all felt the following emotions:
Anger
Annoyance
Confusion
Concern
Disappointment
Discouragement
Distress
Fright
Frustration
Helplessness
Hopelessness
Impatience
Irritation
Loneliness
Nervousness
Overwhelm
Puzzlement
Reluctance
Sadness
Discomfort
Wow! That’s certainly a long list of emotions! And believe it or not, when a button gets pushed and you get to that third level of the volcano, the likelihood is that you’ll feel more, not less of those emotions in turn or, worse, all at once. The inevitable result of buttons being pushed – and feeling annoyance, nervousness, anger and fear all at once – is the only ‘O’ on our list: Overwhelm.
Failure to recognize that buttons are being pushed can cause confusion, emotions and physical reactions all to pile up. Your mind, body and heart are all going in so many directions that they can’t even cooperate with themselves, let alone with each other. Believe it or not, everyone feels like this. You are not alone, and you don’t have to be a robot to get through it. You are allowed to feel.