Inflammation

Last week I got inflamed. I was angry about an injustice in my community and the fury was all consuming. A useful coaching question about nearly anything is: What did I learn? What did I learn from being inflamed about injustice?

The first thing I learned was to notice the signs of my anger. My right eyelid was twitching like crazy—a sure sign of stress for me. My neck was uncomfortably tight, my shoulders ached, and I had serious butterflies in my stomach. The symptoms involving the neck and jaw are physical signs of anger. The stomach/solar plexus reactions indicate fear. I actually felt like Vesuvius just about to spew. That’s not a pleasant feeling and far from healthy.

The next step was to articulate what was inflaming me. We had a family dinner in the midst of all the drama and as I was ranting about the situation to my daughter. My mother-in-law asked, “Just what are you so angry about?” What a great question! I took a few deep breaths and focused on the angry feeling, and soon I could clearly articulate what was inflaming me.

I’m mad at _____ because he/she is doing ____. This affects me in the following way ____.

Unfortunately, it took me a few more days to do anything about the volcano action! Eventually, I thought to ask myself: What can I do to change things? Just feeling angry wasn’t accomplishing anything but making me miserable.

I was reminded of this wonderful quote from Gandhi: Be the change you want to see in the world. In this case, the change I wanted to see was that people would cooperate with each other for the greater good of all. Taking that advice to heart, I realized that I needed to understand and cooperate with people rather than sitting around being furious and not taking action.

There’s another appropriate adage here: The only person I can change is me. Since I can’t change the person who inflamed me, my next step was to understand the dilemma from her point of view. What does she want, and why? Once I know that, I can respond rather than react. I can think about it, write about it, and talk to others about it, which widens the sphere of influence so that many people can brainstorm rather than gossip.

Can I change the course of action? Maybe I can’t, especially if the source of my discontent is outside of my sphere of influence, such as in Washington. In such cases, I feel like an ineffective scarecrow, flapping in the wind while the crows continue to eat the corn. But that’s another article for a different day.

 In this case, however, I can have some influence over the course of action. I can use my responsibility (the ability to respond) in a creative and collaborative process that honors everyone. Next, I asked:

What can I do?

Once this became a collaborative effort, I asked:

What can you do?

From that perspective we can come up with some plans which, through trial and error, can eventually support everyone involved. I feel physical and psychic relief already!

© 2007, Jacqueline Hale

This entry was posted on April 12, 2007 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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