A Tool to Remain Neutral: The Landing Pad

When you learn how to remain neutral, you easily align with others and create win-win relationships. Practicing neutrality by remembering your strengths and positive behaviors will expand your horizons and enable you to discover more effective ways of dealing with potentially uncomfortable situations.

Imagine the following scenario:

You receive an email from one of your colleagues - let's say her name is Amanda. Her email is long and dramatic, detailing how she has had a rough weekend. Her father is in the hospital so she hasn't had much sleep and is behind on a project that you are both involved in. She's requesting that you take up some slack for her on the project. You've heard stories that she has a lot of drama in her life and that she has a tendency to pull others into her dramas, causing them to get lost in the overwhelming emotion. Instead of helping Amanda, her empathetic colleagues and friends mean well, but they end up getting pulled down by the emotions of her story. Because of the drama pattern she tends to fuel, no one gets much done and people around her are affected by her sense of overwhelm.

Think about what you should do in this scenario.

Can you be an empathetic, caring person but not get emotionally drained by Amanda's problems? Yes, you can! There are certain philosophies that teach us how to cope and process emotions by being a "neutral witness" to a situation. This is achieved by becoming and remaining neutral to potentially emotionally draining situations. Instead of getting personally involved you practice not getting emotional in the situation. This will help prevent the situation from sapping your emotional energy.

We will practice one of these neutrality tools now.

Visualization Exercise:

Imagine that you are reading the dramatic and emotional email from Amanda.

• What emotions come up for you? For example: sadness, stress, irritation.

• Give your emotions a color and/or a shape. For this example, pretend that they are fiery red fishing hooks that are shooting towards you, trying to pull you into the story.

• Instead of letting the hooks land on you, imagine that you have a landing pad in front of you, a neutral place for the emotional hooks to land. This will prevent you from internalizing the situation and becoming emotionally invested in it. You can empathize with Amanda and take the role of a colleague or friend who understands that we all experience good times and difficult ones.

• However, you can keep Amanda's situation and emotions external to you. In doing this, you are practicing neutrality; this will enable you to make clear, logical decisions about the best course of action for both you and Amanda.

Spend a few more moments imagining you are reading Amanda's email, and "watch" or sense the emotional hooks landing on the pad in front of you. Move the landing pad out so it is about a foot in front of you. Then after you've finished reading the email and you have all the drama and hooks on your landing pad, move the landing pad further away from you, into an empty place, and let it float away. Imagine that it disappears into thin air, or gets washed away to the sea, or some other image that helps you to clear it out of your mind and free up your mental space.

• Then imagine saying "hello" to Amanda wherever she is now. Take a few moments to imagine that you are talking to her and acknowledging that her situation must be quite difficult; say whatever else you want to communicate to her.

• Now imagine you say "goodbye" to her and say whatever you need to say so that you are able to let it go. You can use this process for any emotion-provoking situation that comes up in your life; it's especially useful for dealing with emails like this.

To help build and strengthen your neutrality skills, ask yourself the following questions.

1. Is it your responsibility to solve Amanda's problems?
2. Should this be your role?
3. What is one way you could be empathetic but neutral for Amanda? (Hint: the exercise above.)
4. What is best for you and what is best for Amanda?
5. If you tend to get very emotional in others' situations, why do you think that is?

Use the "landing-pad" imagery technique and these questions any time you feel you're in danger of internalizing someone else's problems.

This way you'll be able to empathize with situations like Amanda's, while remaining neutral enough to help support her in more useful ways that don't cause excessive drama.

http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Tool-to-Remain-Neutral:-The-Landing-Pad&id=9405293

5 Biases You Probably Have (Even If You Think You Don't)

... including why we favor more attractive people.

In cognitive psychology, there is a concept known as the "better-than-average" effect.

The basic idea of an "average" implies that 50% of people will be below average, and 50% will be above. However, when you ask people if they're below or above average when it comes to any particular skill (e.g., driving, singing), far more people will rate themselves as above average than the 50% that you might expect.

Even when we know about such cognitive biases, we often think of ourselves as being immune to them: Other people might fall into that trap, we think, but I'm too smart for that.

To optimize your thinking, let's examine those cognitive biases to which you believe you are immune. Here are 4 more: 

1. Treating more attractive people better. 

Attractive people tend to get evaluated more positively than less attractive people. If you're in a position to hire a new employee or choose a realtor or doctor, this is a good bias to be aware of. Also, since weight stigma remains very prevalent in our culture, it's useful to be aware if you're attributing any negative judgments to someone who is overweight—e.g., thinking they might be lazy. Another example might be the stereotype that someone who has tattoos might be unreliable. 

The same principle applies to treating people who are more similar to you more favorably. Even when we're aware that this general bias exists, we often don't notice when it plays out in our lives—e.g., in a class, you might find study groups organizing themselves by ethnicity or age, or in your neighborhood, you might have a friendlier relationship with neighbors who are more similar to you than those who are different.

2. Thinking bad things won't happen to you.

You might know the statistics on how many people will get cancer during their lifetime, yet still think that your personal chance of contracting it is much lower. The key is recognizing your "average" vulnerability—to the extent that it's useful and motivates positive behaviors, such as getting a pap smear, carrying appropriate health insurance, wearing a seat belt, and using sun protection. Outside of the health sphere, similar examples include taking basic precautions to secure your home or prevent your stuff getting stolen. 

3. Vulnerability to marketing and sales techniques. 

Most of us know about the common sales and marketing techniques used by brands and salespeople. For example, "upsells" that get us to pay more for unneeded extras; credit cards and loyalty programs that use rewards and bonus offers to get people to spend more than they usually would; free trials that you don't get around to cancelling; and, in stores, putting the most expensive brands at eye level.

Which types of offers do you participate in but kid yourself that you're not getting influenced by sales and marketing techniques? There may be some strategies that don't cause you to change your thinking or behavior, but you need to be able to recognize when you are being influenced. 

3. Our bias toward sticking to doing the same thing. 

The more familiar something is, the more we tend to prefer it. When do you fail to recognize that you like something mostly because you're familiar with it—e.g., wearing black every day just because you're used to it.

4. Seeing people we're in love with through rose-tinted glasses. 

When you're in a committed relationship, it's generally useful to see the best in your spouse or partner. It helps keep us happy in the relationship by convincing us that we made a good choice of partner, and it allows us to give our partner a break when they screw up—e.g., they do something stupid but we continue to see them as generally smart.

However, there can be times where we fail to recognize our partner's shortcomings when it would be useful to do so—e.g., you might allow them to talk you into something financially risky or unethical.  

At the dating stage, love and lust can blind us as well, to the extent that we make a poor choice when a new partner's negative qualities come to the surface—e.g., your partner is a superficially charming narcissist. When would it be useful to you to recognize that your partner does have a weakness in a particular area—e.g., when they overestimate their driving abilities and drive too quickly when your entire family is in the car.

www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-practice/201512/5-biases-you-probably-have-even-if-you-think-you-dont