What happens when your nervous system concludes before you do
One of the harder things to accept is that your response to a situation is sometimes less than exemplary.
Cathy had one of those mornings.
It was only 9:30 a.m., which felt unfair. If your day is going to unravel, it should at least have the courtesy to wait until after lunch.
A colleague had raised an issue about her work in front of several senior people. Worse, some of what he shared had come from conversations Cathy believed were private.
She tried to explain herself. Her voice quivered at first, then rose as she spoke. Her boss frowned. Someone at the other end of the table seemed to smirk. Another colleague raised an eyebrow. There are moments when an eyebrow is simply an eyebrow. This wasn’t one of them, at least not to Cathy.
She saw judgment. Betrayal. Disappointment. Perhaps even the beginning of the end. She defended herself, but she also acknowledged where she had gone wrong and agreed to rectify it. If you had been sitting in the room, you might have thought she handled herself reasonably well.
Cathy didn’t. By the time she reached her cubicle, the meeting had started again. Only now she was replaying it alone. She reconsidered every sentence. Reconstructed facial expressions. Produced several excellent responses that would have been tremendously useful about twenty minutes earlier. The raised eyebrow received additional analysis.
The meeting was over. Her body hadn’t left it. Then her boss sent a message.
We need to talk.
Four words. No explanation. The meeting would be in two hours. Apparently, two hours is plenty of time to lose your job several times.
The Story Arrives Quickly
Cathy considered updating her CV. She thought about the LinkedIn contacts she hadn’t spoken to in months and wondered whether they might suddenly remember how close they were. Then she checked her bank balance. Two months. Maybe three if she stopped being so generous to family and friends.
Her inbox was open, but work had become strangely difficult. One moment she wanted to disappear. The next she was furious. Her team had chosen this particular morning to miss a deadline, and suddenly their shortcomings seemed considerably more offensive than they had yesterday.
She wanted to call her best friend. Unfortunately, they weren’t speaking so much for seeking connection.
During Session 8 of The Clarity Room™, we explored a simple way of looking at moments like this:
Trigger → Body → Emotion → Protection → Story → Regulation → Choice.
It isn’t a neurological pathway. It’s simply a useful way of slowing down something that normally happens very quickly. Something had happened to Cathy. Her body reacted. Emotion followed. Several protective impulses appeared.
And then her mind started explaining everything. I’ve become increasingly interested in that part. We don’t respond only to what happens. We respond to what we believe what happened means.
“We need to talk” could mean a disciplinary conversation. It could mean a new project. It could mean the boss wants to discuss next year’s budget.
Cathy didn’t know.
Her body, however, seemed unwilling to wait for the minutes of the meeting.
Old Lessons Turn Up at Work
There was something else sitting in that cubicle with Cathy that morning: history. Her parents had separated after twenty years of marriage. Her relationship with her mother was difficult. Boundaries were even harder.
As she grew up, her mother had been controlling and deeply suspicious of people. One message had survived particularly well: You cannot depend on people.
Her father was different. Reliable. Present. School fees were paid. Teenage requests were somehow accommodated. But he was quiet emotionally. Cathy knew he loved her; she rarely knew what was going on inside him.
It would be convenient to draw a straight line from childhood to that morning and announce that we have solved Cathy.
Human beings are rarely that cooperative.
Repeated experiences can shape what we expect, but childhood isn’t destiny. Stress matters. Sleep matters. Temperament matters. Current relationships matter. And sometimes the person irritating you isn’t triggering an ancient wound. Sometimes they are simply irritating.
Still, when Cathy’s colleague shared something Cathy thought had been said in confidence, an old question resurfaced:
Can people really be trusted?
She didn’t consciously summon it.
It was just there.
What Is This Trying to Do?
We have a habit of turning our reactions into descriptions of who we are.
I’m defensive. I’m avoidant. I’m a people pleaser.
I’ve started wondering whether a better question is: What is this behavior trying to do for me?
In Session 8 at the Clarity Room, we explored fight, flight, freeze, appease, withdraw, connect and orient as a practical coaching vocabulary for describing how people respond under pressure. They aren’t seven separate nervous-system circuits, and I wouldn’t pretend they are. They’re useful because they move us away from What’s wrong with me? towards What might be happening here?
Cathy had already moved through several circuits before lunch. She defended herself in the meeting. Afterwards, she wanted to escape. At points she couldn’t find the words she wanted. Then she wanted to call someone she trusted. None of these responses, on its own, told us who Cathy was. They told us something about that moment. And moments change.
The Body Knows Something
One of Cathy’s team members called with an update. The project they had been working on had produced results ten per cent better than the previous quarter. For a few minutes, Cathy forgot about herself.
She congratulated her colleague, asked a few questions and offered some guidance. When the call ended, she noticed she felt better. Nothing had changed. The 11:30 meeting was still on. She still didn’t know why she had been summoned. But something in her had shifted.
This is one reason I find body awareness useful. Emotion isn’t just an idea floating around somewhere behind the forehead. We notice changes in breathing, temperature, muscle tension, heartbeat, stomach, jaw, throat, hands. But the body presents another problem. It gives us signals without attaching explanatory notes.
A racing heart can mean fear. It can also mean excitement, exertion, too much coffee or taking the stairs because the lift was taking too long.
Sensation is data. It isn’t a diagnosis.
The body knows something is happening. The harder question is: What? Cathy was about to find out.
“Have I Done Something Wrong?”
At 11:30 she walked into the meeting room. Her boss was there. Two other people were waiting. One was from HR.
Wonderful!
Her chest tightened. Her heart raced, and she nearly caught the side of a chair as she sat down. Sunlight was coming through the window. She noticed it, took a slower breath, and waited.
Her boss began. “You must be wondering why we’ve called you here.” Cathy nodded. Speaking felt unnecessarily risky. “We’ve been looking at your work over the last few months,” said a man she didn’t recognize.
Immediately: Who is this man? Why has he been looking at my work?
Then he smiled. “Sorry, let me introduce myself. I’m Richard. I represent the global logistics team.” Something shifted. Not relief exactly. Curiosity. Eventually Cathy couldn’t stand it. “Have I done something wrong?”
The room went quiet. They looked at one another. Then somebody laughed. “Wait,” her boss said. “You thought you were here because you’d done something wrong?”
“Yes! Quite thoroughly, actually.”
Her boss began talking about her work: the risks she had identified, the problems she had solved, the relationships she had built. He spoke about her willingness to take responsibility. Richard mentioned the numbers.
Then came the sentence Cathy hadn’t prepared for. “Cathy, we’d like to offer you a new role.” Three levels above her current position. Eventually, around one hundred people would report through her. Her heart started racing again. Same heart. Different meeting.
What Her Colleagues Had Seen
That morning captures something I think we misunderstand about emotional regulation. It isn’t about being calm all the time. I don’t know anyone who has achieved that, and I’m not entirely sure I’d want to have lunch with them.
Nor is regulation about never becoming angry, frightened, embarrassed or overwhelmed. Emotion is part of the equipment. What matters is what happens next.
Over the previous year, Cathy had become better at noticing herself. Not dramatically. There was no morning when she woke up emotionally regulated and remained that way thereafter.
She just started catching things earlier.
She noticed what happened in her body when someone challenged her. She became better at naming what she was feeling rather than acting on it immediately. Sometimes she caught herself constructing a story and asked whether she actually had enough evidence for it.
She had also spent time addressing her tendency to please people and get everything right. Her colleagues knew none of this. They saw the consequences.
They saw someone who listened better. Someone who could receive difficult feedback and stay in the conversation. Someone who took responsibility without taking on responsibility for everything.
Her team experienced something else: room. Room to think. Room to make smaller mistakes. Room to tell her when something wasn’t working.
People began trusting her more.
The interesting thing is that what Cathy experienced privately as learning to regulate herself was being experienced publicly as leadership.
Meeting the Emotion Earlier
The Emotional Regulation Ladder™ we used in session 8 begins with automatic reaction and moves through noticing the emotion, noticing the body, naming what’s happening, regulating, investigating the interpretation and eventually choosing what to do.
On paper, it looks wonderfully tidy. Human beings are not. Nobody moves elegantly through seven stages while someone is insulting them in a meeting. Progress is usually more ordinary.
Last year, perhaps you noticed your anger after shouting. Later, you noticed it while shouting. Then one day you caught it just before. Eventually, someone says something irritating, and you feel your jaw tighten.
Ah.
There you are. You haven’t defeated anger. You’ve met it earlier. And earlier gives you options. You might speak. Ask a question. Wait. Leave the room. Set a boundary. Come back tomorrow. Sometimes the most regulated response available to you is a very clear no.
The Meeting We Have With Ourselves
Cathy walked into that second meeting convinced she knew what was happening. She didn’t. I suspect most of us have had a smaller version of her morning. Someone leaves your WhatsApp message on read. A partner becomes quiet. A friend says, “It’s fine,” in a tone suggesting that absolutely nothing is fine.
The boss asks whether you have a minute.
Your body notices something. Then, almost without permission, you begin writing the rest of the story. I’ve become less interested in whether we react and more in what happens after we do.
An argument that once ruined your weekend may eventually cost you an afternoon. Later, perhaps an hour. You notice it sooner. You recover sooner. Maybe you apologize sooner, too.
That counts.
The aim isn’t to defeat our protective responses. Much of the time, they’re trying to help us navigate a complicated world. Sometimes they read the situation beautifully. Sometimes they see an eyebrow and write an entire performance review.
Cathy’s body arrived at that second meeting before the evidence did. By the end, the racing heart she had interpreted as fear was racing for an entirely different reason.
Same body. Different story.
Perhaps that’s worth remembering the next time your mind becomes very certain, very quickly, about what someone else’s silence, expression or a four-word message means. Your body deserves a place in the conversation. It just doesn’t always deserve the final word.
If this message stirred something in you, don’t let it fade.
1. Join my LinkedIn Habit Coaching Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/habits-with-coach-edwin-7399067976420966400/
2. Join my Habit WhatsApp Community at https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbAmKkOBvvsWOuBx5g3L
3. Join The Clarity Room at https://chat.whatsapp.com/HzoEAcKBM4lDHtzDnl6IL8
4. Ready to level up your life? Join my 12-Month Personal Transformation Program and let’s intentionally build the next version of you — with clarity, discipline, and momentum. Call or WhatsApp me directly at +254 724 328059, and let’s begin.
Comments
Post a Comment