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LectureSlides-Week5-RejectionandFear.pptxDay 5: Negotiating Fear & Rejection
BA 411: Financial Planning I
Stephen Summers
Where Does Fear Come From?
External sources?
Internal sources?
Three Major Sources of Fear and Stress
Other people
Sharks
Clowns
What’s Happening When I Face Rejection?
This is a prime spot where your body takes over from your mind.
Stress reactions occur
That’s not necessarily a bad thing!
What’s Happening When I Face Rejection?
What’s the Sympathetic Response? What triggers it?
Eyes dilate, heartrate increases, lungs dilate, sweating increases
What kinds of challenges is our Sympathetic Nervous System built to handle?
What kinds do we usually face on the job?
Sympathetic Response
Fight-or-Flight response inhibits impulse control
Amygdala fires a warning shot
Prefrontal cortex is affected
Less of a rational response
More about fear and escape
Prefrontal Cortex:
Working memory
Amygdala:
Fear learning
What’s the Nature of Stress?
Stress is a behavioral, psychological, and physiological response to events that exceed one’s ability to deal with in a healthy way.
How do we know we’re stressed?
Stress Appraisal: Connecting feelings to thoughts more objectively. Richard Lazarus’s two-part coping process:
Primary Appraisals: decide whether stimulus is stressful/harmful, benign, irrelevant
Secondary Appraisals: test response options and decide on a coping behavior
Cognitive appraisals can help make future decisions, too
How Do We Cope with Stress?
Types of coping:
Emotion-focused coping: trying to prevent an emotional response to a stressor; usually passive: numbing pain, eating, drinking, skipping school/work, etc.; not permanent solutions
Problem-focused coping: using direct steps to solve a problem; finding alternatives, testing possibilities, making active choices; usually works with moderate stressors
Which of these is going to be most important during your job search? Or within your workplace?
Is Stress Bad for You?
Not necessarily! It depends on how you view it!
Eustress: the stress of positive events
Distress: the stress of negative stimuli
Major Life Stressors/Disasters: changes that strain the central pillars of people’s lives; choices we make and those others make (having children, divorce, floods, death, etc.)
Daily Hassles/Personal Stress: Annoyances; individually not very stressful, but in total they can stress as much as major issues; (they include driving, dealing with others, lines, etc.)
Physiology of Stress and Fear Responses
Hypothalmic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis (stress brain hypothalamus pituitary adrenal glands cortisol)
General Adaptation Syndrome (Hans Selye), 3 stages:
1. Alarm, reaction phase
2. Resistance (coping) phase
3. Exhaustion—returning to homeostasis
Acute vs. Chronic Stress
Chronic associated with bad health outcomes
2.
1.
3.
How Do You Motivate Yourself Against Fear?
Motivation: Variables that activate, direct, or sustain behavior
Factors Affecting Motivation: Biological/Psychological/Social
Instinct: behaviors done without prior experience/training
Arousal: physiological activation/raised autonomic responses
Drives: (negative feedback systems) psychological states encouraging behaviors that satisfy needs (e.g. fear/panic)
Needs: position of biological/social deficiency: homeostasis (Walter Cannon) has been upset, so needs create arousal, motivating behavior (e.g. the need to breathe when holding one’s breath)
Theories of Motivation
Drive Reduction Theory: (Clark Hull) linked to Learning—drives increase in proportion to need (greater hunger=greater food need), and push us further to satisfy the need. Behaviors that reduce the drive become reinforced (eating at random, at first). Behavior thereafter depends on drive and habits formed.
Incentive Theory: external goals/objects motivate behavior (money, grades); rewards are common incentives; associating positive rewards with behavior leads to habits. Subliminal cues.
Food (Need)
Hunger (Drive)
Eating (Behavior)
Homeostasis
Theories of Motivation
Cognitive Theories: Goal-Setting Theory: drive to reach an end-goal state; ideal goals are SMART (specific, measureable, accurate, realistic, timely), and of moderate difficulty
Need-Based Theories: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: [1.] Self-actualization as aspirational: all dreams attained, etc. Beneath this level is esteem, then belonging/love, safety, and at the base is physiological survival. Achieving the top level is the ultimate drive.
Arousal and Performance: Yerkes-Dodson Law: [2.] performance increases with arousal levels to optimal point, then decreases with additional arousal
Self-actualization
Basic survival
Biological and Sociocultural Motivators
Intrinsic/Extrinsic motivation:
Intrinsic motivators (value/pleasure for its own sake)
Extrinsic motivators (payment, reward, reduction of a drive)
Self-determination (Mark Lepper’s research: children colored for fun until paid)
Goals and Delayed Gratification: Walter Mischel’s marshmallows
The Need to Belong: need for interpersonal attachments is innate and motivates us adaptively; need for friends
Eating is motivated by time, tastes, familiarity, culture
Substance addiction: biological drive vs. cultural beliefs
The “OK Plateau”
If we feel that our motivation, external stresses, and coping mechanisms are constantly battling, what happens?
We become less and less likely to do anything that puts us out of our comfort zones
The OK Plateau is a conception of this: once we’ve worked hard enough to get good enough, we quit
The “OK Plateau”
The OK Plateau represents that point where you’ve gotten good enough and the motivation to push onward is gone. You go from the…
Cognitive stage (having to focus on every detail) to the…
Associative stage (improving with less concentration) to the…
Autonomous stage (running on autopilot, less conscious effort)
The “OK Plateau”
Maybe you get B grades on your papers, and you’re motivated to work for an A. Once you start getting A grades, you can ease up.
Or you’ve worked at a company for 5 years. You’ve reached the top of your pay grade and your responsibilities have leveled off. What happens now?
The “OK Plateau”
When you find yourself at the OK Plateau, you’ve really got two options:
Stay safe, avoid stress, resist rejection, dig in your heels, and stay put for the rest of your life
Find ways to challenge yourself: risk rejection and move past fear, find opportunities, ask for
What Do I Do?
When you are looking for a job, or looking at a job offer, it’s easy to know your motivations
At the same time, you have to be careful not to let fear of loss or rejection cause you to negotiate poorly, or to accept a subpar offer.
How do you prepare yourself to take on challenging environments and conversations, especially when the motivation is murkier?
One way to do it, is to prepare your long-term, willpower-driven brain to take over from your stressed-out, fearful brain
A Brain on Willpower
Fight-or-flight stress reactions can turn into Segerstrom’s thoughtful “pause-and-plan” responses, with some effort, planning, and practice
A brain on willpower will get the same warning signals as your stressed-out self, but it also engages the prefrontal cortex to help make better long-term decisions
Physiologically, this biological signature will counteract the sympathetic response
The result of this preparation is lifted paralysis, and the ability to think
This Is Your Brain on Willpower
Good news: You have a willpower “reserve,” that survives the ups and downs of stress
But over-stress, constant stress, depletes the reserve, leaving you stuck in the sympathetic stress state
Research shows that this willpower reserve is linked to and measured by heart rate variability
How Do You Rebuild Willpower?
Heart rate variability is the willpower reserve
Which means you can exercise and develop it like a muscle! It’s improved by:
Eating nutritious food
Breathing clean air
Avoiding chronic stress/illness
Meditation/spirituality/religion
Better sleep
Good friends and family
Try It! Breathe In Some Self-Control
To increase your heartrate variability and build up willpower reserves, give this a try:
Slow your breathing down to 4-6 breaths per minute (10-15 seconds per in-and-out cycle)
Do this for a few minutes
How Do You Keep Your Mind In Control?
Slow breathing is one willpower prescription for stressful situations
Another “willpower miracle” is exercise
Exercise offers immediate benefits to self-control and confidence!
Exercise helps us resist temptations
Exercise reduces stress and works as an antidepressant
Exercise improves heart rate variability
Exercise helps grow your brain
How Do You Keep Your Mind In Control?
Dixon and PE classes
You’ve already paid for a membership—
Time to start using it?
Walk, run, bike, hike, play hide-and-seek
5 minutes of “green exercise” outdoors lowers stress, raises mood, focus, and self-control. Go play in the park!
Ask Yourself: Where Is Your OK Plateau?
Am I okay being stressed all the time, constantly looking for coping mechanisms to avoid facing challenges and frustrations?
Am I okay feeling like this point in my life is the furthest I’m ever going to get, as far as my career and goals are concerned?
Am I okay taking calculated risks, and seeing where they take me?
References for Reference
Psychological Science, Michael Gazzaniga
The Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal
Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer
Public Domain Illustrations courtesy: http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/furniss/ge.html
