Rudeness at work can lead to mistakes

Have a look at this article seen on Yahoo News:

 http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20100706/thl-rudeness-increases-mistakes-risk-d831572.html

Studies are indicating that our performance in various tasks is impaired if someone has been rude to us beforehand, even mildly rude. What’s more, even witnessing this rudeness to someone else can impair our performance!

Interesting.

The article goes on to say ‘ “This reaction is probably caused by the emotional arousal caused by the rudeness, which resulted in a switchover of cognitive capacity to deal with the required emotional processing, or it may, more simply, be caused by distraction,” Prof Flin said. ‘

This completely rings true. We have a saying that ‘Strong emotion makes us stupid’, and this is because once the emotional brain becomes aroused, the connections to the rational, cognitive part of our brain are obstructed. So how often, for example, do we go into an interview or exam and completely forget everything we know, and we know that we know!

Our minds are pattern matching machines. For some of us the act of walking into an exam or interview is matched to ‘danger’ by our emotional brain, initiating the ‘fight or flight’ response that we are all aware of, switching off our cognitive capacity.

So what can we do?

There are a couple of little tricks that can really help in these situations.

Firstly, did you know that just by going into peripheral vision, we can no longer panic? Try it! Pick a spot to look at on the wall. Remain looking at the spot and start to see how much more either side of the spot you can see, as your eyes de-focus.

Secondly, try a technique called 7/11 breathing. Breathe slowly and deeply from the diaphragm (which means keeping your shoulders and chest still, while your tummy goes in and out). Take a long breath in (for a count of 7), followed by an even longer breath out (for a count of 11), really drawing out that breath out. This causes a physiological response which, after just a few minutes, cannot help but relax you.

I hope you try these out.

For more information on how to get rid of these fears for good, you can email me on

cathy@cathysimmons.co.uk. Full contact details on http://www.cathysimmons.co.uk

This entry was posted on 07/07/2010 at 04:38 pm and is filed under Interesting Links, General Ramblings. 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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