Or let’s take a setting very far removed from the office: we’ve just arrived at the resort hotel for the vacation we’ve been dreaming of all year. But on the way we were flagged down and ticketed  for exceeding the speed limit. Or, we find that the room we reserved is not ready yet and we’re forced to wait, tired and hungry, in a crowded and drafty reception lounge for an hour and a half.

Now, let’s take out our imaginary “emotion meter” and take a reading of our mood or state of mind during the rest of the day at the office, or the first few days of our vacation.

Our boss’s momentary rudeness (or at least we perceived it as such) is in the past. He may even have apologized, or we may have realized that it was really our fault.  Or the minor discomfort we had to endure on the first day of our vacation didn’t last much longer than sixty minutes.  Great! So why are we making so many mistakes on the job, and why was our lazy day on the sun-drenched beach…well, yes, a lot of fun,  but…not quite as much fun as it was last year?

To be sure, our emotional state at any particular moment affects  our actions, present and immediate future, in so many different ways, and I mentioned some of them in my recent post on defining emotional intelligence. Yet unfortunately, that’s often not the end of the story.

It’s bad enough when some external stimulus, whatever it is, make us feel angry, or disappointed, or irritable, or extremely frustrated, and  so gives rise to a mood or state of mind that can last for several hours, days, or even weeks.

What’s worse is that our emotional state often doesn’t just remain at its initial level. It may escalate in intensity, without warning,  so quickly  that the person feels he is losing control (or sometimes he may not even feel it!). I have seen this referred to  very descriptively as “the spiral effect.” Perhaps an even more appropriate term would be the “one-thing-leads-to-another syndrome.”

Jack and Jill’s little tiff: how they erred

Let’s use our now famous (!!) imaginary couple, Jack and Jill,  to cite a simple and familiar example from everyday life.

After a business meeting had finished sooner than anticipated, Jack calls Jill mid afternoon to tell her that he will be arriving home earlier than usual. Of course, Jill is pleased, and asks him if she could save her a trip by stopping off at the neighborhood supermarket on the way to pick up a few things.  She rattles off the items she wants, and assures Jack that though she might not be at home when he comes,  she’ll be back soon.

Jack arrives home with the goods.  Jill isn’t back yet. He was pleased to help  because he figures Jill must be exhausted  after an especially busy day. Then he has a brainwave: why not help even more by cooking some supper?  So he takes some noodles and eggs and a few other small items from the bag he’s just brought and begins to cook up a dish he knows Jill is fond of.

The pot on the stove is almost ready when Jill walks in.  She ambles over to the stove, opens the pot nervously, and lets out a scream.  A real scream.

“Hey, Jack, have you gone out of your mind?  Are those the noodles you bought? I especially needed them for the meal I promised to take to my sick friend tomorrow. I wanted to use the leftovers from Sunday lunch for supper tonight…now I’ll just have to throw them out. And by the way, you bonehead, you now I always buy brown eggs, not white ones. Can’t you think for once in your life?”

Jack, who just two minutes ago was expecting to be showered with praise for his thoughtfulness,  is overtaken at first with with a numb feeling.   A rather bland, seemingly harmless, sensation.  But the numbness quickly turns to bewilderment, which in turn converts into anger.

And unfortunately, anger breeds more anger. Jack storms out of the kitchen, leaving a badly burned culinary creation to go up in smoke.  And a lovely young couple hardly speaking to each other for several days.

What should Jack have done – while his emotions were still reasonably under control?  First and foremost,  he should have kept reminding himself of his   original intention, what he had set out to achieve in the first place.  If making things easier for his wife was his first priority,  then by definition, that took precedence over a wounded pride or temporary feeling of disquiet!

He might have said: “Look Jill, I’m sorry, but let’s see what we can do; losing our cool won’t get us anywhere.  I’ll pop back to the store to get some more noodles, or maybe I can borrow from our neighbor. Perhaps we could…”

For Jill’s  part, some quick thinking  before Jack’s stormy exit would surely have helped.  “Jack,” she might have said,  “I know you only wanted to help me.  I’m sorry I lost my flap…I must be overtired, I guess. You know what – let’s put your concoction in the freezer…it  will actually be a big help not having to worry about tomorrow’s supper!  And you know, there are some dishes that taste better with white eggs, not brown…”

The problem is as we said: a strong negative emotion will most likely generate a still stronger negative emotion. If it happens to you, will you be able to take one step back and direct your rational side to take charge, before hell breaks lose and everything spirals out of control?

In an upcoming post,  we’ll discuss this kind of situation further.  We’ll analyze the sad case of a hitherto happy and close family that was nearly ripped apart by anger,  see  how the situation could easily have been prevented  and what can still be done to repair the damaged relationships.

Yes, this is a tale of tension between a woman and her son-in-law, who, by all accounts, is a good husband to her daughter. Of course, there are always two sides to every story, and we’re surely in no position to say of either party that he or she is entirely free of blame. To be sure, it can rarely be appropriate for an outsider to pass judgment in a dispute involving other parties.

But what we can say with conviction is that the mother-in-law of our little saga deserves our admiration and praise,, and we’ll see why.

Alice Alexander and her daughter, Tessa, had always been very close. Alice and her husband had been thrilled when Tessa found Jake, the young man of her dreams. After the wedding, the close relationship between mother and daughter continued. At the same time, Alice, by nature a person sensitive to the needs of others, tried to be careful to respect her daughter’s new status as a married woman, to give her husband the honor due to him, and not to say or do anything that might cause offence to either of them.

Imagine Alice’s shock when Jake and Tessa paid an unexpected visit one evening, and after the usual exchange of pleasantries, suddenly announced:

“Look Mom, there’s something that’s been bothering both Tessa and I for some time, and we decided together to come straight out and tell you: you’re coming to visit a little too much and it’s disturbing us. No doubt you mean well and want to help, but we can manage just fine on our own. Our request is this: please don’t ever visit our house again unless we ask you to come…”

Alice turned a deathly white and barely managed to glance at Tessa, who nodded meekly in assent but averted her eyes. Her mother wasn’t fooled. Clearly Tessa was not really in agreement with her husband’s biting comments and bizarre demand.

Turning to Jake, Alice said simply: “I really don’t understand. But I’ve always respected you and will respect your wishes now.”

From that point on, things were never quite the same in the Alexander family. Alice tried as best she could to adjust to the new reality. Mother and daughter remained in frequent contact, but with rare exceptions, only by telephone, and Alice would call only when Jake wasn’t likely to be at home.

One morning, a very anxious Tessa called her mother. She wasn’t feeling well at all, she explained, and especially since a baby was on the way, she didn’t want to take any chances. She knew Jake had a very important business meeting that day and he wouldn’t like to be disturbed. Would her mother have time to accompany her to the doctor?

Late that evening, the phone rang in the Alexander household. Jake was on the line.

“Mom, what’s the matter with you?” he ranted. “A guy’s wife gets sick, and her own husband isn’t entitled to know? What right have you to go with my wife to the doctor, leaving me completely in the dark? Whoever heard of such a crazy thing!”

Alice opened her mouth momentarily and was about to let loose with heaps of pent-up rage. But instead, she bit her lip. And kept quiet.

Things hardly got better when the baby finally arrived. Who asked Alice to give instructions to the nursing home staff? Why did she bring Tessa’s younger sisters to see the baby without clearing with the baby’s father first? How dare she do this, but why didn’t she do that? And she calls herself a mother! What is the world coming to!

Shortly after Tessa arrived home with her baby, Alice paid the two of them a visit – this time , without the required permit from you-know-who!

“Tell me,” asked Alice, ” and be honest with me. Does your husband ever talk to you the way he talks to me?”

“No, never” was the emphatic reply. “Mom, of course I’m sorry that we don’t see each other more often, but you can believe me, I’m happy…”

Alice knew her daughter well enough to understand she was telling the truth. And as far as Alice was concerned, that’s all she needed to know.

True, Jake’s relentless tongue-lashings had hurt her deeply, but her personal feelings were of no consequence. if Jake and Tessa’s relationship, the peace and harmony in the family, were at stake, she was happy to remain quiet. She wasn’t about to rock the boat if there was any chance it might be at the expense of that harmony. Nothing else really mattered.

Did Alice do the right thing? One could argue both ways. But although it took a long time, Jake ultimately came round to showing some remorse for his treatment of his devoted mother-in-law. He eventually apologized for humiliating her by his impulsive outbursts over the years, which, he explained, were only caused by his highly-strung temperament and acute concern for the welfare his beloved wife.

What can we learn from all this? Self-control and the exercise of restraint even in the face of extreme provocation is usually a sign of strength, not weakness. And a wise person is one pulls back from responding impulsively in any situation, but rather carefully weighs up the consequences of his or her actions.

“Sorry,” apologizes the gatekeeper, “your Daddy’s busy at a very important meeting right now, try later.” The kid does try later, in fact several times “later”, but on each occasion he gets a similar response.

But being, after all, the son of a highly successful executive, he’s not one to give up on a challenge so easily. Eventually, he manages to reach his father on his car phone, as he’s speeding along, already fifteen minutes late, to an urgent rendezvous with a business associate. As he drives, Dad is making all kinds of intricate calculations in his head in preparation for the meeting ahead.

“Oh, it’s you, Ricky,” exclaims an irritated and impatient father. “Don’t you know I’m busy? I’ll be home later….”

“Dad, I won’t keep you. Can I just ask a quick question? How much do you earn?”

“Oh, I don’t know…perhaps $120 an hour..”

“Thanks, Dad.” Click!

As a worn and weary executive walks in the door around 9 that evening, Ricky thrusts a little plastic bag into his hand. The bag contains a bunch of assorted notes and coins totaling about $30.

“This is the money I’ve been saving up, Dad. Can I buy 15 minutes of your time?”

In an earlier post, I discussed an interesting social paradox: as the economies of developed countries grow stronger, the income of the average citizen grows as well. But for the most part, people aren’t any happier than they were before. Why?

I elaborated on one economics professor’s very plausible theory, which is supported by some telling experiments by social psychologists. The real problem is that people are in the habit of comparing their lot with others. If I have a million but you have two million, I have to be feeling miserable. My million is almost worthless to me.

That’s a fine explanation as far as adults are concerned, but what about our children? Why are so many children in affluent countries so darn miserable?

Sue Palmer, a British consultant on early childhood education and author of the best selling “Toxic Childhood”,  cited in a feature in the Daily Mail last year a UNICEF report on “childhood well-being”  that found  that out of 21 nations across the developed world, British children are the unhappiest.

And of course, although the British may technically be winners of this contest that no one  would want to  win,  we have  no reason to believe  that  most other civilized  nations are very  far behind.

Palmer tries  to understand why this should be so.  “Our homes are crammed with labour-saving devices and electronic entertainment that previous generations couldn’t even dream of.  Surely our children should be growing happier every year?” she asks.

She  quotes a  damning survey by the National Consumer Council, which  revealed that children who watch too much television and spend hours on the internet are “greedy and unhappy…These children argue more with their families, have a lower opinion of their parents, and lower self-esteem than other children.”

That explains a little of course, but why are these kids sitting all day in front of the electronic media  in the  first  instance?

Palmer gets to the heart of the matter:  “After researching the state of modern childhood for over five years, I’m convinced that, as our country has grown richer and more “advanced”, we’ve lost sight of certain fundamental truths about child-rearing.

“We’ve come to believe that 21st century children are different from children in the past – that they can get by with less parental time and attention, skip stages in their development and cope with pressures and emotional burdens children shouldn’t have to cope with.

“The brutal truth is that they can’t. Life may have changed enormously over the past few decades, but the human brain evolves much more slowly – in fact, it hasn’t changed since Cro-Magnon times.

“All babies are born as little Stone Age babies, and it’s up to their parents – supported by their wider community – to help them towards maturity, gradually equipping them with the inner strength, skills and knowledge they need to live in a complex technological culture…”

Significantly, Palmer also stresses the  natural obligation of parents to help their children  get a  early start in the mastery of communication skills,  so crucial for successful  emotional and social development.

“As parents sing and talk to their babies, they awaken the language instinct wired deep in the human brain and provide the data through which children will learn to speak their mother tongue.

“But if adults don’t spend time with their children, communication skills won’t develop as they should – and, in a busy modern world, many parents aren’t available to play their part in this process.

“Many children now spend the majority of their day in institutional care.

“At home, babies often sit in front of an electronic babysitter and, as they grow older, there is that problem of older children having TVs in their rooms, which means that even when the family is in the same building, its members are splintered off from each other.

The more than ironic bottom line: in a world where there are more ways to communicate than ever before, parents communicate less and less with their own children!

We will be talking more about  some implications of these heartrending  facts and various issues arising from them in upcoming posts.

Ed is a highly competent and successful CEO, respected and admired by many in the business world. He has good manners and for the most part, is respectful of others. On the other hand, his modus operandi is characterized by that typical signature-tune of highly pressured, impatient executives: “Gimme the bottom line!”

“Leaders like Ed,” observes Dr. Goulston, “are superb problem-solvers when given the data,
and like data machines, they can’t stand it when people belabor points with irrelevant details and stories.”

So the writer tells Ed that he’s highly impressed with his fine character and all his abilities and accomplishments. On hearing this heartwarming praise, Ed already senses that there’s a “but” coming, and he asks Dr. Goulston what it is. His reply, apparently, was totally unexpected, and although Ed was somewhat puzzled by it, he did not dispute it:

“I wouldn’t want my sister to marry you!” Why? “Because she would die of loneliness.”

Dr Goulston explains: “What Ed failed to appreciate – as do many leaders who are goal driven to a fault – is that, especially at the end of the day, especially at home, the telling of the story is the data. The story itself is not all that matters. And for the data to compute in the right way to be satisfying (instead of frustrating) to the person talking, Ed and leaders like him need to provide unhurried and undivided attention.”

In other words, when busy, goal oriented, and- inevitably – intimacy-challenged business people and professionals like Ed and his ilk finally touch base with their spouses at the end of the day, “Get to the point” or “Spare me the details” just won’t cut it. In fact, a demand to “get to the point” is missing the point. Totally. No way to sustain an intimate relationship.

Dr Goulston quotes the eminent psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion who talks about the overriding need to “listen without memory or desire.” Listening with “memory” means you have an old agenda you’re trying to plug someone into; when you listen with “desire” you have a new agenda you’re trying to do the same thing with.

But in either case, these are your agendas not the other person’s. And the other party isn’t fooled for a second.

For more insight on this topic, read the gripping but sad tale of the mysterious Harold Burwell, everybody’s dream boss. Or check out my own contribution on the subject.

“Good”, for example, can mean “useful” or “functional” (That’s a good hammer), “exemplary” (She’s a good student), “pleasing” (This is good soup), “moral” (He is a good person), and probably other similar things.

If I say “I have a good daughter,” can you be sure what I mean exactly? Am I saying she has high ethical principles, or that she’s very popular, or that she’s in good shape physically, or perhaps something else?

Technically speaking, the kind of confusion I want to talk about is not correctly termed ambiguity, but vagueness. Only since most people tend to think of it as ambiguity, I’ll stick to that term. Let’s begin with a simple example.

“I’ll be a little late tonight,” Jack calls out to his wife, Jill, as he picks up his briefcase and heads out the door after breakfast. “Some clients are coming around for a quick meeting on their way home.”

On an average working day, Jack gets home around 6.15. On this night, he makes his appearance at precisely 8.08. Jill is furious; she needed Jack to attend to something important that could have been completed in less than two minutes, but could only be done before eight. Jack just can’t understand what the fuss is about. Didn’t he tell her in advance that he intended to be a little late?

But then, he didn’t mention a specific time frame, did he? To Jack, “a little late” meant one thing; to Jill it meant another.

People see things in different ways. A “carefree” attitude to one person may be “irresponsible” to another. What I call “relaxation”, you may call “laziness”. What’s a “convenience” to you, may be “life-sustaining to your spouse; he or she may call “extravagance” what you view as “essential spending”. The potential for conflict is obvious.

But even where ambiguity doesn’t lead to open conflict, there still can be plenty of room for misunderstanding, confusion and doubt. Consider this scenario:

A usually ravenous teenager sits down at the dinner table. His mother notices he is doing a good job on the potatoes and salad, but is barely touching the chicken.

“Don’t you like the chicken, Jim?” asks a concerned mother.

“Yeah, well, um..ah…”

“Why aren’t you eating it?”

“Well, because it’s white meat and I like dark meat!”

Mother explains that chickens have only two legs and this time his brothers got to them first. Had they been millionaires, she would have bought several chickens, or maybe pre-cut parts. As the reality was, Jim should realize that this was not a five-star hotel….

“It’s okay, Mom, “interrupts Eli. “These potatoes are really good and I won’t drop down dead if I skip the protein for one meal.”

“Quite so, Jim, but by the same token, why don’t you eat the white meat just for once? You’re getting too picky when it comes to food. When I was your age….”

But Jim didn’t hear the rest of the story because something his mother had just said made a bell go off in his head. It was all on account of one sentence he had overheard while she was speaking on the phone a few days previously. He didn’t normally eavesdrop on his mother’s conversations, but he had just happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Jim’s parents had decided to have new kitchen cupboards installed and they had just returned from an excursion to the craftsman’s showroom. His mother was discussing their exciting experience with a good friend on the phone.

“There were so many different styles on the floor, and about a dozen different shades of wood to choose from,” she had said. “I just couldn’t make up my mind. My husband got really impatient and said I was too picky. I told him that wasn’t being picky – I was merely making a ‘preference analysis.’ ”

So when exactly does the (illegitimate) habit of being “picky” become a (legitimate) “preference analysis”? What’s the difference between being choosy with your food and being choosy over a color scheme? Teenagers are pastmasters at spotting ironic inconsistencies. To Jim, this was a glaring example if there ever was one.

We’re all human. Is this kind of situation completely avoidable? I’m not sure.

But certainly, we see here once again how important it is that parents (and teachers) strive to be consistent at all times in all their interactions with their children.