Soft skills training courses, like ones meant to enhance resilience and emotional intelligence, sometimes fall short. It’s not that people actively resist the concepts, but many are passive about creating real change in their behavior. A reason for this is embedded in human nature and can be overcome with a simple and engaging strategy.
Humans have two brain systems that influence learning and behavior. One is the emotional system– it is unfocused, automatic, and feels pain and pleasure. The second is the rational system – it is conscious, deliberate and analytical. The emotional system produces cognitive biases in thinking that operate subconsciously and are detrimental to people’s ability to change behavior. The way to manage these biases is to show people how they are affected by them, then provide strategies to overcome them.
One bias that is particularly relevant to resilience and emotional intelligence is the negativity bias. The brain’s emotional system is designed such that negative events have a stronger effect on people than positive or even neutral events. This is why people’s moods are more affected by the co-worker who gossips than by all the co-workers who are positive. The negativity bias narrows the mind and promotes hasty, sometimes harmful responses to adversity. Ultimately, this bias leads people to feel overwhelmed, resist change and damage relationships. The problem is that, like all cognitive biases, people don’t recognize it in themselves or see how it affects their attitudes and behavior.
A simple way to make it real for people is to ask them to write two lists: one with all the negative emotion words and the other with all the positive emotion words they can think of. Only allow thirty seconds for each list. Most people will generate a longer list of negative words compared to positive words. Due to the negativity bias, it is far easier to think of words like angry, sad, frustrated, and their synonyms, than it is to think of words like happy, joyful, elated and their synonyms. This phenomenon is supported by J.R. Averill’s research, “On the Paucity of Positive Emotions,” that shows 70 percent of the most common emotion words in the English language describe negative emotions. The negativity bias is embedded in our language.
After this demonstration, trainers help participants examine how this bias influences their own attitudes and behavior. In response to stressors at work, people have automatic negative thoughts that occur immediately and below conscious awareness. For instance, when a budget cut is announced, a person’s automatic thought might be catastrophic, “I’m going to lose my job!” When an employee misses a meeting because they are running late, they might automatically think that the boss is fed up with them and will no longer trust them with important projects.
By examining their reactions to stressors, most people will recognize patterns in their thinking. Some people automatically make disasters of events, others are chronically pessimistic, while some people externalize and blame others for their problems. Once these patterns are identified and named, participants learn to recognize when they’re happening in real time and stop them. The technique is simple, but requires practice. During stressful moments, people need to learn how to slow down their minds, challenge their automatic thoughts and replace them with more rational and realistic thinking, leading to more effective behavior. This technique engages the brain’s rational system to exert control over the emotional system.
When the person who makes a disaster of every situation misses a meeting, they should recognize that their automatic thoughts are creating more stress and hurting their performance. Instead, they should challenge their beliefs by examining the situation more rationally, “It’s rare that I miss meetings. My boss also has kids and will understand. This is temporary.”
The negativity bias inhibits people from making positive changes to their thinking and behavior. This, in turn, affects their performance and how they deal with stressors. The simple process of learning about the bias, recognizing how it affects oneself and challenging automatic thoughts can be accomplished within training programs. This is particularly helpful where the goal is to enhance resilience, emotional intelligence and even innovation. The technique is easy to remember and practice, and can powerfully affect people’s thinking and behavior.
