Touchdown! No, Interception!
Talk about Mixed Signals!
It happened in the Greenbay/Seatle football game and will never be forgotten. Time ran out on the clock, Seattle threw a bomb into the endzone, and 4 Packers and 1 Seahawk jumped for the fall. When they came down with it--one ref immediately signaled TD and the other interception. Look at the picture above. Talk about mixed or rather mixed up signals.
A little more background. On review, the ref in the box with the replay could not tell who had the ball and gave Seattle the TD. However, the TV replay showed that Greenbay had possession first. So, it should have been an interception and Greenbay won the game. The real story is that with the NFL referees on walk-out, the second string refs did the best they could with an impossible call.
The real story took place in the clubhouse. The Greenbay coach said that he was not there to discuss the refs but the game. Period. He did not let his emotions get the best of him. He was mixed up like the call. He was the real pro.
Get to the Balcony!
Several posts ago, I wrote about "the best advice ever." The best advice is to be true to yourself. But you cannot do that when your emotions take over you--or should I say, TALK over you? When your emotions do your talking--you are done, you cannot do your best, better not to have spoken.
So how do you manage your emotions and keep them in appropriate boundaries? The advice is: "get to the balcony." Martin Linsky and Ronald Heifetz, in Leadership on the Line, recommend " conditioning oneself so that in emotional "strikes" that come out of nowhere--you tell yourself to "step back and go to the balcony." Look down on yourself in the situation. Disengage. Then, with some detachment, frame your response. The skill is to let the wave of emotion wash over you.
How exactly does one do that? The coach had time to think before he acted in the interview. He immediately began the interview with what is called "a buffer statement"--"I am not going to talk about the refereeing tonight." Similarly, we can develop our own buffer statement to use automatically in emotional times. Try one of these--but develop one for your "buffer statement." In the order of my preference---
May I think about that for a moment?
Or
You have given me something to think about.
Or
Let me think about that.
These statements acknowledge what has been said, but create a space to respond. The use of the question is particularly effective.
Once on the balcony, you can assess where you want to go with the response. Remember the coach who set a definite boundary for what he would not comment on. He won the real game.
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