Mental indifference

The psychiatric phenomena of alexithymia and anhedonia are relevant to our story. The first term, which has Greek roots, was created by psychiatrist Peter Sifneomos in the 1970s and literally translates as “no word for emotion”; the second, also of Greek origin, means the inability to take pleasure in normally pleasant things. Two French psychiatrists set the stage for the debate with the idea of "penseeoperatoire" ("operational thought") - a practical way of thinking and interacting.

Alexithymia

In psychiatry, the term "alexithymia" is used to describe people who resemble dead fish; from the former fire only smoldering coals remained in them. Such people try to understand their emotions and moods with varying success, but they cannot understand their subtleties. Since they are not sure what exactly they feel, they have difficulty expressing emotions. Instead of expressing their feelings, they focus on physical problems. (Remember, ulcers are not caused by what you eat, but by what eats you.) Despite the strange name, alexithymia is not difficult to identify. Its symptoms: poor imagination, lack of internal emotional experience, inability to express amusement, a tendency to speak lifelessly and in too much detail. Moreover, people with a similar mental disorder emanate a certain feeling of mechanicalness, which interferes with any spontaneity. (Winston Churchill, writing about the Russian politician Vyacheslav Molotov, captured this characteristic: “I have never seen a man who better embodied the modern idea of a robot.”) Alexithymics remain calm under conditions that would shock ordinary people. The death of a loved one, the infidelity of a partner, the loss of an opportunity to advance at work - nothing touches them. All events fall into a black hole of inexpressiveness and emptiness. Alexithymics are incapable of either empathy or introspection. This, combined with their mechanical reactions to conflict, leads to psychological illiteracy. They think about the concrete and objective; metaphors, allusions and hidden meanings are a foreign language to them. The work environment in which most managers move is conducive to the development of alexithymia. Thus, in the routine life of some insurance companies and banks there is simply nothing to be surprised or happy about, nothing to be interested in. The lifelessness of a dying company forces executives to suppress their emotions, a process that takes a lot of energy. Like a weightlifter trying to lift a heavy weight, leaders who suppress their emotions eventually become exhausted. There is an emotional division of labor in companies these days: the higher the position a person occupies, the more he will have to restrain himself. Members of management, from managers to senior workers, are practicing more stringent rules for managing their emotions, perhaps due to the expansion of the white-collar and service sectors. Many companies focus on expressing certain emotions. For example, which is sometimes called the “smile factory,” requires its employees to “play” happiness. Other companies make it clear that expressing deep and strong feelings is inappropriate. Few have realized that suppressing emotions (or managing feelings too strictly) leads to regressive behavior and infantilization and causes symptoms of stress

Anhedonia (emotional anesthesia)

The doctrine of hedonism, discovered by the ancient Greeks, states that pleasure, that is, the satisfaction of sensual desires, is the highest good. Although most people still subscribe to this theory, too many suffer from anhedonia—the inability to experience pleasure. Anhedonic people experience a feeling of complete apathy, loss of interest and aversion to usually enjoyable activities; they are dead inside. They do not want to seek new sensations, their attention is weakened, they lack a thirst for life. True anhedonia is a serious psychiatric syndrome. Here we are interested in quasi-anhedonia, that is, a mild form that develops in people who are capable of experiencing pleasure (and they have experienced it before). However, even quasi-anhedonia among senior management can have a devastating effect on a company, since leadership takes a lot of energy. And a dead fish does not have enough energy to lead people to success.

Resurrection of "dead" leaders

What can you do to restore your sense of excitement? What can you do to reinvent or reinvent yourself? Considering the fact that people are the main asset of a company, how can we discover creativity in ourselves, our colleagues and subordinates?

Feeling of flow

We must discover within ourselves what psychologist Michal Csikrzentmihaly calls the feeling of “flow”—a feeling that comes from being animated, focused, and so engaged that we lose track of time.
How to do it? First, we need a challenge. If we work on difficult tasks that can be accomplished, we achieve the feeling of conquering Everest that accompanies the feeling of flow. Tasks that are too difficult or too easy will cause difficulty. Work goals should be achievable: if they are too difficult, anxiety will force you to give up or work until exhaustion; if they are too simple, you will become bored and rusty. Challenge is very important because it forces you to learn. Humans have a hunger for research that can only be satisfied by study (as we will see in Chapter 13). Companies that encourage learning, thereby creating opportunities for creativity and innovation, help their employees feel energized. Secondly, intermediate results are needed. Small “wins” are very important. If you set and achieve a milestone toward each big goal, you'll receive constant feedback, a sense of control over what you're doing, and be able to "celebrate" progress along the way. In stressful environments, it is more difficult to maintain the excitement and energy needed to feel flow. They spend too much energy on solving personal problems. However, given the importance of managing emotions and the extent to which leaders serve as living symbols for their people, emotional expressiveness is essential. Symptoms of alexithymia, anhedonia or dissociation make it difficult for a manager to connect with his employees. This can be played out, but over time, managers and subordinates will feel that their leader is not with them morally and emotionally, that he cannot maintain the driving force. Thus, the leader must either prevent the occurrence of such symptoms or seek external help (from colleagues or specialists) to get rid of them. Leaders will be able to help their people stay energized only if they look at these problems intelligently. To the list of articles on Coaching and business consulting To the list of articles on the Clinical Paradigm of Management To the list of articles on the History and Theory of Psychoanalysis To the list of articles by A. V. Rossokhin in the journal “Psychologies”

Mental strength: the ability to love and take a blow

These people have enormous spiritual strength. They knew how to withstand life's blows and be stronger than circumstances. And they also knew how to love.

A mentally strong person is a person who is both spiritual and strong. Most often, this is the name given to people who are capable of bearing the mental burden and steadfastly overcoming life’s difficulties, but who have developed this ability on the basis of strong love or high duty.

Let us emphasize this: in contrast to simply persistent and courageous people, those who also know how to love are called mentally strong. Stupid and narrow-minded people can also steadfastly overcome life's difficulties, but stupid obstinacy and mental strength are not the same thing.

Maria Volkonskaya went to Siberia for her Decembrist husband not because she was accustomed to obediently following her feminine lot. Everyone tried to dissuade her, but she made her decision and shared hard labor with the one she loved.

Mother Teresa rose every day at 3.30 am and cared for the sick, repeating the prayer: “...Lord, help me to honor the good of my neighbor above my own. May I work to understand him, and not seek his understanding, may I work to love him, and not seek his love...” But she was not a stupid fanatic, but a wise businessman, philosopher and poet. Read her poems!

Like any ability, mental strength is trained. I set high goals, learned to overcome life’s difficulties, and gained mental strength. I avoided difficulties and taught myself to give up.

Another clarification: a mentally strong person and a strong personality are not the same thing. If mental strength is manifested in the ability to bear a mental load, in overcoming life’s difficulties, then personal strength is manifested in a collision with other strong individuals, in the ability to be stronger in a direct personal confrontation.

A famous example of a mentally strong man is Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln lost 18 elections before becoming President of the United States. We can say that failures haunted him all his life, but he rose again and again and persistently moved forward, remaining in the memory of the country as the most worthy of all American presidents. Some events of his life:

1831 - Lincoln went bankrupt in business and declared bankrupt;
1832 - defeated in elections to the legislative chamber of his state;
1834 – again burned out in business and again declared bankrupt:
1835 -1836 – personal failures and, as a result, a severe nervous breakdown, was treated for a long time;
1838 – defeated in the next elections;
1843, 1846, 1848 - defeated in elections to the US Congress;
1855 - defeated in elections to the Senate;
1856 - defeated as a candidate for the post of Vice President of the United States;
1858 - defeated in elections to the Senate;
1860 – elected President of the United States.

The textbook slogan of a mentally strong person was formulated by Winston Churchill: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal. All that matters is the courage to continue!” Having failed in the Battle of the Dardanelles in 1915 and causing the death of one hundred and twenty thousand people, he did not surrender. In 1940, he became Prime Minister of England, defended his country and led, together with Roosevelt and Stalin, the anti-Hitler coalition.

Mental strength is a characteristic of a person who lives not by momentary emotions, but by reason, will and high values. At the same time, it is not uncommon for a person who is mentally strong in one situation to show mental weakness in another. In a situation of challenge and in a collision with external life difficulties, men often turn out to be stronger, and in situations of prolonged internal tension they are the first to break. Women are more stress-resistant than men and can more easily endure tension and ruptures in relationships (although apparently it often seems the other way around). Where men rush to meet a challenge and try to resolve the issue directly, head-on, with force, women show greater flexibility. Sometimes this is assessed as female wisdom, sometimes as female weakness. Men don't like to give up and often break down as a result; the girls seem to give up, but internally continue to resist. Girls often portray mental weakness where men boast of their mental strength.

This is hardly a natural feature, to a greater extent it is a matter of upbringing: boys are ashamed to be afraid and it is not customary to cry, for girls it is okay to cry and it is normal to be afraid. Moreover, men like girls who make them feel strong, and girls are happy to play along with them, play weak, and get used to being weak.

However, over the past few decades, due to the fact that male education is disappearing and boys are raised mainly by mothers, there are fewer and fewer men among grown-up boys, and resilience and mental strength are becoming less and less characteristic of them. When men do not show masculine qualities, women have to show them, and there are more and more women with masculine behavior and a masculine mental structure: women who are strong and persistent.

Feeling helpless. Impotence.

Helplessness is the inability to cope on your own, to do something on your own and need the help of others, to not have deep knowledge to solve a problem, or simply an unwillingness to solve your difficulty. Powerlessness is the inability to control and influence events; inability to do/accomplish/overcome something, when you can’t do anything before the onslaught of insurmountable events. From Ozhegov's dictionary: HELPLESS. Needing help, unable to do anything for himself. Helpless child. The patient is helpless. To be in a helpless state.

IMPOTENCE. Lack of strength, physical weakness. Lack of ability to act. Feeling powerless in something. If we talk about helplessness, then we can literally say: “... someone can, it is possible for someone else, but not for me.” For example, a small child, recently born, is completely helpless, he cannot yet satisfy his needs, but someone else can. An adult can, mom or dad, but he doesn’t yet. The child screams, cries and thus calls for help and someone comes and helps him. The child always signals that he needs something, some of his needs strives to be satisfied. Having received help, he is no longer helpless. And as an adult, you can also ask someone for help, or you can silently wait for someone to offer it. If suddenly for some reason a person does not have the resources to change anything, then he becomes helpless. A healthy reaction when an adult feels helpless is to send a message to himself: “I need help!” Well, when he realizes that he cannot cope on his own, he goes and asks for help from someone, thereby not being left alone with his helplessness, he does not become its victim. At the physical level, helplessness can manifest itself, for example, in the following messages: “My right arm is broken and in a cast, I can’t write, can you help me?”; “I don’t have time to complete several very important tasks on time, please help me.” At the psychological level, the messages may be: “I am very worried, I need your support”; “I’m scared, I’m in danger, stay with me, please.” How we react and act in a state of helplessness depends on the experiences we received in childhood. If the child was understood, supported, his requests were responded to and helped, then the realization is reinforced that it is normal to be helpless and you can figure out what to do next. And if in childhood they ignored a lot, responded to requests with indifference, condemned them for any manifestation of activity, shamed them, or, conversely, provided help much earlier than the child had time to understand his need for help, then helplessness becomes a very painful and difficult to bear condition. And asking for help in difficult moments becomes a whole problem for such people. Before asking for help, you need to admit to yourself and others that you are helpless in front of something. The following phrases may appear in your head: “I’m not a self-sufficient person,” “I can’t cope on my own,” “I’ll be weak if I ask for help,” “I’m flawed,” and so on. Admitting that I need help and support may be unsafe for someone, because then that other person will be stronger, or they may reject me, laugh at me, or do something else that was done to me once in childhood . And then I have the right to be afraid and afraid to open up and ask for this very help. When I hear the word “powerlessness,” I understand it literally as “I am powerless in front of this... it cannot be changed, it is not possible for anyone, and then the strength to do this and for this leaves me.” I lost my strength after constant attempts to change or do something, but nothing changed, all efforts were in vain. Examples of feelings of powerlessness: “I am powerless to change the past”; “I am powerless to bring a dead person back to life.” In a state of powerlessness there is no hope. Powerlessness often breeds fear, it negates our strength, reason, common sense and opens the way to a feeling of weakness. Powerlessness can be a sign of a personality crisis, and then a person can reach a new level of awareness. In both a state of helplessness and a state of powerlessness, a feeling of impasse may appear. But if in a state of helplessness we can ask for help, then in powerlessness we can only accept what is. Asking for help or accepting the situation as it is in its unchangeable form is the way to a new level of awareness and development.

Publication date: October 06, 2022