Mental Toughness -What does THAT look like?

Manage my feelings...                             Sort...                                           Notice...                                   Do....           

I have to give a group at a prison this week. I work in a rehab facility so it's not so much geared at crime reduction -those kind of programs are offered by the Parole Board, it's about their personal rehabilitation.

The trouble is, every other day they're told about breathing and relaxation and you can see them glaze over about 2 seconds into a discussion of same.
But that's what I'm going to talk about -at some stage, so I want them to understand why they need to listen.
Hence the Mental Toughness course.These guys need to be tough. Prison is as about as harsh an environment as you can get. The difficulty for the Rehab Unit is that a lot of therapy and programs require looking at the hard stuff which often renders anyone vulnerable. But being vulnerable in prison is not a good survival strategy. There is commonly a violent stand-over culture with a continual appraisal of where an individual stands in an abusive pecking order. So they would be thinking "you can take your breathing and relaxation and shove it up your [insert orifice name here]."
Mental Toughness, now that might appeal because these guys are in serious survival mode.

But what is it?
Well I think it boils down to being in control and having options...

The control part is managing despite having high levels of stress or strong and consuming negative emotions. Often when this happens, people get reactive -fight, flight or freeze. With the prison population it is often fight.
But there's a big difference between knowing you can fight and going "ape-sh!t", -as voices are raised, and pushing and shoving is starting.

We often discuss anger management. Anger is touted as a bad thing, but I argue that it is good and bad, it depends what it leads too?

First do no harm.
If possible, help other's...is my yard stick.

Many of the prisoners are scared of getting angry because they get off-the-scale angry very quickly and do lots of harm to others, harm that they greatly regret later (well most of them). So they walk around with their fists rammed in pockets, living in fear of losing it. But also living in fear of not losing it.
So, Mental Toughness would be knowing what to do when they feel like this.
The same with fear, anxiety or hyper-vigilance...

That they will experience it, is a given, learning to manage it adaptively, is where the mental toughness comes in.

So this is what I will tell them tomorrow:

It's in their interests to track and manage their anger and anxiety.
How? Well, with a few strategies, which I'll outline below, but they do include relaxation and breathing, only this time, hopefully, they have a reason to listen.

Managing strong feelings.

With managing strong emotions there are things we need to notice, sort and do. So...

Notice feelings...

OK, feelings can be obvious, describable emotions. They can be  feeling "crap" or "yuk", but too hard to put into clear terms, or a bad physical body sensation.

This step involves noticing that some kind of bad feeling has taken you over. You can be tense, bristling and enraged, or sick/flat/down...

The point is, NOTICE IT, that something has changed, and a you are in the grips of a powerful experience. The natural response is to not question it, and react to the headspace that comes with it., getting caught up in all the rhetoric.
Let's press on to the next step...

Sort feelings...

This step is interesting because it gets us to explore a little further. Feelings are complex, very complex, and a strong feeling will take over. But often there is more too it. In this picture we have a red, angry feeling covering up a sad, disorganising feeling. Walking around feeling sad is, overwhelming, but also makes us vulnerable, -better to cloak it in a sheath of anger. That expresses the negativity while protecting us. The anger galvanises us where the sadness threatens to disorganise us.
The reverse can be true too, where anger is damped down under a covering of sadness or depression. We need to probe for the sneaky, hidden emotion because they both need to be understood, to be dealt with.

Do with the feeling...

In the "doing" phase we now have to observe the identified feeling or feelings. They are powerful, like a giant ocean wave. If we try and swim or surf them, we are likely to get dumped. That is the same as getting caught up in all the stuff going on in our head when a powerful wave is coming through. It smashes our reason and we act in a way that we later regret.

We have to imagine ourselves sitting on the dunes, watching the surf roll in. As each wave comes to the shore we can watch it break and retreat. Only then can we speculate about what to do, once we are safe sitting on the shore and it no longer has a hold of us.

So the relaxing and breathing?

Well we do that from the shore, calming down so we can make choices of what to do next. That's the options part. Having options and making good choices is the way to go -that 's real anger management.

Hope you have a Betta Day!