Furious, or not so Furious Feedback

Imagine you’ve sent out a new billboard design that is going to plastered up next to one of the busiest interstates in the country. Tensions are high at your marketing firm. Will this become another one of your great successes or will the client think it’s a flop and you’ll need to go straight back to the drawing board. The week wears on and finally the client sends your team one email about the marketing campaign.

“We’ve been working furiously to get through the different advertisements you’ve prepared. We’ll need some time to discuss the new billboard...”

What? That’s it? Do people even know what ellipses mean? Why is he leaving out information? The mind begins to play tricks on you and soon you’ve made up your mind. The whole project is scrapped. There’s no chance they’ll like the design you gave. But before you begin spiraling try going through a few simple steps to bring you back to your center and begin using your wise mind.

Obvious Observation

DBT is composed of fairly simple things. The first portion of being mindful is the what you do when practicing mindfulness. The other portion is how you practice mindfulness. But for now we’ll just focus on the what which is composed of observe, describe, and participate.

The observe step is just that, take a step back and begin observing.

Pay attention to your senses. What sensations are coming through your eyes, ears, nose, skin, and tongue?
Pay purposeful attention to the present moment.
Push away nothing, cling to nothing. Be the manager of your attention.
Without speaking, watch the world around you. Allow the thoughts and emotions you feel to drift by like leaves on the wind or twigs on a river.
Notice what is happening within yourself and without.

When you observe what is around you, your mind becomes clearer and you’re more easily able to enter a state of the wise mind.

Dedicated Describing

Describing is a critical step in the process of accepting the world around you and being able to work within it. When you describe you,

Provide words for your experience. This allows you to give a name to the things you fear but also the things you are experiencing. The idea is to allow you to acknowledge what is happening to you and around you.
Give it a label. “Label a thought as just a thought, a feeling as just a feeling, an action as just an action.” (Linehan, 53)
Remember that if it cannot be observed through your senses then you cannot describe it.

Practical Participation

Participating is the final step of what you need to do to be mindful. This step is about becoming a part of the flow of life and the events that are occurring. This is possibly the more difficult of the steps. Up to this point you have been simply looking and giving words to what you see. Now you need to enter into the mix and be a participant.

Give yourself wholly to the activity at hand. Be in the moment experiencing all of the things you have just observed and described. It’s okay to be a part of it.
Act within the wise mind as seems appropriate. Move with the mixture of events and emotions but do not lose yourself.

Returning to the Root

Back to the situation we began with. You’ve just received this very cryptic email from a client. What do you do now? First, observe the situation. Feel the tension in your stomach and the wild state your mind has entered as it tries to catalog all of the most terrible things that could possibly happen ever. Look at those around you, the other members of your team. What are they thinking about? Are they feeling the same things that you are feeling? Now it’s time to describe what’s happening.

“I’m so frustrated with clients. Why is it that they can’t just give me a little more of a hint of what's to come? But all I know is that the boss has emailed me. They’ve kept things a little light-hearted and vague. I’m going to speak with them later and see how things are. My feeling of anxiety is just a feeling. My thoughts about how terrible things might be are just thoughts. I don’t know what they really meant, and I can’t guess. I better get back to what I was working on.”

Without anything to do until the meeting, you can only go back to what you were working on. There is nothing to be done with this email. You might joke around with your colleagues about the degrading use of the ellipses as an ice-breaker instead of its original purpose. Ultimately, you can now go back into the flow of your work and wait to see the facts of the situation when the client calls you later this afternoon.

Next Steps

You now know the what of mindfulness. Take some time to practice these skills. In Assignment #2 you’ll be asked to take some time to practice and describe your experience with your colleagues.

Next we’ll move on to the how of mindfulness.