Chapters 6-8: Contending with Emotions

These chapters contend with exercises that are driven on dealing with expressing emotion. 

I'll try to give the tl; dr version of the chapters here. Chapter 6 begins with an overview of the brain - a very biological overview. Mendes discusses the amygdala, which is responsible for emotions like fear and rage, and the left pre-frontal lobe  which puts the brakes on impulse control. In highly emotional contexts, the amygdala provides emotional context to the experience. The exercises in this chapter essentially involve diving a classroom into groups of three or four and providing an object as a "talking stick." The groups are a listening group rather than a discussion group. They are given a prompt in which to discuss their emotions on a particular topic. 

Chapter 7 is about finding positivity - spending five minutes writing or discussing a success you had that week, or pretending a movie is being done about your life, and you give a 90-second synopsis to the director - all of this is within groups, followed by reflective debriefing. I think the most interesting exercise from this chapter is "speed teaming" - a quick way to build a team - everyone in a group spends 30 seconds telling everyone something  (non-work/non-school related) about themselves. Then they are given a limited amount of time to come up with a team name and a ritual for celebrating. 

Chapter 8 is about developing interpersonal sensitivity, and there is no way in technical training I would touch either of those exercises with a ten foot pole.  The second exercise in particular is asking people to take sides on a controversial topic (there is too much homework in school, for example), and is meant to be a way of enforcing respect toward conflicting points of view. Mendes does mention this needs to be done within an environment where people are more comfortable with one another, but that is rarely my situation. 

 I will say that my initial enthusiasm for this book has waned as I have gone through the book. The exercises in the book are described in inordinate preciseness down to providing scripts for how you might introduce them. I know the writer has done seminars on this sort of thing, and I imagine that these lessons work best as a lecture and not so much as a reading. At least then, you would see examples of these exercises in action before trying them on your own. 

I am trying to get out of my technical training mind with this book because I don't know if I will always do technical training.  So, I could imagine I may have experiences where some of these would come in handy. But for right now, most of the exercises in these chapters have little correlation to what I do.