One Action Cannot Destroy a Reputation

If one action cannot destroy a person’s reputation, as we suggested yesterday, then we must learn a few skills. One, as we said before, we must learn our own triggers. Two, we must become disciplined at evaluating who people prove themselves to be over time.

As for number one- we will not be able to avoid being triggered. We will always have triggers in life, and they may change over time, but there is no way to completely avoid them. What we can do, is learn how to pay attention to them and, when we learn what to pay attention to, we can, over time, learn different kinds of responses to them.

The way to know when you’re triggered is to use the gift of hindsight to evaluate when your emotional response to a situation was entirely too strong. This is going to require some serious honesty, self-reflection, and non-defensiveness. Once you’ve learned that you were triggered, you need to then spend time figuring out what exactly caused the overly-heightened emotional reaction.

In the example of Tim and James from a few days back, the trigger was actually a broken promise, not a “lie.” The broken promise led to the accusation “liar” because of Tim’s sensitivity to broken promises. It would then be his work to figure out why he’s sensitive to broken promises and, more importantly, to make a mental note of the fact that he’s sensitive to that. It would also be important, going forward, for Tim to make mental notes about the times in which people promise him things and to practice thinking through what might happen if they break that promise. This way he can be prepared for his trigger which may help him respond differently.

A Triggered Reaction

Yesterday we started a character assassination “case study.” In the example, a made up person named Tim called another made up person named James a liar because he did not follow through on a promise.

Now, if Tim has a history of being on the wrong end of broken promises, we can understand why he might accuse James of being a liar. This has been a pattern elsewhere in his life that has caused great pain, and this similarity has led to a heightened emotional state that does not match what this particular situation demands.

That is what we call a “trigger.” (We talk about triggers too much these days, and we are calling too many things “triggers” that are actually just “bummers,” but stick with me nonetheless). When something happens to us that reminds us of something negative from our pasts that causes us to have a reaction that is too strong given the details of the specific situation we are in, we are “triggered.”

It is important to be aware of these. Why? Because when we are not aware of them, we run the risk of acting out of our heightened emotional state that does not match the situation we are in. We run the risk of causing unnecessary harm.

The first step in unnecessarily assassinating someone’s character is being triggered without awareness of our triggers.