Last week, some guy shared one of my posts for the sole purpose of telling his audience that he was right and I was wrong.
Wrong about what, you ask? Facts. Well-documented, easily-checked facts. Research 100% supports what I wrote.
No, the post wasn’t directed at him. I didn’t even know who he was!
And here’s your giggle for today – he claims to teach Emotional Intelligence.
But my own first instinct was not exactly stellar either. I wanted to fire back point by point. My jaw was clinching. I could feel the whole speech running away forming itself.
That right there is a trigger doing its job. Mine, though his was clearly working overtime, too.
Here’s the thing about being made wrong in public. It rarely feels like a simple disagreement. It feels personal. Like an old, familiar accusation that goes back a lot further than one man trying to build himself up by tearing someone else down.
For me, it reached straight back to a much older feeling of being falsely accused, one that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with something decades older in me. Once I recognized that, the whole thing lost its grip on me pretty fast. I just didn’t need to prove anything anymore.
That’s the part nobody tells you about triggers. It’s rarely about the thing right in front of you. It’s about what the thing in front of you reminds you of.
And for the record, reposting someone’s work for the sole purpose of proving them wrong and yourself right isn’t exactly a shining example of Emotional Intelligence. Or integrity. Or maturity. But that’s a conversation for another day.
Here’s the point I actually want to make: every one of us has our own version of this. A total stranger’s ordinary comment that sends us straight back to some old wound we didn’t even know was still tender. It happens over bringing home the wrong loaf of bread. Someone jumping in front to grab a parking spot. It happens over a re-share from someone who seems to teach EQ badly, and maybe knows it, but needs to make someone else wrong instead of upping his own game.
You don’t have to eliminate those moments. You can’t, really. That’s not how any of this works. But you can learn to recognize one while it’s happening, instead of just getting swept along for the ride.
That’s exactly what I teach in Put Your Triggers to Work FOR You. The masterclass on-demand replay walks through what triggers actually are, why they show up, and also teaches three simple tools you can start using right now, especially the next time a trigger grabs you by the collar. It’s paired with the StoryShift Triggers Card Deck that gives you a way to do this work on your own terms before you’re feeling triggered yourself.
If you’re tired of being at the mercy of your own reactions, Put Your Triggers to Work FOR You is a good place to start.
Anne
XO