The Field of Connection: Moods and Emotional Contagion [2]

Just in case you're not convinced that one person can make that much of difference in the mood and emotions of a group, have you ever been to a party that just wasn’t happening; not much energy, no one having a very good time, and then suddenly someone walks in and the party lights up?  And on the flipside, have you ever been to a party that just wasn't’ happening; not much energy, no one having a very good time.  Then suddenly someone leaves and the party lights up!  As a colleague of mine says, “It's your choice, you can be a headlight or a tail light!”

It’s our connection to one another, our common link to the field around us that makes this experience possible. This connection to one another and the field is impacted by subtle energy—like our mood—or to more obvious energy—like the words and tone of voice that comes out of our mouths.

Maya Angelou once said that words become the energy that fills a room, home, an environment and then, our beings.  She described how words stick to the walls, the furniture, and even our clothing.  It is for this reason that she is very particular about who is welcome in her home and what kinds of conversations she allows in her presence.

What kind of energy do you bring to your home, office, or environment? Do you want to be a headlight or a tail light?

The Field of Connection: Moods and Emotional Contagion

We are contagious to one another in what we think and dream about, as well as in our moods and emotions. This can happen on the subway with strangers or while waiting for a flight in an airport. When we are exposed to the emotions of others around us, they impact our individual states of mind. The impact is more pronounced, however, in our more familiar groupings, in our fields of connection. 

Think about it for a moment.

You can no doubt recall times when someone in a bad mood changed the course of a meeting you were attending, perhaps definitively impacting the decisions that were made or shutting down the process all together. Negative moods and emotions can also have a daily ongoing impact on a team or an organizational environment.  It may be one person who constantly ‘rains’ on everyone’s parade, or it can be just the way we all pass along our moods to one another, and they go ‘viral.’

In client work, I’ve seen over and over how one person can bring the productivity of a team, a department, or a small organization to its knees.  Toxic emotions from one person can poison the water cooler.  We are that connected.

Thankfully, the impact can go the other way as well. We can spread more positive emotions as well. Why is that important?

In the realm of neuroscience, studies of the brain are showing that the more we focus on problems and a negative mental frame, the more our brains trigger fear responses, embedding the problem thinking in the neural circuitry and lowering our ability to find solutions. [Sharon Begley, How The Brain Is Wired, 01.19.07, TIME]

Research on high performing teams conducted by psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada [AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, 2005] concluded that the critical variable accounting for the teams’ success was the ratio of positive to negative talk, in excess of 2.9 to 1.  Similar research shows that married couples [5 to 1] and individuals also come closer to flourishing with a higher degree of positive to negative thought and talk.  

Fredrickson has advanced a “broaden and build” hypothesis based on her findings over the past ten years in which she posits that a more positive emotional frame enables us to access greater memory, cognitive skills, and attention.  In addition to healing from old lingering emotional wounds, positive emotions help us become more resilient.  A positive frame allows us to be more in touch with our own strengths, which in turn, helps us attend to and appreciate the strengths of others and see the potential in our situations.  Better for us, better for our organizations, better for our communities. [From Barbara L. Fredrickson, Positivity, 2009.] You can see a sampling of your own positivity ratio on the linked webpage.

Barsade concluded that both kinds of emotion, positive and negative, are highly contagious, but that positive emotions stimulate a group to be cooperative and make more positive choices in decision making, while the reverse held true for negative emotion. [From Lynne McTaggart, The Bond]

So, my mood today and yours, and the way we spread it around, matters to the fields of connection on which we play.

Connective Dynamics: Fields of Connection and Wholeness

“…latest evidence from many disciplines—from neuroscience and biology to quantum physics—suggests that nature’s most basic drive is not competition, as classic evolutionary theory maintains, but wholeness….new research demonstrating that all living beings, have been hardwired to seek connection above virtually any other impulse—even at personal cost… ‘The individual’ is only the sum of an infinite number of inexactly defined parts, and the parts as we currently understand them are shifting and transforming at every moment…Nature’s most basic impulse is not a struggle for dominion but a constant and irrepressible drive for wholeness.” [Lynne McTaggert, The Bond]

What does what we’re learning about fields and wholeness mean for organizations? For communities?

More and more, it means changing the way we have operated, moving from just coordination among individuals to actively seeking to bring minds together to take advantage of that natural connection and opportunity for better solutions. 

When issues and challenges are very big [meta-challenges] or very new [emergent shifts], no one person has the whole solution.  We need the intelligence of the collective, the tapping of everyone’s brain and heart.  We need the whole for big projects, big solutions, big changes of heart, bigger ways of understanding our systems and our place in them.  That happens together—we can’t get there on our own.

For big things, we have to invite the whole consciously onto the field of connection and play.

Just this summer, we are becoming more fully aware, all of us, that the weather is changing, whether or not man has had anything to do with causing the change. The New York Times published an article last week about the stressors on aging infrastructure in the US from heat and storms; in another piece, the author noted that something like a third of the food-producing areas of the US are considered disaster areas because of drought conditions and crop loss.  Mindful responses to issues this large cannot be successfully addressed by one agency, company, or community. Sharing ideas, knowledge, and strengths is the only way through.  How do we effectively do that, inviting ourselves and one another onto a field of connection and consciousness?  Seeing ourselves as  part of it all and co-accountable for outcomes?

But, dealing with systemic and structural breakdowns needs greater coordination, shared knowledge, co-learning. We respond to big issues by showing up together on the field of connection, ready to roll up our sleeves.

Have you experienced that in your own life, in your own organization and around areas of passionate interest and concern? Where with focused group energy, you were able to transcend personal limitations, whether those were intellectual, emotional, or limits of perspective and scope? When you felt yourself connect up and solutions surfaced, perhaps solutions that had been unforeseen?

We are all dealing with these issues anyway. If quantum physics theorists are correct, we are connected up anyway. So, we can draw on that. We can connect up intentionally. We can invite our best intelligence to join together, knowing that we are smarter together, and the stakes are often very high.

There are lots of ways to facilitate this, but these are some basic elements of co-creating and connecting to fields:

--Multiplicity: the desire for multiplicity, an intention to gather greater knowledge through connecting stakeholders;

--Engagement: clear intention and invitation to include, an invitation to engage; an environment that facilitates thinking together

--Thinking Together: a process to attune to one another in dialogue and engage the purpose [those I-We-It connective dynamics again]

--Aligned Action and activation: the knowledge that solutions that can be acted on and ways to implement found, that sponsorship and resources can be  tapped.

We will be examining these META elements in greater detail over the next months as they are core to connective, collaborative, and collective process.

When intentional connections and field building don’t work so well and the invitation to the magic of collective intelligence does not occur, it’s usually at the level of engagement and intention where we have not done our prep work.

But if we do fully enter into the process of creating and nurturing fields of connection on behalf of topics of importance, we will notice our values begin to shift:

• ·      We begin to value other perspectives and points of view, more than we value full agreement;
• ·      We begin to value the transparency between us, more than our individual self-protective cocoons;
• ·      We begin to value the wisdom available to us, and to put greater value on the collective rather than only individual good;
• ·      We begin to value wholeness.