Episode Transcript
The room was packed. There were no empty seats, and it seemed another 100 people were standing in the back to catch a glimpse of the presentation. The event organizers had promoted it to their massive audience as a must see. The stage was empty except for the MC who was adjusting the microphone as she prepared to introduce the speaker.
I was the speaker. Over the next 30 minutes, I gave the worst presentation of my life. I had completely reworked it at the last minute. Wasn’t comfortable with the content. Wasn’t yet confident in front of audiences this large. After it was over, a participant in the front row came up to shake my hand. But I felt so disassociated and broken that I bypassed their handshake and just instead hugged them as if I’d known them for years.
It was all so incredibly awkward. If you are out there listening, dear stranger, I am so sorry I did that. Fueling all of it was embarrassment. It was the most embarrassment I’d ever felt in my adult life. I was embarrassed for not preparing like I should have, for not seeking enough feedback on my presentation, for wasting the time of this huge audience who chose to be at my session over so many others.
I immediately left, went back to my hotel room, got in the shower. Even in the shower, I forgot I was in the shower. It was as though my entire body was flooded by embarrassment to the point where I could barely do anything else. Many years later, I learned of a book titled My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard trained neuroanatomist. Jill’s work, a result of studying her own stroke, attempted to document the physiological lifespan of an emotion.
She found that emotions and their associated chemicals tend to arise and then flush out of our bodies within about 90 seconds. Of course, it can be plus or minus 90 seconds, but that anchor can give us a ballpark sense of how long it may last. But if emotions have such relatively short lifespans, why did my embarrassment seem to last for days?
Maybe you too have felt an emotion for far longer than 90 seconds. The answer, as best as I can tell, is us. After that initial wave passes, we step in. After I stepped off the stage, boom, 90 second clock began. But then I kept replaying the mistakes I made, the verbal slip ups, what I should have said, what my slides should have looked like, how my career was ruined, how audience members were going to tell their friends about the disaster they just witnessed, and on and on.
Sometimes story building like this can be useful, but a lot of the time it’s just adding unhelpful fuel to restimulate a kind of emotional loop. I’ve started calling that moment, the one right after the wave, the 91st second. We often have more agency here than we realize, but this isn’t about pushing feelings away or telling yourself to just get over it.
Grief in my experience, doesn’t run on a 90-second clock, though I have found that as with all emotions, I can extend the strongest waves of it by creating stories. So the next time a feeling hits hard, see if you can just let the first 90 seconds happen. Don’t suppress it. Don’t reach for your phone. Just feel.
Maybe even close your eyes. Take steady breaths and just notice how it’s moving through you. And then after 90 seconds or so, ask yourself, am I still feeling this? If so, is it because I’m now feeding it? Can I learn from the experience without feeding the emotion it gave rise to? Those questions alone might change what the next hour, day and week looks like for you. See you next week.
Show Notes
Don't Just Keep Up.
Define the New Rules.
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