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Emotional Control – and Two Fights.

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Years ago during my policing career, two colleagues arrested a criminal who had a reputation for violence. On arrival at the Custody Unit car park, and just outside the Unit entrance doors, the officers alighted and invited the detainee to get out of the car. (It was before the use of vans was routine.) He declined their invitation.

Using ‘minimum force’ I used a technique I had learned in training, I put the blunt end of a pen against his earlobe and putting the two between my fingers, squeezed. He got out, at which point my two colleagues pinned him against the wall and tried to cover all his limbs and torso at the same time. I observed two things – one, he was trapped, and two, he wasn’t actually resisting any more.

“Flipping heck Dave, help us!” yelled one of my mates.

“He’s not resisting anymore.” I calmly responded. And he wasn’t. he meekly accepted his fate once the two sweating coppers eased off and the rest of the process went easily.

For 24 hours the two colleagues thought ill of me. The following day, they apologised. The emotion of the moment had taken over.

Another day, same unit. A well known and truly violent prisoner, with a history for acting up in the Unit, was asked to remove his clothes for forensic examination. Predictably, off he went. Yelling, demanding, threatening. It was going to take the world to get his kit off.

“Oy, ******,” I shouted. “WHAT?” he replied.

“Has behaving like that ever actually worked for you?” I asked.

A moment passed and he started undressing.

I’m no saint. I lost my temper now and then. Which doesn’t make today’s lesson less impactive, it merely reinforces it.

When emotions are high, when stresses are present, when losing your temper and abandoning all emotional control is ooohhhh so easy,

Don’t.

There are two reasons for this. First of all, it makes you feel good afterwards. Your keeping control is emotionally satisfying.

But second, it means you keep control and are able to deal with the event better. While I’m not proposing you will ever need this advice, my experience has always been than in a fight it’s the one who loses control that loses. I was attacked many times during my career but I always (somehow!) managed to keep my cool – even when a criminal bit into my leg and I let him stay there because it meant he wasn’t running off – and I literally tied them up in an effective controlling hold because they had lost control and I hadn’t.

You may not be involved in fisticuffs, but the same advice applies to those verbal confrontations we all, occasionally, find ourselves starting or trying to finish. Maintaining emotional control is key to resolution, and it is a truly empowering characteristic that those who wish to be principled leaders should seek to adopt.

All it takes is a moment to decide – who’s in charge here? Me or my emotions.

Choose ‘me’.

My Biggest Mistake

28 Thursday Jan 2021

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One of my deepest regrets in my professional life relates to a character flaw I had (have?) which was an unintentional, and oddly counter-intuitive effect of having studied the field of personal development, particularly the writings of leadership thought-leader Stephen R Covey.

Those who knew me best overlooked that flaw and saw something which I seemed determined to hide but (at least for them) shone through the cracks in the illusion I’d somehow managed to create.

It was this. Having discovered a sense of self-direction borne of the personal development world, everything that got in its way was annoying. And even if I didn’t say so out loud, which I occasionally did, then I would still somehow manage to communicate that frustration.

For example, in a busy CID office I walked in one morning to the news that my DI had selected me to investigate a vulnerable missing person. He was vulnerable by definition (over 65) but there was no actual fear for his safety. Anyway, that day I had a plan, and the news wasn’t welcome. I rang the DI, who wasn’t in, and left a message about how I was going to comply with his request and ‘then do some proper police work’.

Apparently, I went viral.

Good boss, raised it with my immediate supervisor and I went to apologise. (As an aside, that’s what I mean by ‘people who knew me well’ were able to make allowances.)

With 20/20 hindsight I wish that instead of having a ‘plan’ priority I’d had an ‘excellence’ priority, instead. That instead of moaning and whingeing (while still doing a great job) I did an excellent job in good humour, welcoming the trust and the challenges that were being offered to me. Perhaps I would have achieved just a bit more professionally – I did specialise and I did well, but much later on my hubris – and perhaps unwillingness to absolutely follow the change in political ‘line’ – bit me on the bum.

The same applied at home. If I had a plan and something interrupted it, instant strop. If someone doesn’t do what I ask (reasonable though it may be), I mention it DI-style. Not good for relationships, even if the penalty isn’t quite as drastic as a job loss, for example.

The point is – instead of pausing in the Stimulus-Response Gap and considering that a request was reasonable, do-able, developmental and relationship-building before welcoming those opportunities, I chose conflict. Imagine that – I chose conflict. How dull am I?

After all I have studied, agreed with, understood and desired to apply, I still find a tendency to bite. Not as much as I did, but too late to do anything about those mistakes I made, and to have another chance to learn from them.

Time is a bitch. It won’t move in the direction I need it to.

Anyway, apologies to the offended. It wasn’t personal unless I made it plain that it was.

The message?

Now is the time to adopt a considered, conciliatory approach to work, impositions, interruptions and people. The alternative isn’t worth the lack of effort. (It does make sense.)

Have a great week, everyone. Even those who offended me. Because now – I understand.

We’re all too similar to criminals.

01 Friday Nov 2019

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Another potentially controversial entry, today. It may not seem obvious at the outset but it does have a time management dimension, if you stick with it.

Listening to the radio and surfing LinkedIn while otherwise disengaged from the world, two reports outlined a modern phenomenon which I suspect is a consequence of the psychology of modern life.

One report was of a man whose child is being detained in an institution. I know little more, and I suspect that if I were in his position (Circle of Concern) I, too, might be angry. His complaint, which may be perfectly valid, I don’t know, is that his daughter is not receiving the care he believes she deserves. (I’m being careful, he might be absolutely right – we only get the snapshot that he and the BBC want to give us, after all.)

The second is how a Coroner is criticising MI5 for not preventing the London Bridge attack. Again, Circle of Concern stuff – I’m 180 miles and several months away from what happened. But the Coroner is probably not an ex-anti-spy, and probably knows nothing about how big MI5 is and how much it is trying to do with what it has.

Now, I am not saying either party is wrong in their assessment. However, there is one glaring issue arising.

The assumption by the critics is that ‘those responsible’ could have, should have, and must have done better.

Let me go off on a tangent for a minute. When I was a police officer, I would frequently find myself in the custody unit when some under-informed, ill-educated, rights-aware-but-responsibilities-deficient miscreant would be brought in, yelling and screaming. The common statement made by all was

“I wants moi solicitor, now!!”

First of all, he assumed we knew who his solicitor was. Second, he assumed that the Transporter Room facilities were in full working order, and that his solicitor was happy to be beamed away from his bed into the unit, ‘NOW!’

At the same time, we frequently hear about people having to wait for ambulances for an inordinate amount of time.

Well, guess what?

We don’t have a staff of ambulance personnel, legal teams, anti-spies, nurses and doctors available to each of us. There is a finite number of each available at any one time, and they must be available to all of us. And when they are dealing with one of us, the others of us have to wait unless and until we are able and willing to engage such staff out of our own pocket, or ‘our’ emergency trumps ‘theirs’.

But in our world of immediacy brought about by instant news and communication by a phone in our pocket and a car each (as opposed to the ‘old days’ of reliance on public transport and the re kiosk at the end of the road that required cash input), we have unconsciously drifted into an expectation that the world must revolve around us, and NOW and MINE and AVAILABLE are demanded, despite all three not, necessarily, being possible.

(If you think I am wrong, ask yourself how often you’ve been talking to someone and a third party wanders up and starts talking to the second party without even an “excuse me”. That, my friend, is how mobile phones work.)

I think it’s about time we gave ‘other people’ the same respect we expect them to give us when they demand something of us NOW – which is ‘ I’ll get to you as soon as I can’.

If you manage your time well, you can serve more people. But you still can’t serve everyone simultaneously, and you don’t belong to them even if (as some will insist) ‘I pays your wages!’

So remember, when you are sat somewhere demanding something of someone, consider how you feel towards someone who demands that of you – and give the people from whom you seek a service the same respect for what they are trying to do with their resources, that you would expect from them as you utilise your own.

If you have time and resource challenges, so do they.

Time is finite. Resources are finite. Unfortunately, hindsight is infinite. But hindsight is a poor and harsh critic.

So don’t surrender to it. It just might be true that NOW isn’t possible. Now go to your cell and shut up……..

Lies, damned lies and statistics. What would YOU do about them?

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

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Three days ago I wrote about truth. One of the lessons I have learned over many years of the study of Dr Covey’s works has been this – what we are being told is rarely, ever, the wholly accurate truth. That use of the gap between stimulus and response which contains self-awareness, creative imagination, independent will and conscience has awakened me to how much people’s bias or motives intrude upon communication and debate.

This week the press reported that there had been an upsurge in complaints against the (British) police, up to 35,000 recorded in the latest recorded year. One paper said that was evidence of a police force that did not respect the people. Many complaints were for ‘incivility’, some for ‘neglect of duty’.

Of course some complaints are justified. Some are genuine misunderstandings about what was and was not possible (based on watching NCIS and The Bill). Occasionally it is a procedural complaint that a process failed.

But the media was focused on the numbers, but it notably left some numbers unreported, or unrecorded. And they did no analysis of their own.

For example – 35,000 complaints among 140,000 officers meant only one in four officers was ever complained about, and complained about only once in that year. In hundreds and hundreds of interactions, in 200 days of working. Takes the tint off a bit.

Next, no measure was provided about how many of those complaints were be people later charged, or convicted in connection with the incident giving rise to the complaint. I’d ask this because (and this may surprise you) some criminals/people are dishonest.

Of course, you can’t measure complaints by those who just won’t listen – people who lose things insisting on a ‘crime report’; people who instigate fights complaining that they were assaulted; people who ‘think’ they know the law – but patently don’t.

That reminds me about one person who didn’t complain, but he arguably could have. I was parked blocking a road with my marked police car, blue lights flashing. A man drove up.

“Can I drive through, officer?”

“Only if one of us is a ghost, sir,” I replied. Sarcasm. Not allowed any more.

Anyway, this particular newspaper report hit close to home, it’s something I know a lot about. I was once ‘top of the force’ for complaints (preen, preen) and I know how much some of them are instigated by defence lawyers as a bargaining chip.

What is the situation like in your own sector – are people lying – sorry, being disingenuous about you and your colleagues?

If so, could you apply the Third Resolution and do something about it?

Change yourself before asking others to do so.

03 Wednesday Dec 2014

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“We can never really change someone; people must change themselves.” Stephen R Covey

But that doesn’t stop us trying, does it?

One of those ‘things’ that I find wearing about other people (and which they probably find wearing about me) is when they try and impose their autobiography onto yours. This occurs during many conversations and is CERTAINLY the one that directs much of what passes for debate on tv. You know the one: “A (insert profession) once treated me badly OR was charged with a crime so THEY ARE ALL CORRUPT.”

Despite the fact that the protagonists in our conversations either have no personal connection to the incident OR that they do, but it’s only one incident through which they elect to judge everybody, they will insist on arguing the point. Any attempt on your part to argue the opposite or, grace forbid, to try and suggest a bit of objectivity, is seen as an attack on the former’s integrity and so the argument, based on a false premise, goes on.

We have to acknowledge that what happens to us may be true in the moment, but it is not necessarily true all of the time – it is not necessarily a ‘principle’ that youths hanging around a shop are trouble, for example, even if they occasionally can be.

Many years ago I was a ‘street cop’ and one problem we had outside one shop was a youth gang who were just a nuisance. We would be called incessantly, and move them on only for them to come back. (One effective method I had was to drive up at speed, slam on the brakes and open the door. The gang would run off and I wouldn’t even have to get out of the car. It was fun.)

One day, off duty, I was approaching a shop past a couple of teenagers, and just after I passed I heard a coke can fall to the floor. I testily challenged the youth, “Are you going to pick that up?!”

“It’s not mine,” he replied. It was only then that I noticed a bin, full to overflowing – and the heavy wind that had evidently blown a can off the top.

That was my ‘Aha!’ moment, when I realised that I (we) tend to judge people not so much by what ‘is’ as by what ‘we believe’.

I still do that – it’s nature. But we do have the option of using our proactive mindset to pause and ask ourselves if what we think we saw actually happened.

And so to the people of Ferguson and all those others protesting things they didn’t witness, ask yourselves whether what you’re being told by people encouraging you to damage YOUR OWN COMMUNITY is true. And, even if you conclude that it is, ask yourself why your punishing  EVERYBODY for something ONE PERSON DID is any different to what you’re saying they did to someone you never met?

(And here’s a thought – the two biggest international community backlash protests over police killings have been where the community has gone nuts over a dead criminal – not an innocent. Why IS that?)