How to Become Unflappable
Be the Adult in the Room When Tragedy Strikes
About the Author
Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.
I recently got reason to think a close friend of mine had died, a woman I was planning on spending a couple months with later this year. In my past, it would have bothered me greatly, the death scenario impinging on my thoughts throughout the day and preventing me from thinking of anything else. Not anymore. (More on her later.)
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“Being unflappable” means, in this post, reacting to tragedy without shock, emotional misfire, or losing one’s cool. One can pull this off not because one has lost the ability to vividly feel or fully appreciate the horrific situation. Instead, one is psychologically prepared in advance since one is sort of expecting it.
An analogy: if you’re an adult who has followed politics for many years (not always a good thing), and then you discover that a politician you fully endorsed and even admired turns out to be corrupt, you will hardly go into shock, emotionally misfire, or lose your cool. That’s because you’ve seen all this before. You’ve seen this movie many times. It’s old news, and you are already psychologically prepared for more of the same. You had no reason to think that this particular politician would turn out to be corrupt, but you knew, from experience, that some of the politicians you favor are going to turn out corrupt.
Being unflappable = not getting terribly upset or shocked when tragedy hits, because you were prepared for it, psychologically. You are the adult in the room, while most of the people around you lose their minds, because they aren’t unflappable.
The bad news is the primary method for becoming REALLY unflappable sucks. But the good news is that you can get half way there via probabilistic reasoning plus an exercise in imagination instead of first-hand experience.
The straightforward, primary way: experience tragedy multiple times and realize that they will inevitably continue. This is how I became unflappable. It wasn’t pleasant.
Note that the primary, common, road to unflappability has multiple tragedies. One or two won’t cut it. It’s only after you’ve gone through several that you are psychologically ready for more.
The alternative way of achieving unflappability probably won’t generate the very same result but it comes pretty close anyway:
People are typically surprised and even shocked when their spouse betrays them viciously, their teenager is arrested for drunk driving and smashing the car into a house, their mother slips into dementia and even psychosis, their sister suddenly goes bankrupt after getting addicted to heroin, their brother is arrested on child molestation charges, their best friend dies in a horrific accident or is murdered, and so on. (These are relatively big tragedies—that’s what I have in mind. Getting laid off from one’s job, for instance, is usually pretty tame.) There was no way at all that they could have known beforehand that the tragedy was going to occur.
True enough. But you can know beforehand that the disjunction of those, plus similar, events will occur. That is, you know that at least some of those kinds of tragedies will hit you eventually, as it’s just a matter of time. In brief: although you can’t know ahead of time which particular tragedies will hit you, you can be quite certain, on relatively obvious probabilistic grounds, that some will. When one of them does hit you, you will think to yourself “Oh shit . . . . Okay. Well, I knew something like this was on the way. I guess it’s my turn now.”
Naturally, some lucky souls won’t experience anything like those terrible events. But I think the vast majority of us do eventually, usually between the ages of 30 and 60. People who never experience tragedies of that scale are pretty clueless about life, in my opinion. Kind of like a priest who never marries but offers advice on marriage.
That’s part 1: the probabilistic reasoning. Part 2 is the exercise in imagination.
In order for this realization of the truth of the tragedy disjunction to sink in, it’s helpful to look around at your loved ones and vividly imagine various tragedies happening to them, as realistically as possible. (No, it’s not pleasant imagination exercise. It’s not supposed to be fun.) More specifically, imagine how you would react to learning about the tragedy that befalls them.
You need to say to yourself, with firm emphasis, something like “This IS going to happen to me, or my loved ones. Some time in the next few years someone is going to die in a shooting, or get arrested in a major charge, or have their career destroyed permanently, or fall into hopeless addiction. This is actually going to happen. This isn’t fantasy or fiction. It’s future fact. It might not happen next year or even in the next five years. But it is going to happen.”
Next, imagine what it would be like to be the “adult in the room”, who reacts without shock, without spouting gibberish, without denial, without screaming, without frantically assigning blame, and so on. Imagine being the person who more or less takes control of the situation, figuring out what to do next, whom to comfort, and so on.
Finally, imagine yourself being that person. Visualize it.
Earlier I wrote “People are typically surprised and even shocked when” tragedy strikes. True, but it doesn’t have to be you.
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Back to the beginning: fortunately, my friend was not dead! She’s fine. But if I had learned she was dead, I would not have lost my mind. Yes, I’d be very sad, but that’s different.