Myg Trigs in Meetings

It will happen. During a meeting, you will say or do something that will trigger a seemingly irrational response from a participant. Someone you thought to be on side might suddenly want a fight. Someone else might urgently excuse themselves for a few moments, taking flight to the bathroom. Or it might happen and you don’t even notice it. Whilst a freeze seem less irrational, that participant is certainly not in a position to hear anything you say.

Take solace – you are not to blame. The amygdala is responsible. This is the part of the brain that develops first, whilst we are in the womb and finishes its development as the rest of the brain grows. It stores all of our early emotional states, alongside the context in which those states are experienced. But because all of this happened early on, perhaps before we had words and possibly even before we had conscious memories, the participant experiencing that fight, flight or freeze response might not recognise what is happening. Their myg has been trigged – the amygdala is in control.

Describing something as ‘triggering’ is common these days but rarely is the term used in an emotionally literate way. Daniel Goleman explains how “the amygdala has sloppy circuitry. It scans and comes up with a match when conditions are only slightly similar”. And so…

A student who was parented by a shaming disciplinarian might experience feedback as an attack.

A trainee who wants your approval might construe your preoccupation as a shattering rejection.

A participant might, when asked to sing in a group, suddenly turn from a 47-year-old man into a frightened child who needs to take refuge in the toilet because when that participant was six he was forced to sing a solo in front of the entire class, just because he’d bobbed up and down during the song I Feel Like I’m Made Out of Gingerbread!

Okay, so that last example was me (I’m sure the specificity gave it away). And I didn’t quite run away from the training room to hide in the loo – it just felt like I needed to. What I was able to do was share the feelings (and the story) which meant I could regulate the urge, be back in the room and make a few colleagues laugh. This felt easy because I work in an emotionally literate workplace where it’s safe enough to say.

And so the emotionally literate trainer might…

  1. Turn a myg trig into material – modelling to others vulnerability by sharing his or her own story.
  2. Introduce the term – knowing about myg trigs, and being with others who know what the term means, gives us all an incredibly useful shorthand.
  3. Give permission for people to say – create the safety and space for people to share or, at the very least, put in place the formal, supervisory structures that ensure that support.
  4. Bring awareness to those moments – interrupt the stimulus response mechanism.
  5. Look for the humour – because not really controlling how we respond, and not really knowing why we respond in that way, is pretty funny. Isn’t it?