Go Ahead, Get Perturbed! Then Reset.
Victoria Castle on Centering, by Vicky Schubert

from Leverage Points Issue 108

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Victoria Castle is the author of Trance of Scarcity and a seasoned organizational coach. For over twenty years, she has been helping leaders and organizations increase their effectiveness by achieving greater congruence between their way of thinking and their way of being. With prevailing economic conditions making it ever more challenging to maintain our cool, Victoria offers some simple suggestions for building our capacity for resilience when it’s needed most.


Victoria Castle laughs when she quotes a physician colleague of hers who once observed: “You want to be perturbable. Because if you’re not, we’re going to put you in a category called ‘clinically dead,’ and that’s a very different future.” While we might like to treat ourselves like machines—always running, never tiring—the truth is that we are living systems, designed to get perturbed or knocked off center from time to time.

Without the “fight or flight” instinct that comes with perturbation, we might not know to jump out of the street when a bus is barreling down on us. Those changes that stressful conditions trigger in our breathing patterns, blood pressure, hormone levels, and muscle tension are indispensible to our survival. They help us take action in a crisis. But as escalating complexity and regular bad news have created an atmosphere of chronic crisis, we find ourselves living in a state of "fight or flight" almost all the time now.

Building Resilience
How can we learn to hit the Reset button and get our systems back to a neutral state more regularly? Do we need to go away for a weeklong retreat, or get up an hour earlier and meditate? Not necessarily. We can’t be centered all the time; it is simply not possible. And that's not the real game anyway.  The key is to notice quickly when we’re off, and come back, knowing that we’ll get knocked off again. That’s resilience.

For Victoria, resilience and leadership have become synonymous. The most effective leaders focus their attention on building their capacity to function well under stressful conditions rather than on trying to relieve the pressure—which often isn’t an option. And the first step in building resilience is to recognize what it feels like when we’re in "fight or flight," when we’re triggered, or when we’re stressed; that means paying attention to what’s happening with our breath, what our muscles and bones are doing, what patterns our thoughts are falling into.

A Simple Daily Practice
Try this 4-step centering process to retune these interdependent systems to the same frequency, and return to a state of congruence from which you can operate more effectively. According to Victoria, you can do this practice as often as 100 times a day for 5 seconds a time. That's amounts to just 8½ minutes a day. [Click here to listen to a five minute audio clip to help you get centered.]

1. Exhale. Breathe deeply and fully.
It’s funny, but we might find it ridiculous that resilience could result from something as simple as breathing. We must be more complicated than that! Certainly, as an isolated thing, breathing isn’t going to change our lives. But part of what keeps us stressed is our tendency to hold our breath, leaving no room for fresh new breath to come in. When we exhale, we actually signal the biological system that we’re safe now, that it’s okay. Holding the breath sends the message “Danger, danger, danger.” So the release of the breath gives the message, “Oh, okay, we can reset now."

2. Relax your muscles.
With oxygen back in the system, we can purposely relax those muscles that have tightened up in response to stress. We don’t want to relax to the point where we go limp, but simply let go of all the unnecessary tension. We particularly hold tension around our eyes, jaws, abdomen, and for most of us, pelvis and legs. The skeletal system is designed to hold us up without the muscles having to work. So, if we simply let our skeletal system do its job, we can let our muscles soften onto the bone.

3. Expand to your full length
The third part is to actually let ourselves get long. From the soles of our feet through the top of our heads, we can fill ourselves up; give ourselves room to counter the contraction that’s taken place. One trick is to envision a sky hook going up to the center of the sky and an earth hook going down to the center of the earth, and being held along that axis. It’s not about straining to be tall or straining to be long, or being stiff. No, we’re just letting ourselves fill out here, as opposed to being shrunken down.

4. Choose to focus on what really matters to you
When we’re caught in "fight or flight", it’s very hard for us to shift our perspective to what we really care about. We get preoccupied with the things that are causing us immediate anxiety. Once we’ve turned down the alarm system by breathing and relaxing (un-contracting), we can remind ourselves about what really matters to us. Is it important to win this conversation? Or am I better served by tending to the quality of the relationship? Centering allows us to be in the present moment differently because we are looking through a lens that includes bigger considerations than the stresses that caused us to shut down.

As a practical matter, when we feel a sense of overwhelm, that really represents a prediction about the future. If we thought this crisis was just going to last for an hour or a day, we could deal with it. But when we believe that this is the way it’s going to be from now on, we hunker down, close off, and sadly, move away from other people. We’re less likely to trust or collaborate because we get stuck in a fear of scarcity and danger. If we can take a break every 10 or 15 minutes to take two or three breaths, let our bodies unwind, and put our attention where we want it to be, we can get back in the game with purpose, curiosity, and humor—and be way less worn out at the end of the day.

To listen as Victoria walks you through this centering exercise...
Open this five-minute audio clip .

Visit Victoria's website.