In the Challenge of Change Profile we have a scale called avoidance coping, which is described as the ostrich principle for dealing with issues – stick your head in the sand and ignore them.  If you're the sort of person who puts off making phone calls because you're afraid of the response you might get, who postpones tackling a project because you don't know where or how to start, or who focuses endlessly on the trivial tasks at work because the big, really important one pushes you out of your comfort zone, you might be what we call an 'avoidance coper': you've learned to respond to the pressures in your life by trying to avoid thinking or doing anything about them.  This might work in the short term, but all you're doing is compounding the problem and making yourself miserable.  

This is a continuation of last week's two part blog. In light of recent tragic international events developing sensitivity to others couldn't be more important. 

One of the scales in the Challenge of Change Resilience Profile measures Sensitivity.  We usually talk about this in conjunction with the Detached Coping scale: people who are high on both have what we call Detached Compassion, which means that they can pick up quickly and accurately how other people feel but don't themselves become identified or involved with the emotions.  

Heaven help me, I've just been holidaying with a Toxic Achiever.  Do these people never relax? 

In the course of delivering the Challenge of Change Resilience programme, participants will from time to time suggest that rumination must have a purpose, otherwise it wouldn't have evolved. Evolutionary oversimplifications of this kind are widespread and persistent: as early as 1966 Robert Ardrey claimed in The Territorial Imperative that a human being is 'as much a territorial animal as is a mockingbird singing in the clear California night'.  The basis for his argument was that humans own property, but let's dispense with these sorts of glib notions by looking at the evidence.