A gorilla in red pumps

“Life is not an easy matter…You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism…” ~Leon Trotsky

I attended a convention this past fall — it was a networking event.  I don’t know about you, but whenever I am attending an event like this, I feel like we’re all a bunch of dogs, sniffing each others’ behinds.

At this convention, I met a lot of people who asked me, “So, what is it that you do?” or, “Tell me your story, Victor,” and I would tell them that I help people build better relationships.  More times than not, I would get a polite glassy-eyed stare and a nod (which means that they believed I couldn’t really do anything for them), and they’d move on to the next person.  Once in a while, I would meet someone who was genuinely interested in what I was doing and what I had to say, and it developed into a nice conversation.

One person in particular who I had talked with at the convention had written a book, and had it self-published.  I liked the look of their book, and I asked them for the name of the company they went through, and I wrote it on the back of one of my business cards.  I tried finding the card after the convention, but I must have inadvertently given it to another “end sniffer.”  I “friended” this person on Facebook, and then messaged them, asking for the publisher’s information again.  They accepted my friend request, but they didn’t respond to my message.

A few weeks later, I got an email from them, saying, in a nutshell, “Hello — it was nice meeting you at the convention — is there anything I can do to support you?”  I responded that it was nice hearing from them too, and I was wondering if they would be so kind as to provide me with the publisher’s information.  Again, no response.

So yesterday, I got another email from this same person…Here’s what it said (including my internal commentary in parentheses):

“How is your new year going?” (Doing great, but the year is almost 1/4 done…It’s almost March.)

“What are you launching this year?” (Um…Maybe a few bottle rockets around the 4th of July.)

“Would you want to build your list?” (Yes, of course.)

“I am doing a best seller campaign and it is a way to promote you and your list too…” (Cool.)

“How can I support you this year, my dear friend?”

Your dear friend?  Excuse me?

This is where I got a little bit frustrated.  I had asked them twice for the same information, getting no response.  It’s clear they aren’t listening to what I have to say.  More accurately, it’s clear they don’t care about me — they don’t value me — they appear (to me anyway) to be completely self serving.

This prompted me to think, “Are they really listening?”  Maybe I could say that they can support me by donning a gorilla suit, putting on some red pumps and Dorothy’s dress from “The Wizard of Oz,” throwing on a cowboy hat and riding a stick horse, while galloping in time to the “Chicken Yodel” in the local Wal-Mart parking lot.  Oh, and they could also support me by telling me the name of the publisher they went through for their book.

Do you think even that would garner a response?  I seriously question whether it will.

Frustration…What is it?  That is a good question.  More so, what is going on in our minds which causes the sense of being frustrated, because, if we know what causes it, maybe we can use the brain to sort of “prevent” or “minimize” future frustration.

I know why I felt frustrated.  I knew that I felt that this person did not value me.  They didn’t respect me to the point where they could simply read and respond to my email.  I don’t throw emails out asking for responses if I don’t intend to respond.  It’s disrespectful.  I felt that the only reason I was valued by this person was to use me to further their own endeavors — there wasn’t the intention of mutual benefit.  That’s frustrating.  To sum it up, I felt very disrespected, used, and certainly not valued.

I thought that frustration was based on anger, because it’s hard to determine which comes first — anger then frustration or frustration then anger.  So, I started to look around at what I could find out about brain studies related to frustration.

It turns out that research on the topic of frustration reveals that there are really two emotions at play.  One emotion is emotional distress, which stems from decreased activity in the middle of the brain, which contains dopamine neurons.  Dopamine is connected to our “pleasure system” and provides feelings of enjoyment and reinforcement which will in turn motivate us to do or to continue doing certain behaviors. When a person anticipates a reward, only to find out the reward has been omitted, there is decreased firing in this region, which is then coded as a learning signal. We end up learning from this experience that what we had anticipated didn’t come to fruition.

The second emotion is frustration, obviously.  This occurs when we see increased firing in the right insula (located in the area beneath our right ear and temple) and the — get ready for it — Right Ventral Prefrontal Cortex, or RVPFC.  This is located above our right eye.  Both of these areas are actually parts of our pain-processing system, so it could be said that frustration is a painful experience. 🙂

After reading this, it made a lot of sense.  When do we get frustrated?  When something doesn’t occur that we expect to occur.  When we expect our printer to print out a couple of pieces of paper, and it doesn’t (always at the least opportune time), we get frustrated.  We expect the pages to print promptly (the reward) and when they don’t (the omission), we experience emotional distress and frustration.  So true.

So, what can be done to decrease frustration?  Not much, other than learn from past experiences, which means that I likely won’t be asking, once again, for the publisher’s information from this person.

However, it is so tempting to reply using my “gorilla in red pumps” response…Just to see what happens.

Maybe I should fish that email back out of the trash and send it…

Photo source: freedigitalphotos.net