Do you just freak out or rise to the occasion?

Hi there guys, allow me to share with you something that happened recently - I was having a chat with some friends when one of them said that when he got stressed at work, say if he encountered a very difficult client or if he had discovered that he just did something wrong, he would immediately react to it physically either by feeling sick. He would either feel the urge to vomit or he would also get a bad headache like a migraine. A few other people agreed with him, pointing out that they would also react like that if they were to receive some really bad news. However, I had to point out that I don't do that because I am a gymnast and an actor and thus I am very used to handling extremely high pressure situations. Do I get nervous when I have to perform at a gymnastics competition or on stage? Of course I do, but I have trained myself to deal with my nerves in a way whereby I never show it. I have seen young gymnasts make a total mess of their routines at competitions because they allowed their nerves to get the better of them but with older gymnasts who have had years of experience coping with this stress, they learn how to remain very calm under pressure.  A fine example of this kind of composure was at the World Cup back in 1975 in London, after the Soviet gymnast Ludmilla Tourischeva dismounted from the uneven bars, the apparatus collapsed behind her. Yet she didn't even flinch once, she calmly presented to the judges and then walked off the podium without looking back at the chaos behind her - as far as she was concerned, her performance was over and what happened afterwards was not relevant. The amount of emotional maturity she must have had at that moment must have been unreal and you need to watch the video below to understand how her incredibly calm reaction juxtaposed the chaos of the apparatus collapsing behind her. Most people might find that hard to understand - though as a fellow gymnast, I could see exactly why Tourischeva behaved like that. 

I have never had an equipment malfunction like that before but I did have another occasion when I am proud to say, I reacted much in the same way and I did write a whole blog post about it. When I was in Panama City in May 2022, this crazy man tried to attack me with a massive machete. The moment I saw him, I calmly put my phone away, did a quick survey of my surroundings and plotted my escape route. I never knew I could run that fast, for such a long time without slowing down - I honestly don't know how I did that but when there's a madman with a massive machete chasing you, that's motivation to run quickly. I kept running at that speed until I ran into two policemen at a junction, when I stopped to speak to them, I could barely get the words out as that was the first time I had stopped to catch my breath after sprinting for an incredibly long distance. When I told that story to some friends back in London, one female friend said, "I honestly don't know how you kept your cool like that, I would have just started crying and given him everything - my wallet, phone, passport, bag, just take it all." I didn't want to be too judgmental, so let's call her Phoebe (not her real name). She was your typical white girl from a rich family, very middle class, privileged background, not very streetwise as she has had a very sheltered upbringing and she would have never had the kind of experiences to prepare her for that kind of situation in her life before. Thus if you were to put Phoebe in that situation, she would simply freak out, cry like a baby and literally do nothing to save herself from the attacker. I then pointed out to my friends that whether they reacted like Phoebe or like me in such a situation was not so much a matter of choice but a matter of training. When I was attacked in Panama, I turned into a sprinter that would have made Usain Bolt say, "woah look, that guy can run so fast!" Ludmilla Tourischeva's reaction wasn't just 'her character' but it was a result of her being one of the best gymnasts in the world at the 1970s and the amount of discipline that the Soviet training regime had installed in her had led right to that moment. Likewise, my pragmatic reaction when I was attacked in Panama was a reflection of all the years of training I had put in as a gymnast.

This then begs the question - what can we do to make sure that we take someone like Phoebe and give her the skills she needs to cope with life's very stressful situations? After all, if someone tried to attack her in the street, you'd like to think that she would have the presence of mind to defend herself, try to run away, seek help or at least do something apart from simply crying like a baby. Let's start at the very beginning - when Phoebe was a baby under the age of six months, she didn't have the power of speech to communicate with her parents when something was wrong. Like if she was in discomfort, if she was tired or if she was hungry, her only means of letting her parents know was through crying and that is the only way babies can communicate. But fast forward to today, Phoebe is an adult in her mid-20s, yet in that department, she has regressed to the state of a very young baby? How can this be the case? Is this yet another example of a person with poor social skills? Or are we simply setting the bar too high - is it reasonable to expect a person like Phoebe to be able to cope with a madman attacking her in the street with a massive machete? Well, I suppose it depends on the likelihood of that happening and as Phoebe lives in London and not Central America, that's not very likely at all. So does Phoebe need that kind of social skills if she is going to be a housewife in North London, rather than a sniper on the front line in Eastern Ukraine? Then again, people with the ability to remain very calm under pressure are around us all the time - just this week, I witnessed an accident on my way home. I will spare you the details but it was very serious; fortunately, the ambulance arrived very quickly and the paramedics were amazing in the way they didn't just freak out when they realized what they had to deal with - someone like Phoebe would not be able to cope in a situation like that, she would probably just default to crying like a baby in blind panic instead of helping the injured persons at the accident. In the case of the paramedics, can we deduce that because they deal with such horrific injuries everyday, they are used to it and that is why they do not freak out the way Phoebe would? Is this something that starts in our childhood?

Allow me to share another incident which I witnessed in a park recently here in London, we have had some very hot summer days in London and on this afternoon, the temperature was about 32 degrees. I saw a family having an argument on a park bench - there was a young boy, about seven years old who sat on the bench, refusing to move, complaining that it was too hot. The mother was trying to bargain with her son, "please darling, we are only walking to the bus stop - it is just there, see?  And on the way, we'll stop at the shop to get you a really nice ice cream, okay?" The father was having none of that, he raised his voice, "you're always indulging him like that - there will be no ice cream, you're going to get up and walk right now!" The boy then protested, claiming that he felt dizzy, he was going to throw up and to be fair those were signs of heat stroke and it was a very hot day. So what does the boy do when his father yelled at him? The boy starts to cry like a baby and I didn't want to stare, although we were in a public park, this was still a private matter for that family to resolve. I was very curious though what would happen next - if the father gave in, then the boy would learn that he could get his way by crying like a baby. But if the father got even more angry and threatened the boy with punishment for crying, then would the boy finally get up and start walking to the bus stop? Or would the mother stop the father from raising his voice now that the boy was crying like a baby? But what if this boy was really ill and suffering from heat stroke, perhaps he really needed medical attention rather than some tough love from his dad right then? I walked a bit further but lingered, just to see what would happen next. It was evident that the father and mother had very different approaches to parenting and all this while, the boy had started screaming his head off, like a baby in distress, crying for help. The parents just kept arguing until one kind woman approached them to try to help as she was so alarmed that the boy was in that  distraught state. However, the father brushed her aside, "no, don't give in to him - he just wants attention and we must never reward  bad behaviour like that. I don't want to set the wrong precedent." I felt like he had a point: I didn't want this boy to turn into Phoebe but I eventually felt compelled to leave as I felt quite uneasy.

So you might argue that this wasn't the right time or place to try to test the young boy's resilience or how he would react to a crisis, given the possibility that he might actually be suffering from heat stroke at that moment. However, it was not like that family was in the middle of the Sahara desert hundreds of miles from civilization - I stumbled upon them in a park in central London and the bus stop that they were trying to reach was just about 200 meters away (I checked with Google Maps), so even if the boy was genuinely unwell, they weren't asking him to do continue walking for hours. Besides, I did see that the parents had a big bottle of water with them, so the boy wasn't at any risk of dehydration despite the fact that it was a very hot day. So if you weren't going to use a trip to the local park as a chance to test your child's resilience to a crisis, then how low are you going to set the bar? In any case, if the boy had the energy to scream so loudly (mimicking a baby in distress crying), then I thought well you could have walked 200 meters to the bus stop. My guess was that the boy just didn't have the social skills to convey to his parents that he was very hot and uncomfortable, so he simply defaulted to what babies did because it was quite clear that it did at least have some effect on his mother (but not his father). Mind you, I have seen young children manipulate their parents even at that age, in order to get what they want. That would often involve a cunning mix of emotional blackmail and negotiation - so the kid could have either used this opportunity to ask his parents for something he has always wanted like, "if I get up now and walk to the bus stop even though I am clearly so unwell, I would forget about this incident if you promise to take me to Disneyland for our summer holidays." Or the kid could have complied with his parents but banked that memory as ammunition the next time his parents blame him for a mistake, "do you recall that day in the park when I nearly died of heat stroke because you misjudged the weather? I'm not the only one who is irresponsible, you too have made similar mistakes, so don't you start blaming me now!" So all that would require a far more sophisticated kind of social skills beyond simply crying like a baby. 

The bottom line is this: if we could solve problems simply by crying like a baby, then I'd be the first to start crying. But even people like Phoebe will realize that crying doesn't solve the complex problems we have to face in life, yet somehow, she just defaults to that response despite knowing that it is not a good response. I'm currently watching a rather interesting reality TV series on the BBC now called Go Hard or Go Home. It features eight contestants who are typical messed up young people from the UK who are trying to sort out their lives - the eight contestants have to live on an island in the Dominican Republic and are subject to extremely rigorous training by a coach and eight mentors; the challenges that they have to face in each episode are very physical and the training is brutal but the aim is to totally transform these contestants through this boot camp process. I was amazed at how many contestants just broke down and cried like babies throughout this process, despite the fact that it would be humiliating to do that on reality TV. These physical challenges often involve heights, so yes I get it, it is scary - you would be lying if you looked at some of the challenges and claimed you wouldn't be afraid. Two things surprised me - firstly, the fact that adults would cry like babies in the face of such a challenge; note that you can actually simply say, "I refuse to do this." The TV producers cannot force you to do a challenge, but these adults just burst into tears and cried like babies without first thinking it through, "what if I did not complete this challenge, what would be the consequences of my journey in this programme? Can I still survive till the next round even if I failed to finish this challenge? Am I the only one who doesn't want to do this or are there other contestants who are just as terrified as I am?" Nope, they didn't try to bargain or negotiate with the producers - they just cried like babies, talk about poor problem solving skills. The next thing that shocked me was how people responded to this kind of behaviour with a lot of patience and sympathy - I certainly wouldn't have been that nice as I don't believe in rewarding bad behaviour. Yet somehow, on the programme, that crying contestants were encouraged rather than mocked or even punished for crying like a baby, so it disappointed me to see that bad behaviour was rewarded like that. 

Finally, can we actually take someone like Phoebe and turn her into a tougher, more resilient character who would try to solve her problems when in a crisis mode rather than just turn into a crying baby as her default response? That's a good question - this was an issue that bothered me when my nephew was younger. So I remember this incident in Singapore when he was about 7 or 8 years old - he tried to run across a road without looking, I spotted a bus coming his way and instinctively I grabbed him before he got hit by the bus. Being the responsible uncle, I then gave him a stern lecture/scolding about looking for crossing the road and what was his response? He cried very loudly like a baby, right there and then at the side of the road; immediately, my parents swooped in and told me that this was not the time to talk about road safety - thus he effectively dodged taking responsibility for his bad behaviour by crying like a baby, knowing that my parents would respond to that - oh my parents made a terrible mistake there. Fast forward to today, my nephew is now serving his national service and imagine if he did something wrong, would he go into problem solving mode or would he default to just crying like a baby? The people in the army are simply not going to let him get away with anything even if he cried non-stop for hours, hence I hope he would have realized quickly enough that he was now in an environment where his bad behaviour would not be rewarded, but in fact would be harshly penalized. Any soldier in the army who responds in this manner would be ostracized, mocked and bullied - that kind of behaviour is simply not tolerated in the army. I suppose that's why I was not that worried about my nephew given that he would either be beaten up for crying like a baby or he would witnessed someone get beaten up for that same kind of behaviour to realize, oh shit, I just can't behave like that in the army - that kind of behaviour will be penalized, not rewarded. After all, I want my nephew to react like an adult in the face of a crisis, rather than a baby with no social skills or means to solve complex problems. However, unlike my nephew, Phoebe doesn't have to do national service so she will never be in that kind of challenging environment, would someone like her learn the simple lesson that nothing gets solved by crying like a baby? 

Finally, I want to end with a story from some years ago when I had a rude comment on social media from a Malaysian - I was interacting with dissident Alvin Tan online when someone in Malaysia said that white people hate us Asians so much and Alvin will die as a result of racism within a short time in America. I found that comment laughable and I said something like, actually I've been in Europe for over 20 years and I've not encountered anything that I couldn't handle thus far. This Malaysian responded by saying that perhaps I may had been lucky enough to have avoided racism all this time but sooner or later, I will encounter it and that's when I'll flee back to Singapore, crying all the way on the flight until the plane touches down at Changi airport. Now I never said that I have never encountered racism in the UK but I did say that I have never encountered anything I couldn't handled given that I  always spring into problem solving mode the moment something like that happens whereas this Malaysian clearly responds to this kind of situation by crying loudly like a baby. Why do some adults still react like that to when faced with a difficult situation? That's because they are hoping that others around them would respond to that cry for help - they're effectively trying to be the damsel in distress by crying. Now for the record, I'm really way too old and bald to fit the bill of the damsel in distress so I am simply going to get on with solving my own problems rather than waiting for someone to rescue me, such as when I was attacked in Panama City. I was quite shocked when I did some research into the issue of racism in Europe during the pandemic as many Asians who faced racism simply did what babies did - they just reacted by crying like babies instead of trying to find a way to deal with that situation. I shook my head and thought, what is wrong with these people? Yes I accept that it is truly horrible to be at the receiving end of any kind of abuse and bigotry, but why would you react to that by crying when it is only going to show the person attacking you that you are a weak victim and it is only going to make the situation far worse? When will someone say to these cry babies that they need to learn how to react to such situations in a far more mature manner and once you are an adult, you really should stop behaving like a baby and start behaving like an adult?

So there you go, what do you think guys? I have made it very clear where I stand on this issue. Do you think is it possible to change someone like Phoebe, given that I am hoping that my nephew will indeed learn some useful social skills in the army. Is it wrong for me to want to say to Phoebe, "girl, there's something desperately wrong with you, this is not normal. You need to change." Or am I the one who is being incredibly harsh on her? What would you do if someone tried to attack you in the street, would you have fought the attacker, tried to run away or just cried like a baby? Am I being too unrealistic in expecting some kind of miraculous transformation in my nephew's social skills whilst he completes his NS? How would you have handled the situation involving the young boy in the park who refused to walk any further on that hot day? How would you have tried to solve that situation? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.