I was travelling in our car with my wife. She was driving and casually mentioned an email she had received that morning. It said that the invitation to an upcoming garden party at our faith community would only be going out to other faith communities as someone had objected to it being sent to non-faith organisations.

The effect was as if the blue touch paper had been lit inside of me and an internal rant erupted. What on earth do they think they are doing? How is that going to help us attract people to our community? etc,etc. Luckily I didn't need to give a response, but if I had, I would not have said anything constructive.

After about 10 minutes, I calmed down a bit and managed to express dismay at what had been done. I then realised that what had happened was exactly what I had read about in The Chimp Paradox book, my chimp had reacted and my human could not prevent it from happening and was not strong enough to do anything about it. Later on it occurred to me that what had triggered the outburst was the threat described in the SCARF model as fairness. I had interpreted the email as being unfair and reacted.

This experience highlighted how important fairness is to me and has helped me deal with situations where emotions are running high - I remind myself of how I felt at that time. How after being emotionally triggered I was unable to think rationally and it took 10 minutes for that reaction to subside.