Harnessing Your Emotions Part 1
Last week, we learned about the importance of emotions to good decision-making. This week, we're going to talk through the process of harnessing our emotions so that they direct us toward our goals, as opposed to derailing us from the things we want to accomplish.
The effects of emotions on decision-making are enormous. You know this just as well as I do from personal experience. Research has demonstrated that emotions have a significant impact on what we decide to do or how we choose to act in a given situation.
When we experience a strong, perhaps even overwhelming, emotion - particularly if it's an emotion like anger or fear - we can become "flooded" with that emotion. When that happens, we often lose our ability to make a good choice about what to do next.
If you're anything like me, your initial reaction is to bottle that emotion up. To "stuff" it down somewhere, hoping to bury it under a mountain of other disregarded feelings. Unfortunately for me (and perhaps you), those emotions end up coming out sideways - with people who don't deserve an outsized emotional reaction from us, or rattling us such that we can't seem to take the next step in the right direction.
I'll give you a quick example. There was a spelling error in the subject line of the newsletter that I emailed to you last week. I often make mistakes when it comes to things like that - misspelling words and not catching them, writing incorrect dates in emails, etc. Trust me when I tell you that this is not for lack of trying. I always triple-check emails before I send them out - and I still don't catch these mistakes sometimes.
The fact that I don’t catch these mistakes (despite having systems in place to help me catch them) is something that really bothers me, especially in a professional context. I take pride in my work, and I was just so dang annoyed about it! And, it wasn't just the fact that I made a mistake - it was the fact that I made a mistake despite efforts to not miss these types of errors and that this is something that I do much more frequently than I'd like.
I didn't want to deal with those emotions. I didn't want to think through my anger and disappointment with myself, so I stuffed it. After all, it was just an email, right?
I was rattled, but I chose to ignore that fact and move on to the next task - which was to send a preparation document to 9 clients for a series of upcoming Zoom sessions. After carefully checking every document (they were personalized), I sent them off - only to then realize that I'd made a mistake on the dates on two of them.
You can imagine my frustration. On cue, the soundtrack of fixed mindset thinking started playing in the (neurological) background. I recognize that something like this is not going to seem big to some of you, but it felt big to me for all kinds of reasons that I will not go into here. And…I was particularly annoyed because I knew that I'd made those additional mistakes because I was rattled. Instead of dealing with my feelings head-on, I insisted on stuffing them and pressing on. I let myself get derailed.
So then, after all of that, I decided to take another approach: I let myself feel my feelings.
And you should, too.
Why? Because emotions gain strength when we don't let ourselves feel them. That's not just me talking - that's science. Stuffing our emotions only increases the power that they have - they will come out eventually, and they will do so much more volcanically than we want them to if we don't address them as they arise.
Think about the time when a disagreement at home led you to react in a way you wish you wouldn't have when a colleague asked you an annoying question. Or when a meeting at work went badly, and you headed home and let those emotions out on the first person who greeted you at the door (or the grocery store clerk, or the driver who swerved in front of you, and so on).
So, step 1 in harnessing your emotions: feel your feelings.
We'll talk about what to do after that next week.
Ok, it's YOUR turn - where did you let your emotions derail you this week?
