Managing Your Emotions

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Managing Your Emotions
Adapted from the book : Emotional Intelligence at Work - by Hendrie Weisinger, Ph.D
We’ve all heard someone – maybe even ourselves – being admonished to “get in control of your emotions,” or “chill out.” We usually take this as meaning “stifle your emotions.” But as we learn, emotions give us lots of clues as to why we do what we do. Stifling them deprives us of that information. Suppressing emotions also doesn’t make them go away; it can leave them free to fester, as we’ve seen in the case of anger.
Managing your emotions means something quite different from stifling them. It means understanding them and then using that understanding to turn situations to your benefit. Let’s say you’re in a meeting and your boss resoundingly denigrates a suggestion your made. Then he says that if you’d stick to what you’re supposed to be doing you wouldn’t come up with such harebrained ideas. A spontaneous, unchecked response from you might be, “You stupid, insensitive idiot. If you stuck to what you are supposed to be doing you would see what a good idea it is!” While you might be quite right, such an outburst on your part will surely result in another severe reprimand, and perhaps even dismissal.
Here’s the emotionally intelligent way of dealing with that situation. You first become aware that you are feeling anger. You then tune in to your thoughts. The first ones might not be so ennobling: He’s a pig. I could kill him. But then you engage in a constructive internal dialogue: He’s being unreasonable. I will not sink to his level. I will not allow my anger to show. I know my idea’s a good one. Then you might tune in to all the physiological changes – fast breathing, pounding heart – you are experiencing, and practice relaxation techniques. You look at your anger actions – clenching your jaw, making a fist – and stop doing them. Then you give yourself a few minutes’ time-out by leaving the room to get a cold drink of water. Finally, after the meeting you seek a solution to this problem of your boss’s publicly putting you down.
Let’s look at different ways you can learn to manage your emotions. We see how taking charge of your thoughts, visceral responses, and behavioral actions works to this end, and the role that problem solving plays. Being aware of your emotions (as we see in the example of checking your angry response) is the first step
The Components of Your Emotional System Must Work Together
One can often liken the emotions to a computer. In the same way that your PC consists of different components (hard drive, monitor, printer) that are interfaced with each other, your emotional system is made up of different components that interact and must all work together and efficiently for optimum performance. If the components fail to work as they should, the system can crash.
In the case of your emotions, the components are:
 Your thoughts or cognitive appraisals
 Your physiological changes or arousal actions
 Your behaviors or action tendencies
As to which component actually sets your emotional system in motion, some argue that thoughts precede bodily changes, while others take the opposite position. There’s a large group that believes behavior comes before thoughts or physiological
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changes. I see no value in getting involved in this chicken-or-egg debate. What is important is to understand that emotions are produced by an interaction of these three components in response to an external even; by taking charge of them, we are able to effectively manage our emotions.
Actually, there is another component to your emotional system: your emotional context, or your emotional makeup. This encompasses how you were brought up, what you believe, experiences you have had – in fact, everything that makes you who you are today. It can be a fight you had with your wife before coming to work that causes you to feel depressed all day, childhood instructions to be nice and not challenge anyone that lead you to be passive and suppress anger and similar emotions, or the physical abuse you suffered at the hands of your father that causes you to feel perpetual anger with male bosses. Your emotional context underlies all three components of your emotional system and can influence your emotional responses to varying degrees.
A situation with an emotional undercurrent challenges your emotional management system to the fullest. Understanding your emotional context (the subject of countless books and therapy sessions) is optimal, but the more focused solution here is to bring your emotional management tools into play in the workplace. You then deal with the manifestations – say, angry outbursts at your boss – not the context of the past conditioning.
How to Make your Thoughts, Physiological Changes, and Behaviors Work for You.
It is important to keep in mind that it is your own thoughts, bodily changes, and behaviors that drive your emotional responses, not someone else’s actions or an external event. In the example of the denigrating boss, it is your thoughts about your boss’s outburst, your pounding heart, and your clenched fist that cause you to experience anger. By understanding this, you recognize that the power to manage your anger and indeed all your other emotions rests with you, not with your nasty boss or anyone else, and that managing your anger involves taking charge of the components of your emotional system.
Take Charge of Your Thoughts
Your boss’s reprimand generates a number of thoughts. I could kill him is one; I know my idea’s a good one is another. We “hear” our thoughts by tuning into our inner dialogues (which we discussed in the first chapter under “Examine How You Make Appraisals”). These internal conversations, which may precede, accompany, or follow emotions, play an important part in defining an shaping our emotional experiences, for example, it’s easy to see how the statement “I’m going to kill him” can only perpetuate your anger, whereas the different statement “I’ll talk to my boss about this tomorrow” can help reduce your anger.
We often have the same inner dialogue over and over, as the situation repeats itself, thus causing us to engage in destructive internal dialogues as soon as the situation arises. Suppose your coworker repeatedly takes files out of your office but never puts them back, even though you’ve asked him on several occasions to do so. Your internal conversation might go something like this: He’s so selfish. He never listens to me. He’s completely disrespectful. I can’t stand this anymore. Each time you look for a file that he hasn’t put back, this counterproductive dialogue is triggered. Well, your coworker gradually picks up on this; then he begins
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feelings that you are a generally angry person, and that you dislike him.
The thoughts that spontaneously pop out (I could kill him; He’s so selfish) are what we call “automatic thoughts.” They are different from the internal dialogues we discussed under self-appraisal, which usually involve some deliberation (I have all the facts at hand; the points are in order; I will make a fine presentation). The latter we call inner dialogue or internal conversation. Taking charge of both kinds of thoughts is an important step in managing your emotions.
Tune in to Your Automatic Thoughts
Automatic thoughts usually share some characteristics:
THEY TEND TO BE IRRATIONAL.
Because they are spontaneous, they are uncensored. You can say something outrageous like “I’d like to kill him,” even though you never in your life have seriously considered killing anyone. The intensity of the thought is a reflection of the intensity of your anger. Because they just pop out, you don’t have time to consider the logic of the automotive thought. In the case of the coworker, you tend to make generalizations that aren’t necessarily valid. “he never listens to me” is just not true; your problem with him is only over the files.
WE USUALLY BELIEVE THEM.
Automatic thoughts happen so fast that we generally don’t question them. “He’s always so disrespectful” comes into your head so often about your coworker that you just accept as truth that he’s disrespectful.
THEY ARE OFTEN CRYPTIC.
Automatic thoughts are often expressed as a kind of short hand: “Jerk.” “Liar.” “I’m dead meat.”
THEY TEND TO TRIGGER OTHER AUTOMATIC THOUGHTS.
As you can see in the case of the coworker with the files, one thought acts like a catalyst for another: “He’s so selfish. He never listens to me. He’s completely disrespectful. I hope he gets fired.” This not only perpetuates and exacerbates your feeling of anger, but it makes it more difficult for you to shut off those thoughts; it’s like the domino effect.
AUTOMATIC THOUGHTS CAN LEAD TO DISTORTED THINKING.
Take the instance of a boss who calls you in to her office to talk about her disappointment over the unsatisfactory relationship your client says he is having with you. Here are some examples of automatic thoughts that might flash through your mind:
“I’m in big trouble.”
“She thinks I’ve really messed up.”
“She’s going to fire me.”
“I won’t be able to find another job.”
“I’ll lose everything.”
“My family will leave me.”
The emotion you’re experiencing here is fear. But let’s sit tight in this meeting with the boss a little longer. She seems visibly upset. You interpret her anger as being directed at you/ you become defensive. But after you talk longer, you learn that your predecessor also had problems with the client, and your boss is losing her patience with the client, not with you. Because you went in to the meeting with insufficient information about the situation, your automatic thoughts jumped in with erroneous assessments.
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The nature of distressful situations, such as being reprimanded by your boss or being annoyed by a coworker, is that they tend to generate distorted thinking: styles and patterns of thinking that color your perception of reality. Learning how to avoid distorted thinking helps you can gain greater control over your automatic thoughts and manage your emotions.
Tips for Avoiding Distorted Thinking
Don’t Overgeneralize.
Statements such as “I’m always so slow to catch on” and “He never listens to me” come up because of specific circumstances. By generalizing, you give the wrong impression that the statements always apply. Yes, were slow to catch on to an idea being presented, but you are usually very quick. The generalization here can only lead to feelings of low self-esteem. Yes, you coworker doesn’t listen to you about the files, but he does listen about other things. The overgeneralization here can cause you to feel inappropriately indignant and morally superior – attributes that do not endear you to anyone. It is more accurate to say “sometimes” instead of “always” or “never.”
Stay away from Destructive Labeling.
“She’s a jerk.” “He’s so inconsiderate.” Here again, your interpretations are based on specific situations. Yes, your boss behaved unfairly and disrespectfully toward you, but he doesn’t always. So, too, with the coworker. By using this destructive labeling, you suggest to yourself that the situation is irrevocably bad, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.
Avoid Mind Reading.
We often don’t know what another person’s motives or intentions are it’s easy to see what unnecessary anxiety is caused by thinking that your boss is going to fire your, Assuming that your coworker doesn’t respect you is also an example of trying to read minds. If you have questions about a situation (is your boss going to fire you? Does your coworker not respect you?), hold off on drawing any conclusions until you have more information. Asking directly is sometimes a good way of getting the information: “You seem dissatisfied with my performance. Is this the case?”
Don’t Have Rules About How Others Should Act.
This is what Plato called the “ought motive”: “My boss ought to have apologized to me for how he treated me in the meeting.” By having rules for how people should act, you set yourself up for much disappointment and anger because people very often don’t behave as we want. We become convinced that injustice is being perpetrated. Not only that: such distorted thinking interferes with our ability to understand the other person (understanding others is a key ingredient of developing good relationships with them, as we see in Part Two of this book) because we see the other person from our own perspective. By recognizing that people are all different, knowing that they all have their own sets of rules, and being flexible and allowing for other people’s ways of doing things, you automatically stay away from such words as ought, should, and must.
Don’t Inflate the Significance of an Event.
Let’s say you can’t find a letter that the other party’s attorney sent to your boss. You’ve searched everywhere for it, you feel certain that your boss did
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give it to you, and you know you should have copied it right away, but you didn’t. You might say to yourself, this is a catastrophe. I’m going to lose my job. We’re going to lose the case. I can’t bear it. None of this is probably true, unless of course you repeatedly lose correspondence your boss gives you. The situation is bad, but it is far from a disaster. You can always call the other attorney and ask that the letter be sent again, although you might be somewhat embarrassed by having to do so. Turning the consequences of a negative event into a catastrophe means magnifying its intensity many times over. Instead of feeling mildly worried, you become seriously anxious, which only distorts you r thinking even more. Avoid using such words as catastrophe and disaster, but if you do hear yourself saying them, be aware that your thoughts are magnifying the importance of the event. Don’t take this,” because you can take it.
In the next section we look again at some of these same situations to see how carrying on constructive inner dialogues helps override the negative effects of automatic thoughts.
Develop Constructive Inner Dialogues
As we discussed earlier, the difference between automatic thoughts and inner dialogues is that the former are spontaneous and often counterproductive, whereas the latter are deliberate and can be productive. By avoiding automotive thoughts as much as possible, by cutting them off as soon as they start, and by learning how to have effective inner dialogues, you can help defuse the effects of distressful situations. You can even learn to reprogram some destructive automatic thoughts to avoid having them in the first place.
Take an example of Govind your coworker’s not returning the files. Here are some ways to manage your anger in this situation. Let’s say the automatic thoughts (He never listens to me and so on) have already come to mind. First, acknowledge the emotion: “I’m really angry at Govind.” Then restate the generalization, “He never listens to me,” so it applies just to the particular situation: “Govind doesn’t return the files when I ask him to do so.” You can’t say he doesn’t listen to you (that would be mind reading) because maybe he does. He doesn’t return the files because he’s busy doing other things and forgets; or maybe he’s holding on to them because he might need them again, but he neglected to tell you that.
Next, turn the destructive labeling “He’s so inconsiderate” into a thought that again looks at the particular situation: “Govind seems to be inconsiderate when he doesn’t put the files put back in my office. But he often does very nice things for me in other situations.” This thinking keeps you from seeing no possible solution (if Govind were absolutely inconsiderate, there would be none, and this realization would make you angrier). Acknowledging Govind’s positive attributes makes it easier for you to be solution-oriented.
As for the automatic thought “He doesn’t respect me,” which suggests mind reading, if you’re really concerned that Govind doesn’t respect you, you might say to yourself, “It makes me think that Govind doesn’t respect me, but I have no other indication that that’s how he regards me. Maybe I’ll ask him.” This way, you can dismiss your presumption of lack of respect, whether because you see no evidence for it or because Govind tells you that it’s not so.
We’ve seen how saying “I can’t stand this anymore” is counterproductive. An alternative inner dialogue that better covers that territory might go something like this: This has happened so many times with Govind, and it’s making me angrier and angrier. I think I’ll talk to him during coffee break and tell him that it’s really hard for me when I need to have the files in my office yet I have to go chasing after them.
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I’ll ask him if there’s some way we could resolve this. I would even be willing to come and get the files if he called me as soon as he was done with them. This is an example of problem solving (which we get into a little later on), but the point to remember is that instead of backing yourself into a corner, given yourself an action plan for resolving the problem.
Your inner dialogue can also take the form of questions: Why do I get so furious with Govind when I don’t with Anand, who often does the same thing? Am I really so inconvenienced by not having the files? Or am I really angry with Govind because he got the nicer cubicle? By asking questions, you begin to explore the meaning of your emotions, and you can use this knowledge to help resolve the situation.
Another useful type of internal dialogue is the instructive statement, which helps guide you through emotionally stressful situations. Instructive statements reassure you and suggest the course you should follow. (Examples of such statements are in the exercise below.) we’ve learned that people find it very helpful to prepare ready-to-use instructive statements for emotionally provoking situations they are likely to encounter. Here’s an exercise for doing that.
Exercise to Prepare Sample Instructive Statements
1. Suppose that within the next three months you are likely to encounter three situations that promise to be emotionally volatile and cause you considerable stress. As illustrations, let’s consider a job evaluation; a presentation of a report, plan or idea; and a response to an angry client, customer, employee, or manager.
2. Taking one situation at a time, imagine the emotions it is likely to cause. Same possibilities are fear, anxiety, embarrassment, anger, and shame.
3. Write down instructive statements you can use to help you effectively manage your emotions in the situation.
Here are some examples. The first set relate to a performance evaluation:
“I have done a good job.”
“I don’t need to get defensive.”
“I was not entirely satisfied with the outcome of (whatever), but the boss knows I had no control over the cause of the problem.”
“In any case, overall I have worked very hard and gotten good results.”
“I will try to learn from my boss how I can do better.”
“If I don’t understand what my boss is referring to, I will ask for specific examples.”
“I will pay attention to the positive things she says, not just the negative ones.”
Examples that relate to a presentation:
“I have fully prepared for this.”
“I have all my notes at hand.”
“I know my idea (or plan or report) is a sound one.”
“I know the staff (or audience) will recognize that a thorough job I’ve done.”
“I will speak slowly and clearly and look at people.”
“I will do fine, and I will enjoy the presentation.”
The third set of examples prepare you for an angry confrontation:
“I will listen carefully to what (whoever) says.”
“I won’t interrupt.”
“I will speak slowly and calmly.”
“I will acknowledge the other person’s concerns.”
“I will ask questions when something is unclear.”
“I will ask the person how we might resolve the situation together.”
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Now repeat the exercise for three situations that you are in fact likely to face shortly.
It is easy to see that by preparing yourself with such instructive statements, you have a much better chance of handling the situation in an emotionally intelligent manner. You are also well on your way to cutting off those negative automotive thoughts before they even start.
Emotional Intelligence at Work
As my company’s press relations person, I have to do about thirty press conferences a year. They used to cause me tremendous anxiety for days beforehand. Then I started to explore my thoughts and found that I had been telling myself that I wouldn’t make a good showing. I didn’t know what I was talking about, I would be ridiculed. No wonder I was so anxious!
Then, whenever I started to feel anxious, I would take a few deep breaths and ask, “What am I telling myself? What am I uptight about?” I found that most of the things didn’t make sense – I would never be ridiculed. The things that did make sense – like I really didn’t know the material well enough – caused me to get better prepared.
Now, a week before each press conference I tell myself over and over, “It’s going to be great. I’m well prepared. It’s an opportunity to educate the press. I don’t look foolish.” I can honestly tell you that I now look forward to press conferences. (Dennis M., press officer for a high-tech company)
Manage Your Arousal
The next component of the emotional system is arousal, or physiological changes. You will recall on self-awareness, we discussed how feelings tend to be associated with specific physical sensations: nervousness with a hitter stomach, anger with warm cheeks. We explored how you can often get in touch with your feelings by looking at both their sensory and behavioral manifestations. Here we look at the physiological changes behind those sensations – what we also refer to as arousal. We explore how you can tune into the changes and use them as a cue that it’s time to calm yourself to a level of arousal that enables you to think and act effectively.
How to Identify Shifts in Arousal
Increases in heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and perspiration rate are all signs of physiological changes. They may be associated with any number of different emotions; the first step is not to identify which one, but to acknowledge that a change in your arousal level has indeed taken place.
Let’s say you’re sitting at your desk going over your recent sales figures, and they look pretty good. You’re feeling pleased and proud. Then you get a call from your boss: “Carla, I have some bad news.” You feel your heart beating faster. “St. Mary’s Hospital has decided to go with Sansome Pharmaceuticals instead of us.” You feel your breath coming more quickly, perspiration beading on your forehead. Your arousal level has gone from a calm state to a heightened one. The emotions associated with the changes here are probably anxiety (when your boss says she has bad news) and fear (St. Mary’s was your major customer, and without them you have no chance of achieving adequate sales goals).
By instantly nothing the physiological changes, you give yourself the opportunity to use them as a cue that it’s time to modify them. (We look at some techniques for doing that in the next section.) By modifying the changes, you can diminish the anxiety and fear, and thus keep them from becoming overwhelming. Remember, it’s much easier to
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prevent yourself from getting anxious or angry than it is to stop those emotions once they have taken over.
By not tuning in to the changes in your arousal level, you run the risk of acting impulsively. For instance, your boss says she has some bad news and you immediately let forth an expletive you will later regret. She tells you what St. Mary’s has decided and you begin yelling: “How could those idiots at St. Mary’s do that? I always knew they couldn’t be counted on.” Or you say to yourself, “This is it. I’m going to get fired. I can’t handle this.” All of these impulses can have unfortunate consequences. The expletive suggests to your boss that you can’t handle difficult situations. Calling the people at St. Mary’s idiots gives her a clue as to why the hospital went with another supplier. Your comments to yourself only serve to engender and exacerbate anxiety, fear, and anger, all of which show.
Here’s an explanation of why these changes take place. Humans are programmed with a fight-or-flight response for coping with stressful situations. Originally it was designed to ensure for coping with stressful situations. Originally it was designed to ensure survival. (You’re foraging in the woods and come across a saber-toothed tiger; you flee. You territory, and you fight.) You heart rate increases and more blood flows to your brain, organs, muscles, and other parts of the body so they have more nutrients and can respond best, whether you fight or flee. Your breathing rate increases so that more oxygen is brought to all parts of your body, because oxygen is what your cells need to work.
As you can see, the fight-or-fight response is very useful for life-or-death situations, when you need that massive infusion of blood and oxygen. But these aren’t the kind of situation we face in our usual workday (though it sometimes seems that way). Frequent increases in heart or breathing rate can actually take a toll on our bodies, by causing a number of adverse physiological problems, from hypertension to heart attack. So our physical health is just another reason why we want to keep changes in our arousal to a comfortable level. Here’s an exercise for learning how you can recognize changes in your arousal level so as to manage your arousal.
Exercise for Tuning into Changes in Your Arousal Level
1. At the beginning of each day, over a two-week period, choose two situations you will experience during that particular day (they don’t need to be the same ones each day), one of which is likely to have no effect on your arousal level, the other of which is likely to result in a marked increase in your arousal level. Make sure that prior to and during these situations you do not consume anything that could affect your heart rate, as do coffee, caffeinated soda pops, sugared products, cigarettes, and other stimulants. Also choose situations that you expect to result in different emotional responses, so you become familiar with the physiological changes associate with each one.
2. While the situation is taking place, try to pay careful attention to your breathing, your heart rate, and whether or not you are perspiring. This is especially difficult in stressful situations, as your attention is focused on the situation itself; but make an effort.
3. Immediately after each situation, write down what your heart rate, breathing rate, and perspiration were like.
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Here are examples:
Situation Heart Rate Breathing Rate Perspiration
Typing invoices slow slow and regular none
Speaking fast fast and irregular beads on
In meeting forehead
Because the arousal level can vary so markedly, from an emotionally inert state (like that created by typing invoices) to an emotionally active one (speaking in a meeting), even by the end of the first week you will become quite adept at instantly tuning in to changes in your arousal level once you can do that, you are ready to learn how to diminish your arousal.
Use Relaxation to Decrease Your Arousal
We’ve learned how to tune into changes in our arousal level so we can notice them immediately. The next step is to diminish the arousal as soon as we discern it. The most effective way of doing so is by relaxing. When you relax, you slow down such bodily activities as breathing and pumping blood and restore your body to its normal state. This then slows down your emotional response, giving you time to determine the best course of action to take.
There are many ways to learn relaxation techniques. Meditation, yoga, self-hypnosis, and biofeedback are just a few. Different ones work for different people. Here we learn a conditioned relaxation response, one that doesn’t require reading another book or taking a class to learn.
The premise behind the conditioned relaxation response is that you first associate relaxation with specific images and thoughts. Then, whenever you are in a distressful situation, you call up those images and thoughts to relax you. Soon you begin to associate the distressful situations with the calming images and thoughts. Eventually, the first signs of a stressful situation call up those images and thoughts, and you relax. The result is that the period of emotional distress is shortened considerably. Here are the steps for learning the response.
Exercise for Developing a Conditioned Relaxation Response.
1. Choose an appropriate place to practice: a calm, quiet place where you will not be disturbed or distracted. This prevents stimuli or events (noise in the corridor, your phone ringing) from disturbing you as you concentrate on relaxing images and thoughts.
2. Find a comfortable position. (If your leg becomes cramped or your back starts to hurt, you will lose your concentration; so find some position that you can comfortably hold during the course of the practice.) it might be lying against the pillows on your bed, or sitting on a sofa. The goal is to reduce all muscular tension.
3. Adopt a passive attitude. Passivity is probably the most important component in developing your conditioned relaxation response, because when you are passive, you’re not bothered. You just let things happen; you relax. To achieve passivity, you might engage in an internal dialogue something like this: If something distracts me, that’s OK, it just means I need to learn better how to tune the distractions out. If this response seems hard to do, that’s OK, it just means I need to practice it more.
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Whatever happens when I’m practicing, that’s OK, I’ll just let it happen.
4. Choose a calming mental construct that works for you, and repeat it to yourself over and over. This can be an image (a calm lake), a word (peace), a sound (shhhh), a statement (I am at rest) – whatever feels comfortable to you. Then imaging it, say it, or sound it out over and over. This helps you shift your mind from being externally oriented to internally oriented, so you keep yourself from distraction by external factors. Spend about twenty minutes each day doing this, concentrating hard on whatever image or sound you have chosen. Eventually, someone could be shouting on the street below and you won’t even hear it because you’ll be so focused on the image of the calm lake, or the sound shhhh, I have found that by practicing twenty minutes each day, most people can develop the conditioned relaxation response in ten to
fourteen days.
Only you have conditioned yourself to relax at will, you can use your relaxation response to short-circuit any change in arousal. Here’s how you do that.
Exercise for Learning to Use Your Conditioned Relaxation Response
1. Choose a distressful situation that you are likely to encounter in your everyday work, one that causes a particular emotion. This can be making a cold call (anxiety), confronting a coworker about a problem (anger), or talking about a
possible job layoff (depression) – whatever is appropriate in your job situation.
2. Imagine yourself in that situation. Use all your senses. In your mind, go through the steps you are likely to take in the situation (with the cold call, this means looking up the phone number, dialing the number, asking for the person, introducing yourself) and try to evoke any sensations or behavioral actions you might experience (fast heartbeat, rapid breathing, quiet voice, shaky speech).
3. Introduce your mental construct into the imagined situation. As you go through each of the steps of the process in your mind and anticipate the accompanying sensory or behavior response, tune into your relaxation image, sound, or statement. For example, as you imagine asking for the person and your voice quivering, say to yourself, peace…peace…peace…, or imagine the calm lake, or do whatever you have chosen as your mental construct.
4. Repeat this whole process once a day for several days. Each time, use the same situation and the same emotion (you’ll work on others once you have mastered this one). When you are able to automatically shift, almost instantly, from the first signs of a change in arousal to your relaxation construct, you have learned to associate your mental construct with the distressful situation. You’re ready to more on to using your conditioned relaxation response in the real situation.
5. Introduce the mental construct into the real situation. Go through all of the stages involved in making an actual cold call. At the first sign of a change in arousal, instantly call up your chosen image, word, sound, or statement. The ultimate goal is to have the image, word, or sound kick in just before any changes in arousal occur. If you find it is too difficult, then go back to practicing in the imagined situation until you can successfully use the technique in the real situation.
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What you are doing here is reprogramming your arousal for calmness so that it is easier for you to think and act effectively. Now let’s look at how to take control of your behavior to achieve the same end.
Take Control of Your Behavioral Patterns
Behavioral patterns are actions that you tend to do over and over in response to a particular situation. For example, perhaps you yell when you get angry, tap your pencil on the desk when anxious, smile when pleased. Just as our physiological changes are tied closely to our emotions, the same is true of our behaviors. So to manage our emotions, we need to be able to take control of our behaviors; to do that, we must first be able to recognize them.
Learn to Recognize Your Behaviors
Certain behaviors are generally associated with specific emotions. For example, we approach people when we are enthusiastic, we sit around doing little when we are depressed, and we fidget when we are nervous. As we’ve seen with physiological changes, when you allow them to go unchecked they perpetuate the emotion. If you don’t use relaxation to decrease your heart beat or slow down your breathing, you perpetuate your anger. The same is true here. By allowing yourself to go on fidgeting, you can’t help yourself lessen your anxiety.
Often, we don’t notice our own behaviors. We’ve raised our voice in response to anger for so long that we’re not even aware that we do it. Here’s an exercise to help you tune in to your behaviors.
Exercise for Recognizing Your Behaviors
1. Make a list of emotions. In a notebook, write a number of emotions that you are likely to experience in your workplace. Here are some examples:
Anger
Joy
Anxiety
Contentment
Depression
Fear
Confidence
Sadness
Frustration
2. Monitor the emotions, and see what behavioral patterns accompany them. During a two-week period, monitor each of the emotions of your list and the accompanying behavioral actions. Let’s say you are afraid the chief engineer is going to move you to another site. As a result, you avoid passing her office, you sit as far from her as you can in the lunchroom, and you skip a meeting that she is going to be at. To take another example, suppose you have just been given the go-ahead for a project and are feeling confident. You tell your coworkers about it somewhat boastfully. For all of the emotions on the list, note the corresponding behavioral actions.
3. Look for any patterns. Let’s take the example of a possible move. You’re afraid that you might be moved to another site, but you also fear that your coworker told your boss that last week, when you said you had a dentist appointment, you really went to the ball game. You respond
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by doing everything you to avoid running into your boss or your coworker. Looking at your behavioral actions in response to these two fearful instances, you probably deduce that when you’re afraid you avoid the people who are connected to your fear. (We discuss how you can use this knowledge in the next section.)
4. Ask others for input here. If you feel comfortable, you might want to ask a coworker who knows you well and respects you, or your assistant – probably not your boss – how you react when you’re angry, anxious, or depressed for example, your coworker might tell you he’s noticed that when you get frustrated that things aren’t going anywhere in meetings you tend to get sarcastic, making comments like “Well that suggestion should certainly win you an award.”
Derail Counterproductive Behaviors
As you can probably imagine from these examples, sarcasm, avoidance, and boastfulness are counterproductive behaviors. Sarcasm alienates that people it is directed against, avoidance makes your boss and coworker think you’re being rude, and boastfulness makes your coworkers not want to talk with you. Here are some ways you can derail those behaviors that work against you.
Tips for Staying on Top of Your Behavioral Actions
1. Take deep breaths. This might seem rather futile when you’ve got something as forceful as rage behind you, but deep breathing serves several functions. First of all, it keeps you from doing anything else. If you’re concentrating on taking deep breaths, you’re not going to be able to yell or go off bragging to coworkers. Second, it’s a signal to yourself: pay attention, get control, stop doing what you’re doing. Third, deep breathing slows you down.
2. Engage in a constructive inner dialogue In taking charge of your thoughts, we saw how useful internal dialogues can be in helping to get clarity, refocus, and alter your course of action. They serve a similar function here, let’s say you have recognized that you are afraid of the
possible site transfer. You have identified your corresponding behavior as being avoidance. Here’s a constructive internal dialogue for this situation:
VOICE # 1: I’m afraid of being transferred to another site, and what I am doing is hiding from the chief engineer.
VOICE # 2: Am I gaining anything from this behavior?
VOICE # 1: Well, by not talking with him I’m delaying finding out the bad news. On the other hand, the news might be good – maybe I won’t be transferred. In any case, I’m just prolonging and intensifying my fearfulness.
VOICE # 2: The chief engineer probably thinks I don’t like him, or I don’t want to have anything to do with him, or I’m a bit peculiar.
VOICE # 1: I’m wasting a lot of time with this cat-and-mouse game.
VOICE # 2: What would work better for me here?
You might decide that you should ask the chief engineer if you could meet with him for a few minutes. Then you tell him that you have heard rumors that you’re going to be transferred to another site, and you’re wondering if there is any truth to the rumor. This comes under problem solving, our next point of discussion.
Become a Good Problem Solver
The basic of good management is effective problem-solving skills: determining the best way to get employees to work well
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together, figuring out how to get the staff behind a new project, and so on. This is true whether you’re managing a staff or managing your emotions.
Generally, a distressful emotion is caused by a problem situation: the lost attorney letter, the possible site transfer, the coworker who doesn’t return files. To effectively manage your emotions, you need to develop good problem-solving skills, the goal being to determine the most effective course of action to take to resolve the problem. But before we explore some way you can become a good problem solver, you need first to understand the nature of problems.
If you think of life as a series of situations that require some kind of response, then not situation is inherently of problem. It is the ineffectiveness of your response that makes it so. Take the case of the lost attorney letter. You look for it in your desk, your briefcase, next to the copy machine, but you can’t find it. The lost letter is not the problem (because if you found it there wouldn’t be a problem), but your inability to find it is. Your ineffective response to the situation of the lost letter is causing the problem.
This is not an exercise in semantics. The value of looking at problems this way is first to see that they constitute a normal part of life. After all, we can’t possibly always choose the most effective way of handling a situation, and this means we create problems. Second, if your initial response to a situation is not working – you can’t find the letter – then you always have the option of choosing another response (ask someone to help you look, or call the attorney to ask for another letter).
Once you accept that problems are a normal part of life, then you no longer go on thinking there is something wrong with you for having them. You are also less likely to deny that they even exist. We tend to deny problems because they usually upset us, but denying them doesn’t make them go away. Figuring out how best to resolving the situation that brought on the problem is how to make the problem go away; that’s problem solving. Here are ways you can learn to develop good problem-solving skills.
Identify and Define the Problem Situation
When you state a problem specifically and concretely, you put it in focus and force yourself to see what is relevant and what isn’t. Let’s say you stay the problem situation this way: “My job is driving me nuts.” The abstract statement gives you no clues as to what specifically provokes you, why it happens, or who is involved. Thus any resolution is quite elusive. The emotionally intelligent way of identifying the problem situation is to define the specific irritants. You ask yourself who, what, why, when, how. These might be some answers to understanding why your job is driving your nuts: “I am given much too much work to do. My boss is in over his head, so he’s not there for me. My coworkers don’t seem to know what they should be doing, so they’re not doing much of anything. I’m always frustrated and tired.” Once you clearly define the problem situation, you can look at it differently.
Change Your Perception of the Situation
One of the difficulties with problem situations is that we tend to look at them with tunnel vision. We get stuck in our usual mode of dealing with things, and then we can’t find a solution. By reframing our thoughts about the situation, we are able to come up with new and useful responses. Here are some reframing thoughts:
 The real problem isn’t who is involved; the real problem is how I respond.
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 The real problem isn’t what’s done that bothers me; the real problem is how I feel.
 The real problem isn’t how it happens; the real problem is when I deal with it.
 The real problem isn’t why it happens; the real problem is why I respond the way I do.
Here are some ways to reframe thoughts about the dreadful job:
 The real problem isn’t my boss and coworkers, but the fact that I never talk to them about the difficulties I’m having.
 The real problem isn’t that my boss keeps giving me more and more work, but that I haven’t found a way to get help with it.
 The real problem isn’t that my job is dreadful, but that it makes me feel frustrated, tired, angry, and depressed.
 The real problem isn’t that my job id driving me crazy, but that I haven’t yet found an effective way of dealing with the situation.
As you can see, reframing your thoughts about a problem situation enables you to look at the situation afresh. You can then see that you’re no longer stuck in a rut but simply facing a challenging situation for which you’re on your way to finding an effective response. The way to do that is to look at a variety of options.
Generate Alternative Solutions
The goal here is to come up with half a dozen different strategies, because a generous number of options gives you the best chance of finding the most effective solution. Brainstorming is one of the most useful methods for coming up with a number of creative solutions. The idea behind brainstorming is that you toss out ideas as fast as they come to you. In brainstorming, storm is the keyword: just let the torrent of ideas flow, unedited, uncensored. Here are some ways to have a productive brainstorming session.
Tips for Effective Brainstorming
1. Defer judgment. Don’t start criticizing ideas during a brainstorming session, as that inhibits further flow of ideas. Just write the thoughts down as fast as they come, and defer judging their merits until the decision-making stage.
2. Encourage freewheeling thinking. The wilder the idea, the better, because it’s the very craziness that opens you up to all kinds of imaginative solutions. Besides, it’s easier to tame a wild idea than to make a creative solution out of a lame idea.
3. Go for quantity. The more ideas, the more options you have. The more ideas you propose, the more new ones you come up with.
4. Leave the details for later. Just come up with the broad ideas; you can fill in the specifics after you’ve generated you list. Defining the details impedes you brainstorming.
5. Use ideas as catalysts for others. Combine ideas, build upon ideas, come up with opposite ideas – anything to keep them coming.
Explore Different Options
Here are a few ideas that might have been on your brainstorming list in the instance of the dreadful job:
 Find another job.
 Take one sick day a week.
 Find some time to chill out.
 Don’t do any work on the weekend.
 Give boss a lesson in management skills.
 Take time-management class.
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 Suggest to boss we keep track of all hours we each spend on each project.
 Lead insurrection and take over department.
 Talk to Personnel about firing all do-nothing employees.
 Break down jobs I do into individual tasks and ask boss if others on staff can take over some.
Clearly, some of these ideas are wholly impractical. But you can see how they inspire others that are actually quite reasonable. Taking a sick day each week, thought not a feasible solution, suggests another idea: that you need time to chill out. This one then leads to the idea of not doing any work on the weekend.
Look at each idea individually and carefully consider the consequences of implementing it. Take, for instance, the idea of giving your boss a lesson in management skills. Not a good idea, because your boss would probably see you as impertinent and arrogant – or itching for his job. But this idea leads to the one of your taking a time-management class, which is a sound one. Imagine yourself asking your boss if the company would pay for you to take a time management class because you think it might help you cope better with the overwhelming amount of work you have. You might even imaging your boss also taking the class – you could let him seem to come up with the idea instead of you – or at least your sharing with him some of the things you learn, which will ultimately help him be a better manager.
Define the Best Strategies
Eliminate ideas that seem to be ineffective, and combine ideas if it’s useful to do so. Then make a separate list of the three best strategies. Under each one, list as many of the positive and negative consequence of the strategy as you can. Here are helpful questions to ask yourself:
 How would this strategy affect what I need, what I want, and how I feel?
 How would it affect the people I work with?
 How would it affect the significant people in my life?
 What are its short-term consequences? Long-term consequences?
Let’s apply some of these questions to exploring the benefits and drawbacks of the proposed strategy of not doing any work on the weekend. Here are some answers you might derive.
 It would give me time to chill out and be with my family.
 I’ll probably have to work late several nights a week to get all the work done.
 It will help me feel less depressed, angry, and anxious.
 Because I’ll be working late several nights, the other employees and my boss will see how diligent I am, and maybe it will inspire them to be more so.
 My family will miss me during the week, but they’ll be assured I’ll be with them the whole weekend.
 Because the boss sees that I’m no longer working on weekends, he probably won’t ask me to do those weekend trade shows that take place three times a year, which I like attending.
It certainly seems that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, so this would be a good strategy to implement. The second and third strategies you come up with might be to take a time-management class and to see how you can bring other staff members into your projects to do some of the tasks
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that you normally do. Carry out the same weighing of benefits and drawbacks with those strategies.
Evaluate the Results
You now have three strategies for coping with the situation of the horrid job. Your problem-solving skills enable you to come up with a new response to a persistently irritating and distressing situation. But problem solving doesn’t end there: the final stage is evaluating the results to see if you need to refine or alter your strategies. Here are some questions to ask yourself in this regard:
 Are things happening as I thought they would?
 Are the results meeting my goals?
 Is this solution better than the old one?
Let’s say you are getting far behind in your work because you aren’t working weekends, so far behind that you resume going in on weekends. This causes problems with your family, and it deprives you of the rest you need. You may have to go through the problem-solving process again to find a different solution: talk to your boss about getting even more help from the other members of the department; see if there’s any way of scaling down some of the projects, and so on.
Additional Techniques for Managing Your Emotions
We’ve learned how to take charge of each of the three components of our emotional system, and we’ve seen the role of problem solving. Next we look at three additional techniques – using humor, redirecting your emotional energy, and taking time out – that you can use to help manage your emotions.
Use Humor
You’ve heard the adage that humor is the best medicine. You’ve undoubtedly experienced humor’s salubrious effects on such negative emotions as anger, depression, sadness, and anxiety. Well, there’s actually a scientific explanation for this phenomenon. Laughter, a by-product of humor, stimulates the release of protein substances called endorphins. As the level of endorphins in the brain increases, the perception of pain – whether physical or emotional – decreases. Essentially, laughter causes the body to produce its own painkiller.
There is of course another benefit to laughter: it serves as a distraction, turning us away – even for a moment – from whatever distressful emotion we may be having. It’s little difficult to be depressed about you awful job during the very moment that you’re having good laugh. That moment of respite can be quite useful in giving you pause to reappraise your situation, get control of your behavioral actions, or whatever. Here are some ways I’ve found to bring humor into my day.
Tips for Generating Humor
1. Put on “Candid Camera” glasses. Take five or ten minutes out of your workday and try looking at your coworkers, your office, and your boss through a hidden-camera perspective, as in the old TV program of the same name. observe them from an absurd, whimsical, or silly perspective, rather than the serious, somber, stomach-churning perspective from which you may normally view them. Moments ago, Edward was giving his usual lame excuses for why he couldn’t help out with the report; now he looks like a court jester holding forth at the water cooler. The reception area looks the cockpit from the starship Enterprise, with all its flashing lights and equipment. Your boss, moments
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before, was haranguing you about the report being late; she now looks like a silly magpie as she flits from office to office. Chances are that after this experience you’ll return to your office feeling better disposed toward your boss, Edward, and the report. The point is not to laugh at others, but to gain awareness that we often take ourselves and the events we encounter too seriously.
2. Take humor meditation break. When things get especially distressful during the day, try to take a short break of five or ten minutes to do something that is likely to produce a laugh, even a teeny one. Close your mind to external distractions as much as possible, and read funny passages from a joke book or humor scrapbook; look at the funnies in the newspaper; or think of a funny experience from the past.
3. Create a humor-filled environment. Set up a bulletin board in your office or workspace for cartoons, silly photographs, jokes, and humorous quotations. Then look at it whenever you need to laugh. Change its contents regularly so the humor stays fresh.
Redirect Your Emotional Energy
As you experience an intense emotion, energy is being expended. You tend to tense muscles and move your body more. Your circulatory and respiratory systems work much faster. Your mind goes at a quicker pace, with those automatic thoughts. What I’ve found works well in these situations is to redirect this energy into some activity that has nothing to do with the situation at hand.
Suppose you’re extremely anxious about your job evaluation, which is to take place later in the day. You find yourself fidgeting and pacing, thinking I’m going to get fired. He’s going to give me a terrible evaluation. Instead of continuing to fidget, pace and entertain dreadful thoughts – which we’ve seen just perpetuate your anxiety – take up some simple task, some busywork. This distracts your from your anxiety and also helps you gain a sense of accomplishment that you’re actually getting something useful done.
I find it’s quite helpful if I make a list of some of those tasks – filing, ordering supplies, dusting, copying notes, cleaning my desk – and then pull out the list when I need some distracting busywork. Knowing there are constructive things you can do when you are angry or anxious is a good antidote to feeling immobilized by those emotions.
Take Time Out
In the same way that relaxation techniques can calm down your arousal level, taking a break from an emotionally taxing situation can slow down your emotional responses. Sometimes the time-out can be almost momentary: you take three deep breaths before responding to your angry boss. A brief time-out gives you the moment you need to keep yourself from saying something you might regret. Deep breaths are the first form of time-out you should practice.
Some situations may be so intense, so emotionally distressing, so potentially volatile that the only way to preserve your dignity (and perhaps even your job) is to remove yourself entirely. Recall the earlier example of your boss denigrating you in a meeting. Although it would be difficult to leave the meeting for an extended time-out (say, more than five minutes), you could excuse yourself to go to the bathroom. There you might dab some water on your neck or wrists to cool yourself down.
Suppose a coworker accosts you in the corridor and starts berating you for undermining his position with your mutual manager. You might say, “Look, this is really important, and I want to talk with you about this, but just let me go tell my assistant to hold my
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calls.” This gives you a few moments to calm yourself down and collect your thoughts.
Anger in perhaps the most potentially volatile of all our emotions as it is usually another person who provokes our anger and at whom it is directed. With anger, you may need an extended time-out of an hour or more to return to a state in which it is possible to effectively deal with the situation. Here are some ways to defuse your anger.
Tips for Managing Your Anger
1. Communicate your anger. Let the person with whom you are having an angry exchange know that you are angry or that your stress is building. You might say something like, “I am beginning to feel very angry.”
2. State your wish to remove yourself temporarily from the situation. You could say, “I would like to stop arguing for a little while so I can think more clearly. Then I’d like to get back together with you in an hour and talk this thing through,” you should set a limit for the timeout, probably no more than an hour. (leaving the time limit open-ended makes it too tempting to avoid the problem indefinitely, perhaps with the hope that it will resolve itself – which it won’t.) Also, you don’t want to put the other party at an unfair disadvantage by leaving it at your discretion what time you reconvene.
3. Remove yourself immediately. Then do some deep breathing, or use constructive self-statements in the time you have to yourself.
4. Use the time-out productively. During the time-out, do some useful busywork, as discussed above. Use your relaxation response to calm yourself.
Even Positive Emotions Need to Be Managed
Although the emphasis is on managing what might be called negative emotions – anger, anxiety, fear depression, frustration, and others – positive emotions as joy, contentment, and confidence must also be managed.
For example, as nice as it sounds, enthusiasm can sometimes lead to impulsive behavior. Think of a project proposed in a meeting that you find so exciting it causes you to volunteer to head it up – even though you already have more on your plate than you can handle. Or the joy you feel over a promotion, which causes you to go around boasting may anger a colleague who was rejected for it
It’s easy to see that by using your emotional management techniques you can handle such situations more effectively. You might take a few deep breaths and conduct a brief internal dialogue before rushing through with your announcement
Putting All the Emotional Management Tools Together
We’ve looked at the three components of our emotional system – our thoughts, physiological changes, and behavioral actions – and seen how staying on top of them is essential if we are to effectively manage our emotions. We’ve seen how these components interact with one another and work together: constructive internal thoughts can help slow down your physiological changes and behavioral actions, a diminished arousal level can help you gain control of your thoughts and behaviors, and productive behavioral responses such as deep breathing can help defuse destructive automatic thoughts and facilitate return to a comfortable arousal level.