Manage your emotions or they will manage you.
Managing your emotions is key to your effectiveness and impact as a leader. However, it's easier said than done. Our biology and conditioning conspire to ensure we are more likely to react emotionally than to respond thoughtfully.
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The key to better emotional self-control is not suppressing your emotions, but expressing them appropriately, at the right time.
3 key principles to remember:
⓵ You cannot address what you are not aware of.
⓶ Labelling emotions can help manage them better.
⓷ You can always choose how you respond.
In other words, the key to managing your emotions is to be aware of them, name them, and exercise your freedom to choose your response. But what is an appropriate response?
Some common strategies for responding to emotions include
? Choose whether to engage or avoid
? Change the environment
? Shift your focus - toward or away from the situation
? Reappraise and reframe the context
Depending on the situation, and your level of skill, some of the above strategies may be more or less appropriate. However, they provide a useful menu of possibilities - so you have greater choice in how you respond in any given situation.
