Managing your emotions, which is a hallmark of emotionally intelligent leaders, is key to your influence and impact as a leader. But how do you get better at this critical leadership skill?
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We all admire leaders who are good at managing their emotions. Emotional self-control is a key component of emotional intelligence. Managing your emotions is not about suppressing them - but about expressing them appropriately. And at the right time.
Become Aware of Your Emotions
First we need to accept that emotions are natural, and largely out of our control - that is we don't really have any conscious control on what emotions arise and when. What we can work on is our awareness of our emotions and our response to them.
It might seem reasonable to assume that when an emotion arises, we become conscious of it. However, this is not always true. More significantly, we may not always be able to pinpoint the emotion we are experiencing in the moment.
This might not sound important, but unless we are aware of what we are feeling, we cannot address it.
Enhance Your Emotional Vocabulary
An important part of this is improving our emotional vocabulary. While we can discern whether the emotion we feel is positive or negative, some of us find it harder to pin point what exactly we are feeling. Psychologists talk about 8 basic emotions [1] : joy, sadness, anger, fear, trust, disgust, surprise and anticipation.
The emotions we feel are far more numerous - because they can vary in intensity ( so anger can range from annoyance to rage) or because they can be complex emotions - a blend of more than one of the basic emotions (for example contempt can be considered a blend of anger and disgust).
The ability to label our emotions accurately seems trivial, but according to some studies [2] the act of labeling our emotions suppresses activity in our amygdala - which is the part of our brain most closely associated with processing emotion and the source of much of our unconscious and habitual reactions.
Becoming aware and labeling our emotions accurately is the first part toward managing our emotions.
Feeling is NOT Reacting
Another important point to note is that feeling an emotion does not automatically mean we have to react to it. We are all endowed with the capacity to choose our response.
Stephen R. Covey eloquently described this in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People :
Between stimulus and response is our greatest power—the freedom to choose - Stephen R Covey
So managing our emotions means we identify our emotions and make use of our capacity to choose an appropriate response. But what might an appropriate response be?
Strategies for Managing Your Emotions
Some of the common strategies for responding to our emotions include
Depending on the situation, and your skills, some of these strategies maybe more or less appropriate for you. However, they provide a useful menu of alternatives, which enable you to choose your response in an emotional situation
An Alternate Perspective
While I am inclined to believe that we as leaders can and must manage our emotions, there is another perspective worth considering. In his article Emotions Are Data, Too, Gianpetro Petigilieri suggest that our emotions are not just about us.
While they do arise from within us, they are also shaped by our roles, our organizations, and what we have learnt (albeit unconsciously) about what we can get out of them
In this context, it is not enough to cultivate self awareness, it is also important to extend our awareness to examine the system around us. It is not enough to exercise emotional self-control, we should also be using our emotions as data about our surroundings, and what needs to change around us.
To enhance personal freedom and make workplaces more fair, we should stop expecting people to manage their emotions all by themselves
To conclude, while emotions are natural, and you have no control over when they arise, you can learn to get better at managing your emotions. This requires you to become more aware of your emotions, develop your emotional vocabulary, and train yourself to choose your response, rather than react unconsciously to your emotions.
How would you rate yourself on managing your emotions?
What are some approaches or strategies that have helped you in managing your emotions better?
Leave your comments below to join the conversation
Notes
[1] What Are Basic Emotions? by Neel Burton via Psychology Today
[2] Twitter Study Confirms the Power of "Affect Labeling" by Christian Jarrett via BPS Research Digest
Credits: Image by OpenClipart-Vector via pixabay.com
