Manage Your Response to Your Emotions
SUMMARY
Emotions and feelings are two different things.
Emotions, on the one hand, is the physiological sensation that you feel in your body that lets you know that something's going on around you in your world. How you interpret that (where your thoughts go, where you relate that to previous experiences, and what you make it mean) will then determine how you choose to feel. From there, a continuation of this rumination and this whole process means that your feelings will fluctuate.
And all these started with that initial emotion.
This week, I want to help you to be able to do those things that you want to do and become the person that you want to become, whilst enjoying the emotions that you experience.
TRANSCRIPT
Do you find that sometimes your well-intentioned plans are taken over by these incredible things called emotions?
Well, you are just like everybody else on the planet because you're an emotional being. So, stick with me, because this week I want to help you to be able to do those things that you want to do, and become the person that you want to become, whilst enjoying the emotions that you experience.
Hi, this is Grant Herbert, VUCA Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to get us back on track with talking about all things Emotional Intelligence by jumping into the second quadrant of Self-Management to help you to manage the response to your emotions.
Over the last few weeks, we've been talking about all things to do with YOU — your personal leadership and the ability to lead yourself well.
Before we start talking about leading processes and leading people, we talked about building up your identity, which is YOU being able to get to a position of self-approval and operate out of that.
We talked about your emotions and the different types of intelligence that you have.
Last week, we finished with intention, looking at what was important to you. Your values, vision for the future, and your mission in life.
Now, all these things are great and I know you've been working hard and are going through all that with me, and that's fantastic, however, because we are human beings and not human doings (we are not robots, AI, Chat GPT or anything like that), we have these amazing things called EMOTIONS. How you interpret and navigate those emotions will determine whether or not your values, vision, plans, and everything we have discussed will come to fruition.
How do you make sure that what was meant for good won't turn out to be harmful?
To do this, you first need to understand what emotions are, and what they're not.
Emotions and feelings are two different things.
Emotions, on the one hand, is the physiological sensation that you feel in your body that lets you know that something's going on around you in your world. How you interpret that (where your thoughts go, where you relate that to previous experiences, and what you make it mean) will then determine how you choose to feel. From there, a continuation of this rumination and this whole process means that your feelings will fluctuate.
And all these started with that initial emotion.
In self-awareness, I talked to you about being able to identify that — noticing it in the moment so that you could then look at naming it and increasing your emotional vocabulary is really important to do that accurately.
However, self-awareness on its own is not valuable at all. In fact, it can be quite frustrating to know yet not know what to do.
So, self-management is about taking what you've learnt in that awareness and then using that information to manage the response to your emotions.
That last point is very important to have a distinction. You need to take note that you never manage the emotion, but you manage the response to the emotion. Because the emotion is a physiological sensation — a cue and clue that's there as a natural part of being a human being to let you know what's going on — it is not something you want to control.
When you control or manage your emotions, what ends up happening is you try and push them down by ignoring and suppressing them. Then, it doesn’t get to run its course and give you a clue about what you need at that moment. So, the distinction is that you need to manage that process between the emotion and the feeling.
The feeling is psychological. It involves what you make it mean, how you relate that to who you believe you are, and all those identity issues that we've talked about before.
And so, our feelings are what we need to manage.
From that initial understanding, and noticing what the emotion is, you need to do things differently from how you’re doing it now. Develop new strategies to interpret and navigate that emotion. Just like any other behaviour change, it starts with what you think.
Your thoughts become your actions.
So, managing the initial thought process when you experience that emotional sensation is key. It's paramount to you getting a lot healthier behaviour coming from your initial emotion.
Emotions are not something that gets left at the door or that you separate yourselves from. They are an integral part of who you are as a human being. It's about embracing that emotion and being able to utilise it to navigate your journey in a healthier way.
To do that, you need to continue to work on those identity issues:
Who you believe you are and who you believe you're not.
You need to reprogram your inner dialogue and work with that mini-me to take thoughts captive when they are taking you off the positive path.
In fact, talking about that word, there's no such thing as a positive or negative emotion. They're all equal and all have value.
What you do with that emotion is what turns out to be either positive or negative. It's all about behaviour.
Behavioural Self-Control is the first competency of self-management. It's about being able to have new strategies so that whenever you experience a certain emotion, you shift the dialogue and the thinking so you can shift the behaviour. Moving forward, we are going to go deeper into that.
Next week, we will look at actual processes you can take yourself through that are based on logic and utilise what you know and puts it in a process that can then lead you to the behaviour that you want.
Since I’m a human being, just like you, certain things happen in my world (just like it does in yours) that trigger certain thought patterns that bring up certain feelings that I've felt before. Those feelings can either be good and bring pleasure or can be bad and bring pain.
However, all of that is data that we can use to manage the response to our emotions.
When you’re able to do that, you have a better relationship with yourself and with others, and it's good for the greater good.
However, as we step into this starting next week, I want you to remember that this is all about incremental change. It's about reconditioning those thought patterns that are already there.
You already have strategies that you run for the emotions that you experience. It's about tweaking and adjusting them, and I will take you on that journey.
So, make sure that you stay with me and continue this conversation.
Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this and get deeper into behavioural self-control by helping you identify your triggers and those thoughts that lead to the behaviour you don't want.
I'll see you then.
