How to Tame Your Emotions to Achieve Success
Hello! I am Olga Krasilnikova. I have been working at Bercut for the last 2.5 years. At first I was responsible for the training and development direction, now – for the psychological well-being of the team.
During my work as a psychologist and coach, I have conducted over 200 sessions with TOP managers, team leaders, senior and leading analysts, developers and testers. At the meetings, we learned to recognize emotions and their messages, to find a solution based on the information that the emotion carries, to change our thinking and behavior. This helped to improve relationships in teams, to achieve KPIs, to move up the career ladder. Earlier, I wrote an article “Relax, take IT easy: how to bring calm back to work”. And today we:
let's find out where we go wrong when we try to manage our emotions at work;
let's figure out how to make emotions your guiding star in achieving goals;
Let's look at specific situations where working with emotions helped get a raise, a new position, and complete tasks on time.
What's the problem?
Emotions can interfere with building a career, moving towards a new goal, changing a project, job. Even when we just want to talk about a raise, we can be overcome by fear, irritation, anger, and resentment. It is not always possible to cope with emotions.
Let's look at real phrases heard during individual coaching and psychological sessions:
“I don't have enough knowledge and experience to move on to the next career position.” What's behind it? Annoyance. Sometimes irritation.
“I don't feel supported by the team,” fear sets in. “What if they don't accept me? What if I'm left alone?”
“I stopped feeling the joy of life” – there is an emptiness inside, which is disappointing, because you want your work to bring joy, for the quality of life to improve. But this is not the case.
“I didn't pass the selection, but my colleague got the position he wanted” – this is how envy is born. “He could do it, but I couldn't. Why? There must be something wrong with me.”
“The boss is laughing at me” – how dare he? And there is anger behind it. I don't want to be treated like that. I want respect.
All these emotions – fear, disappointment, sadness, anxiety, frustration, disgust, shame – appear every day, sometimes several times. They come down to one word – discomfort.
The strength of discomfort directly depends on the environment, people, tasks and the characteristics of the nervous system. Even on whether we got enough sleep or not. But do you want to go towards your career goals with discomfort? It doesn't matter what it is: a new position, a salary increase, leading a new project. Even if there is more money, more interesting and complex tasks.
I definitely don't want to. And everyone I worked with also had a negative answer.
Therefore, the most common way to cope with emotions is not to experience them. Which leads to the next difficulty: people consider emotions undesirable and choose either to avoid them (by not doing certain things) or not to experience them (freeze them). And this is understandable, because negative emotions do not give us dopamine and serotonin, oxytocin.
This means that we will constantly use avoidance, just to avoid feeling bad. When avoiding, our actions will go around this negative emotion: for example, we need to talk directly and honestly with our boss about a promotion. But I know that I will be scared, I will feel uncomfortable. What do I do then? I put it off. Or I know that everyone is waiting for the report, but I am so bored writing it. I’d rather pour myself some coffee or look out the window, take a photo of the cat, just to avoid feeling this boredom.
The second way is to freeze, that is, to hide emotions deep, deep in the body, pretending that they do not exist. The mistake is that we refuse important life experiences.
Hence the conclusion: to regain control of your career, you need to meet the emotion and learn to withstand it. If we are in the emotion long enough, we have a chance to see what it is about.
Otherwise, we automatically choose a familiar path, although we need to act differently. And here we need to understand how our emotions work.
Why do we need emotions?
Emotions are a system of rewards and punishments for actions that help or contradict survival. One problem is that the versions of the “software” in our heads are about 200,000 years old.
The brain continues to react in the same way to things that would have killed us in the past, but mean nothing today. The brain believes that we will die if we are unattractive to someone, if someone thinks badly of us, if we are rejected by a significant figure. Rejection by a group once meant death.
The brain continues to prioritize negative experiences. For every positive experience, we remember 10 negative ones. Why, you ask? There used to be more dangers – missed one of them, and that's it. Positive experiences did not threaten survival.
But this is a “mistake” of the brain. We are guaranteed not to die because of rejection by the group, lack of respect, bad relations with the leader and other moments that bring emotional pain.
If we want to change this, we must train ourselves, we must try to update our “software” ourselves. If we let it go, we will constantly experience negative emotions: anger, fear, disgust, and so on.
What does the ability to experience happiness depend on?
According to researchconducted by Ken Sheldon, Sonja Lyubomirsky:
50% of our ability to experience happiness is genetically determined;
40% is influenced by internal factors (sleep, nutrition, thought management, meditation, training);
10% of happiness comes from external factors (where, how, with whom you live).
Happiness research from Gallup, Oxford University and the Centre for Well-Being Research, confirm these numbers.
Just imagine, only 10% of our happiness depends on external factors. And we attach such great importance to them! Our genes influence 50%. Well, some are “lucky” to inherit anxious genes, some – depressive ones, and for some everything is relatively normal. As they say, what grew, grew.
As much as 40% of our happiness is contributed by sleep, nutrition, and body training. And here is another point – cognitive management, or thinking management. We will stop here.
Let's consider 2 planes of action:
Let's talk about strategy first
The methods that worked best with the requests of colleagues at Bercut were CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy).
CBT is based on the following scheme: thought – emotion – action – result.
First, a thought appears in our head, like an electric discharge. Then this discharge triggers neurochemistry. That is, emotion is essentially just a chemical process inside us. Emotions provide energy for action – our heart begins to beat faster, our breathing becomes shallow or deep, our hands begin to move or, conversely, to drop. And then the result that we get because of the action we have taken (or the choice of inaction).
Every situation that happens at work and brings with it a negative emotion can be broken down into this diagram.
I will show you real examples from Bercut
Here is Dasha. She wants to become a leader:
Thoughts: “I dream of a leadership position, but I have no management experience.”
Emotion: “Anxiety”. Dasha feels anxious, worried, worried, because she wants to take the position, but she is afraid to even take some steps towards the goal.
Actions: “I’m learning,” I don’t tell my manager about my desire to develop.”
Result: “I miss the opportunity to express myself and gain experience.” Dasha gets a lot of theory and no practice, she stands still.
Another example is Misha. He is a team leader in QA, 12 people in the team:
Thoughts: “Only I can do these tasks, I don't want to let the guys down.” Misha says: “But I want to help them! Yes, I take on tasks. And I help.”
Emotions: “Sadness, annoyance.”
Actions: “I fill all my time with operational tasks.” Misha's schedule includes other people's tasks, not his.
Result: “I’m not developing, I’m working overtime, I’m burning out, I think that ‘team lead is not for me’.” Misha starts to think that the management track is not for him and he needs to go back to the expert track.
Please note that emotion is not only a consequence of thought. It is important that emotions can be changed through thinking and that they provide energy for action or inaction.
In the context of the topic, we are not very interested in the level of “action” and “result”. To answer the question “how to cope with emotions?”, you need, as Einstein advised, to rise to a higher level. In this case, it is the level of thoughts.
Who is to blame and what to do?
A thought in itself cannot be good or bad. Emotion arises at the moment of divergence of our picture of the world from reality. When we expect one thing, and reality shows another. And if the latter is better than we expected, then a positive emotion arises. If reality falls short of our expectations, the emotion will be negative.
Every time our expectations of the world and other people collide with our own description of reality that contradicts it, we become destabilized internally, and along with this we experience emotion.
For example:
I thought that the offer would say 400,000 rubles, but it was twice as much.
They promised to call with the results of the interview, but they didn’t.
I wasn't sure I wrote the code correctly, but it turned out there wasn't a single error.
I thought that I could complete the task in 2 days, but I couldn’t, it took me 10.
I was prepared for the puppy to chew all the wires, but he only ate a slipper.
I expected positive feedback from the customer, but received a modest “okay”.
The main thing here is the discrepancy.
Let's go back to the examples of Dasha and Misha
Dasha believes in the idea that “management experience is necessary for the team lead position, without it you can't apply.” At the same time, reality says: “Dasha, well, you have zero in your work record, you have never had a single mentor. You have never substituted for a manager.” And that's why Dasha is anxious? Not because she wants to, but she can't. But because she believes that experience is necessary, but she doesn't have it.
Or Misha. He believes that he cannot let the team down, that only he can and should do some important work. But reality says: “There are 24 hours in a day, you have one brain, two hands, you have 12 people on your team. Well, sorry!” Hence – sadness, disappointment, annoyance.
But it is very important to see another thought behind our discussion of this point. [KO1] Every time we experience negative emotions, we have a chance! A chance to reconsider our picture of the world, our thoughts about reality. After all, negative emotions are a sign that our brain made a mistake, predicting something far from reality. And this means that we need to rise to our thinking, see where there is a discrepancy, and think about what to do with it.
Globally, there are two strategies here:
Change reality, i.e. bring it to your expectations = set a goal and take action to get what you want. For example, request feedback on the interview results yourself, get information and adjust your behavior, or acquire the necessary knowledge for that very Dasha's promotion.
Bring expectations to reality, and this means accepting what is. For example, there is no opportunity to move to another city or country, get some kind of paid education, and we cannot change this now.
As Karl Friedrich Oetinger prayed: “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can. And grant me the wisdom to know the difference.”
It is important for us to draw the following conclusion from this block. If we want to learn how to cope with various life events and quickly return to a calm state, we need to train the quality of thinking every day by doing the following exercises:
we practice breaking down situations into levels of “thought – emotion – action – result”;
we rise to the level of thinking every time we feel bad;
we look for the discrepancy between our expectations and reality;
we choose what we want to do with it.
Let's move on to the next block. Now it's important for us to figure out what to do when we're already in an emotion.
Tactics: Learning to be informed by emotion
The most important thing at this stage is to understand what the emotion is telling us. Emotions have one function – to show what the brain is worried about. It tells us what our body has already prepared for.
So we only have 1 second to choose our next reaction. And if we use this one second, then we can choose between an automatic reaction like “you're an idiot” or “screw you! here's my statement” and another behavior that will bring us closer to the goal.
If we fail to use this second, we will miss this information and become a hostage to emotion. In order to remind ourselves of one second and be able to use it, I suggest a simple exercise.
Exercise
When you feel that emotion has taken over you: you are already angry, scared or sad. Before you answer a colleague or manager, write a letter, say out loud or to yourself: “One second.” Even if you have a meeting, you can say: “One second,” and get up from the computer. The main thing in this one second is to hold on and not fall into emotion. Then choose more constructive actions.
How to understand: are actions constructive or not? In my opinion, there are 2 indicators:
Are you getting closer to your goal or further away? And your colleague to his goal?
Does contact with the person opposite remain or is it broken?
What else can help us in the moment to benefit from working with emotions? This is understanding what the brain is telling us through emotion.
Each emotion asks a specific question and signals something:
Fear is a “possible loss of integrity.” The brain reads the situation as unclear, uncomfortable, unpredictable, or predicts the possibility of such a situation. The brain sees an attacking (non)verbal reaction. We feel fear, which means we expect to lose the group, resources, and see the possibility of death. It is important to remember that the emotion of fear calls for action. It asks the question: what should be done now to avoid problems in the future? And this does not mean that we should run or freeze. We can ask ourselves: “Is there really a threat of danger now? What actions should be taken to protect ourselves?”
Anger – “safety requires restoration.” Often anger is a consequence of fear, and always an action aimed at protection. Anger requires restoration of gene safety, assuming that you are stronger than the “enemy.” Anger always tells us about the violation of boundaries. And then we can ask ourselves: “How can I restore my boundaries? Where do I need to protect myself? What should I do to restore safety?”
Disgust – “getting ready to get dirty” in both the literal and figurative sense. It is an emotion of self-preservation. And then we need to ask ourselves: “Where do we need to restore “purity”? Where am I betraying myself now and where am I being dishonest with myself?”
Sadness is “the unwillingness to accept.” Sadness is a mixture of loss and helplessness: we or the carriers of our genes have lost integrity and are resisting what has already happened. Sadness is always about the fact that we need to let go of something, but we do not want this farewell. When you feel sadness, you can ask the question: “What do I not want to let go of? What do I need to let go of?”
By asking yourself these questions, you will learn to quickly, already in a situation where you are experiencing negative emotions, choose those actions that will help you move towards your goal and return to a balanced emotional state.
But what if you didn’t use this “one second”? If you still fell into the emotion, forgot about the divergence, forgot about the message of the emotions, we do the opposite with you. Instead of tension, we relax. Try to observe the body and what is happening in it. You can ask yourself: “In what part of the body is my emotion located? What does it look like? What does it resemble?”
The thing is that the longest duration of emotion is 12 minutes, this is data research. You just need to hold out for this time. Try to take a break and be silent if the situation allows.
For example, you received an unpleasant message from your boss – put off all your business for 12 minutes. Just observe what is happening in your body. Look out the window, pet the cat. Set a timer. If you have a lot of energy, you can do some squats or write 25 possible responses to your boss, this way we use muscle activity, which helps the emotions evaporate. The main thing is not to send the letter. As soon as the chemical reaction in the body ends, there will be no trace of the emotion, then return to the answer.
So, what do we do if emotion has already burst into our working life:
noticed that some negative emotion is rising, we do the exercise “Second”,
we remember the messages of emotions and answer the question of each emotion,
If you fall into an emotion, observe and act only when you return to a calm state.
The main thing is not to do something under the influence of emotions or not to make decisions. After all, a decision made from emotion contains a mistake with a high probability. Even if it is a positive emotion – we make mistakes, the brain makes mistakes. Any decision is important and should be made in a calm state.
And what happened after the coaching sessions with Misha and Dasha? We:
found and replaced thoughts that were contrary to achieving goals;
learned to withstand emotions, including through the techniques described above;
saw the fight-freeze-flight actions and chose constructive behavior strategies.
Emotions are not intuition, not something to rely on. The more order you have in your head, the cleaner your thinking, the better it is, the calmer you will feel and the easier it will be for you to go towards your goals.
