Typical response to emotions

- Your coworker is slacking off on yet another team project. And before you know it, steam is coming out of your ears and you're saying something harsh you wish you hadn't said. The last place we want to be emotional is at work, right? But it happens all the time. When emotions come up, most of us either ignore them, or get overwhelmed by them. Sound familiar? So let's say today you receive feedback from your manager that the presentation you gave wasn't well-received by the client. As you listen to them, you notice that you have an unwanted feeling. Maybe you're embarrassed, or scared, or just uncomfortable, but you're not really sure why. When unwanted feelings like this appear, most people tend to ignore them in one of four ways, and I call those the four Fs. Let's unpack them. So the first F is Figure it out. If I can figure out why I'm feeling the way I'm feeling, then I can make the feeling go away. With this reaction, you start perseverating and analyzing the situation on what went wrong. And that might sound good for improving your work, but it won't soothe your emotions, and if you're stuck in your emotional response, you'll be more focused on how not to feel whatever you're feeling and less capable of creative and adaptive thinking. The second F is Fix it. This is about changing something in your external environment to avoid feeling. Let's say you feel insecure about your relationship with your client after the presentation, and you ask your manager to take you off the account. It's like you're thinking, "Well, if I can change this external scenario "that's causing me to feel insecure, "then I won't have to feel that way." The third F is Fool yourself. If I can't Figure it out, or I can't Fix it, then I'm going to pretend that whatever the thing is that's bothering me doesn't really bother me. For example, if you felt shame or embarrassment when your manager told you about that presentation not going well, fooling yourself would be thinking, "Whatever, they don't know what they're talking about," or, "I don't care about that project anyway." Because it seems like there's no time to have the feeling or it's not the right place to have the feeling, you talk yourself out of having the feeling and you just put your head down and get back to work. These first three responses are all ways of ignoring the feeling, which is to say, you are disconnecting from yourself. A different way to think of this is you're having a feeling which is a heart and a body experience, and you're trying to come at it from your mind, to Figure it out, to Fix it, or to Fool yourself entirely that it's not happening. There's a disconnect there. The final F is Flip your lid. When you Flip your lid, the emotion takes over entirely. Rather than you pushing the emotion away, the emotion pushes you off your center. You get the feedback, and tears start to well up. You can't seem to keep it together or say something coherent in response, or maybe you find yourself running to the bathroom to burst into tears. As you know, none of these typical responses help you to feel effective and competent at your job. I invite you to consider then what do you typically do when an emotion shows up at work? Does your response change depending on what the emotion is? Take time to consider this, because knowing your current relationship with emotions helps you to discern how to better manage them in the future.