Self control in the workplace: 4 strategies for mastering self management to get more time and energy

Studies estimate that managing your impulses takes approximately 25 percent of your waking hours, about four hours a day.

While it is possible to turn emotional outbursts into opportunities for growth, where you must spend time and energy repairing the damage in the aftermath, you have less time and energy to dedicate to other things in your life.

People who practice self control typically do three things that help them safeguard their time and energy.

1. They wait. All words and actions are preceded by a pregnant pause.

2. They look for multiple perspectives. They use their lens to see all the angles of a situation.

3. They scan their context to find clues about what might be influencing their feelings right now.

4. They use their power of focus to direct their mental movies toward positive thoughts.

 

If the description below is closer to your reality than you’d like, use these four strategies to help you (re)master self management and get your self control in the workplace back.

You know how to self-manage in the workplace. Or at least you knew how. You aren’t emotional at work….usually. But recently you’ve almost cried in the corridor.

You are showing up to work late feeling fuzzy, buzzy, and half asleep. You snap at colleagues in situations that haven’t triggered you like this in the past.

In the meeting yesterday, you felt like throwing a chair, which surprised you because you haven’t felt much of anything the last month. You don’t know how to deal with it.

 

Strategy 1: Waiting – the Pregnant Pause. Use time to buffer your reaction and create a response that works.

 

Emotions are only 90 seconds long. Yes, you read that right. An emotion is a physical cue from our autonomic nervous system in response to something in our environment.

That physical cue only lasts a minute and a half. Everything after that comes from the interpretations and assumptions you apply to the physical response. So your feeling is only a story. Which means it’s not fact. Which means it can change.

This strategy uses time as a buffer between your knee-jerk reaction and the response you wish you’d had.

A pregnancy has three trimesters, three different phases of development. Your feelings go through cycles as well.

Negotiate time to process your emotional reaction. In the moment when you are about to (over)react, ask for time.

Plan how you will ask: what will you say to secure your buffer? If you are asking yourself, ask if it’s critical to respond immediately and how your immediate response will impact the outcome. Usually a delayed response is more useful than an immediate overreaction.

Perhaps if it’s someone you know well, being straightforward is best: “I need some time to process this. I’ll come back to you in X time.”

If it’s in a meeting with your boss, perhaps it’s best to couple delay tactics with reassurance e.g. indicating that you’d like time to ensure a comprehensive understanding.

The method you use to secure the buffer may be entirely unrelated to the reason you need the buffer; it may be a magician’s method of misdirection, but it gives you want you need: time.

In that time, breathe. Practice mindfulness to turn off your stress response. You will have a hard time responding in a way that serves you or the situation in the heat of the moment. So buy yourself time and turn off the heat.

Then ask yourself open-ended questions about the story that’s attached to your emotional response. Open-ended questions are important because often the stories in your mind are black and white. Open-ended questions don’t have yes or no answers, so they will help you bring out the nuances, the critical holes that become windows full of illuminated insight.

 

Strategy 2: Multiple perspectives – a different angle or lens. Find a new viewpoint to see new possibilities.

 

 

Any situation that’s bringing out a strong emotional reaction will be complex. Like a video game, there will be multiple levels. Like an onion, multiple layers. Angles within layers, layers within levels.

Challenge yourself to see as many of them as possible. If you looked at it from the point of view of anyone else involved, how would the picture change? If you looked at it from a macro or a micro level, what effect does that have on the image?

How does your perception shift if you put on the other person’s shoes for a moment and got curious about what happened in their life that made this the best behavior for them?

Often in conflict situations, if you can trace a person’s reaction back to the cause, you’ll see that their behavior, feedback, or reaction isn’t about you at all. It’s about them.

How does understanding that their nasty comment not have anything to do with you, but is all about their feeling about themselves, help you better control your response to it?

The more empathy you can bring to bear on the situation, the more distance you’ll be able to give yourself from your emotional response. Empathy isn’t about justifying or accepting something you decide is not okay. It’s about creating the emotional objectivity to decide what is or isn’t okay and communicate that in a way that gets your needs met.

 

Strategy 3: Hunting the Contextual Clue(s). Ease the influences in your environment that might amplify your reaction.

 

 

The last strategy is about better understanding the context that’s creating your emotional state. A comment from your boss didn’t bother you two months ago, but today it’s a kick to the throat. The negative attitude of your colleague rolled off your back last week, but now it grates such that the irritation hurts your throat.

Ask yourself, what has changed? Why is this bothering me now?

The first place you look are the influencers. The factors that are so ordinary, so commonplace, so frequent that they blend into the landscape or become the wallpaper in your life. You don’t even notice them anymore.

But you feel their influence constantly. Check your sleep, your diet, your environment, your relationships, your sources of inspiration and learning, and your thoughts. If you rated each of those categories on a scale of 1 – 10, where 10 is amazing!, which areas would contribute to your current reactive state?

Putting your house in order – balancing those influencers as close to 10 as possible – you will notice a significant shift just from that. Where those influencers are out of whack, you will be trying to be emotionally stable and sane in a house with a crumbling foundation.

Once the foundation is secured, use the feelings that arrive and work backward.

Start with the sensation. What are you sensing? Are you holding your breath? Is your jaw clenched? Is the dread in your chest hot or cold? Are your ears tingling? Use all of your creative powers to describe the texture, color, and temperature of your sensations.

Then get curious about when and why the sensations occur. In what other situations do you hold your breath? Why does this situation cause you to hunch your shoulders? When you clench your jaw what is the purpose? Is it to silence your voice? Is it part of a complete muscular lockdown that happens when it feels like you are losing control? Understanding your physical reactions will give you a wealth of information that you can use to decide how you want to feel.

Then use the sensations to shift your emotional state.

 

 

In other words, reverse engineer them. If you were holding your breath, notice what it feels like to breath. If you were clenching your jaw or hunching your shoulders, feel the ease that comes with intentionally releasing those muscles. If the dread is cold and heavy and constrictive, what happens when you imagine it as hot and light and expansive?

 

Strategy 4: The Power of Focus – positively directing your mental movie. Challenge your thoughts and reframe them to create a better ending. 

 

 

Knowing what you want to feel – inspired, empowered, connected, fulfilled, relaxed, confident – and how those show up for you physically, ask yourself what the situation and your reaction would look like if you came from a headspace of abundance and positive energy, rather than a mindset of scarcity and negative energy. What would change? How would the situation, the other person, your reaction, or even your physical posture look different?

Reflect on what in your experience is causing you to experience this person or situation in such a troublesome way. You will find that you are applying patterns from a previous experience to the current one.

These patterns create stress if they cause you to predict a negative outcome. Since you don’t control the future, it’s unnecessary stress because you both can’t control the outcome and because you can control what you choose to focus on.

If you are focusing on negative thoughts, challenge yourself to find concrete evidence that your thoughts are true. And by concrete, I mean facts or physical proof, not interpretation or opinion.

Then challenge yourself to prove yourself wrong. Once you’ve built a substantial pile of positive proof, intentionally choose to believe in the possibility, rather than the risk, inherent in any outcome.

In other words, choose to believe in the 50% positive outcome because it’s equally likely that will occur as the negative outcome. So if you are on the tram to work feeling the tension mount because of an upcoming presentation, choose to daydream about smashing it, rather than ruminating about bombing it.

Using any one of these strategies will positively impact your self control inside and outside the workplace. Used together, they will give you time and energy back. Master them and you will lead from within, which is integral for excellence in leadership.

Schedule a free call to partner with me to learn the basics or uplevel your skills.

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With gratitude to Maria Fabrizio for bringing “emotional chaos” to life.  Find this print and more here: https://mariafabrizio.com/