At work, stop asking “how to turn off your emotions” and start asking “how to use your emotions to lead from within“

 

Studies agree that we are emotional people, emotions are good & useful, and emotions belong in the workplace.

 

If you didn’t know that happy reading!

 

If you did know that, but are still wishing you could compartmentalize your emotions into neat boxes with tidy lids because the emotional rollercoaster is exhausting, start looking at how you can harness, rather than stuff your emotions.

 

Emotions are the basis of emotional intelligence and it’s agreed that these so-called “soft” skills are really power skills.

 

People who are solid emotional regulators don’t try to erase or lock their emotions away. They learn to harness these power skills to lead themselves from within and get better outcomes.

 

You too can learn to lead yourself from within and transform your life by practicing this 5 step program.

1. Don’t be afraid of emotions.

   Learn to accept your feelings and sit with them to strengthen your distress tolerance

2. Use mindfulness to get off the emotional rollercoaster.

   Detach from your feelings. You are not your feelings – they are only parts of the larger person. Re-take control.

3. Become an observer of yourself.

   Notice the different parts of your mind and hunt the story that you are telling yourself. This story fuels the emotional instability.

4. Choose a new story that supports the outcome you want.

   Once you pinpoint the story that’s driving your emotional turbulence, challenge your thinking and create a new story that serves you.

5. Focus on what serves you.

   Think and speak about yourself from the perspective of the new story. When you find yourself wandering back to the old story, bring your focus back to the story you consciously chose.

 

Let’s look at each of the five steps in more detail.

 

Don’t be afraid of emotions.

 

Emotions feel messy and unmanageable. Anger, sadness, and disappointment burst, trickle, and leak out of your body. They feel uncontrollable. Many of them also don’t feel good.

 

When you don’t have an tolerance for distress and you have a penchant for control, turning away from emotions is often the go to solution.

 

You believe the faster you repress, ignore, and deny the mess, the less bad and more in control you will feel.

 

That’s not true. It may give you some immediate relief, but in the long term, these repressed denied emotions become invisibles that render you helpless to their power.

 

The barriers you build to repress them do work to reduce your emotional sensitivity – you are less aware of them.

 

Reduced awareness is not the same as an absence of emotion.

 

Just because you don’t feel or notice the invisibles doesn’t mean they aren’t there influencing every decision you make.

 

You don’t get a choice to not feel – as a social creature who experiences sensation – you are built to feel.

 

When you shut down the emotional master switch, you reduce your ability to sense all emotions, not just distressful emotions. Goodbye joy, love, excitement, contentment and so on.

 

You want to be aware of your emotions for two reasons.

 

Firstly, because you want to feel positive emotions.

 

Secondly, because when you aren’t aware, you give up skills that are crucial for relationships, as well as losing access to information about yourself that is key to changing your outcomes.

 

What you want to do is surface the invisibles.

 

To do that, you practice sitting with the emotions you feel and accepting them as they are.

 

Yes, as they are. Not different, less messy, more justified. Just as they are. All feelings you have are valid and are great sources of information.

 

Until you give yourself the right to feel what you feel, you will never be able to mine this valuable treasure trove for gold.

 

Because behind the emotions sit your needs. If you can’t sit with the emotion long enough to recognize what it is and start asking what it’s telling you, you’ll never find the need hiding behind the resentment, the disappointment, the anger.

 

So today, sit for two minutes with a hard-to-feel emotion. Doing so will not only strengthen that muscle, it will show you that you are fireproof.

 

You are already bearing the emotions that are hiding invisibly under your skin.

 

If you are going to carry them, you might as well start using them. To do that, you have to get comfortable with them.

 

Two minutes today becomes 10 minutes in a few weeks. A year from now, you notice that you no longer repress emotions, but acknowledging them doesn’t mean you have been hijacked by them.

 

Use mindfulness to get off the emotional rollercoaster.

 

When the emotions roll in, sometimes the wave swamps us. And it’s not necessarily a distressing emotion – ever felt that first flush of love?

 

But whether it’s enjoyable or painful, you don’t want to become your emotions, to fuse with them so tightly you no longer see reality.

 

Painful emotions typically induce a stress response – because you have no distress tolerance, you want to fight or flee or play dead.

 

Where you don’t turn that stress response off, leaving your mind looping endlessly in and around and through the distress, it actually impacts your health.

 

It also impacts your decisions. Just try to make a conscious decision when you are burning with anger or cringing with shame.

 

Take back control by using mindfulness to stop the stress response and detach from the emotion just enough to see that while you are ashamed, hurt, outraged, you are also more than that single feeling.

 

Sit for two minutes and focus on your breathing. You can assess the sensation of your breath in your nose, your lungs, your belly.

 

Or you can imagine it as a color – breathing in a rainbow of light and breathing out the smoke and ashes of the distressful emotion.

 

Breath is the link between your mind – your conceptual self, your spirit – your feeling self, and your body – your emotional self. Calm your spirit and your mind by using your breath to drop into your body.

 

Become an observer of yourself.

 

Have you ever been in a meeting or a conversation and noticed that you were participating in the interaction, but parts of your brain were also making grocery lists, replaying the fight with your partner, reminding you to tell your mother a story, and thinking about how your hair looks?

 

That your mind can do all that at one time is evidence that you are more than a single feeling or thought.

 

Use that awareness to practice observing what you are noticing and feeling as you move through your day.

 

You are developing this skill for two reasons.

 

As you get better at this, you’ll begin to notice connections that you didn’t before. You’ll see that a certain person or subject makes your ears hot or your chest tight.

 

Being aware of those sensations helps you act preventatively. Noticing that your heart rate is picking up or your hands are beginning to sweat, you can proactively move to help yourself handle your impending reaction.

 

The second reason is that the more observations you can include in the picture, the wider the angle of your camera, the more information you’ll be able to include to emotionally regulate yourself.

 

Part of this wider angle is seeing what the story is that’s driving your reaction. What are you telling yourself when you feel discomfort?

 

It’s at this point that you can begin to consciously choose how you will respond.

 

Choose a new story that supports the outcome you want.

 

Once you identify the story, you look at where it comes from and what the effect of the story is on your feelings, behaviors, and outcomes.

 

You’ll find that a lot of stories are embedded in childhood.

 

An example: your value came from doing, so if you don’t do something well, you aren’t worth anything. Conversely if someone doesn’t do something for you, it’s because they don’t think you matter.

 

The effect of this is that you armor up to protect yourself and you do more than you want to. You demand that you do it perfectly. If someone else doesn’t appreciate your effort or doesn’t do something in return, the resentment you feel swamps you.

 

The need to feel valued and the resentment from feeling like you have to do something and/or the gesture isn’t appreciated or returned will color every decision you make for yourself and your relationships.

 

When you choose from a space where you feel insecure, your choices are scarcity, poverty, toughness, and armor.

 

Start consciously questioning and reframing the story. Choose a story that helps you act from a secure space, where your choices are abundance, richness, softness, and openness.

 

What that means practically is when something happens that makes you feel scared, nervous, threatened, or angry, you choose to step back and see what story is running through your mind and what it’s telling you.

 

From there, you challenge the story. How much concrete physical evidence do you have for the story? If your story is that someone doesn’t care about you or you don’t matter, did they say that directly? Do you have it in writing?

 

If not, what you have is interpretation, your opinion of what’s going on. Opinion and interpretation are subjective, they aren’t facts.

 

If you don’t have any concrete factual evidence, then you have a 50% chance of being right and a 50% chance of being wrong.

 

Given that it’s a toss-up whether or not you are right, at this point you actively decide to choose to believe a story that helps you get a different outcome. An outcome full of abundance, softness, and openness.

 

To change your story, look at how could you reframe it. Perhaps instead of the idea that you aren’t important or respected, you choose to believe that the other person is overwhelmed or oblivious.

 

You choose to grant them the benefit of the doubt, rather than believing they are intentionally disrespecting or disregarding you.

 

If all of your actions and thoughts came from the idea that the other person was doing their best and wasn’t intentionally trying to treat you poorly, how would your response change?

 

This technique works with single thoughts as well as whole stories. If you have a negative thought boomeranging around your mind, catch it. Challenge it. Reframe it.

 

Focus on what serves you.

 

Reframing the story and accompanying thoughts set you up to being leading from within. Choices made from a space of security that assume your worth and the other person’s best are very different from fear-based choices.

 

But this only goes as far as the story lasts. Evolutionarily we are built to run our in-grained patterns. This means that at some point, your old story will make an entrance.

 

This is where you get to practice. Practice releasing the old story (and resulting emotions that return with the story) and focusing on the new story.

 

Do this even when you don’t holistically believe it. You are choosing, even in the face of internal skepticism, to believe that you can create a different outcome for yourself.

You don’t have to be at the mercy of other’s actions and your knee-jerk reactions. Each time the old story pops up, you remind yourself that it’s not what you’ve chosen to believe and you train your focus on the new story.

 

Initially it will be using a new muscle. And like going to the gym, the first couple months of lifting a new weight are hard. But then it gets easier, and you can increase the weight you are lifting.

 

In the same way, your power skills get easier to harness. And suddenly the out-of-control reactions disappear. You see that you can pause and intentionally choose how to respond in a way that achieves the outcome you want.

 

If you want a partner to help you work through these five steps, schedule a free call with me to map out what that looks like.

 

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With gratitude to Australian artist Sara Riches for the painting Gilded Cage, which helps us Read more about Sara’s journey here: https://australianartistsunited.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/sara-riches/. Click here to purchase artwork: https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/519729