Emotions: Over reacting much?
If you are reading this, you are probably someone who can be impulsive and reactive to emotional triggers.
Your emotions can take over you and make you do things we wouldn’t do under normal circumstances. When you’re under pressure and the heat is on, your emotions can get the better of you. You’re looking for some simple ways to manage your extreme emotions to allow you to have better interactions at work and healthier personal relationships.
There are some simple steps you can take to manage your emotions, so when you’re deciding how to react to a situation, you can make be more rational instead of emotional.
So how can we avoid operating on the wrong types of feelings and master our emotions under the harshest of circumstances?
Follow these 5 simple steps to control your emotions and regain rationality in any challenging situation.
5 Simple Steps To Manage Your Emotions
1. Take a moment to think
You can become extremely emotional immediately after an emotional trigger has been switched, and if you react immediately, you’re going to regret everything you say or do. It’s very important to allow your body to deal with the emotional impulses without acting on them by giving yourself up to 5 minutes of thinking time. Take a walk, keep yourself busy, but whatever you do, don’t respond until you can think rationally and without bias. Only then should you respond.
2. Clarify before you respond
You can easily misunderstand someones point of view. Before following step 1, make sure you clarify the other persons point of view. If need be, repeat what the other person just said. This ensures you understand the comment and gives your colleague or client the opportunity to clarify any miscommunication.
3. Find an outlet
Emotions should never be bottled up. As soon as something happens, and you’ve taken the time to think rationally about how you should respond, you have to find a healthy outlet. Call or go see someone you trust and recount to them what happened. Hearing an opinion other than your own broadens your awareness. Keep a journal of what happened. This will help you learn from the event which will help you deal with it should it ever come up again.
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4. Keep a journal
We touched on journal keeping in the last step, and it can play such an important role in understanding your emotions that it deserves an entire step on its own. At the end of each day, when all of your duties and responsibilities have been dealt with, take some time to recount the important moments of the day.
Did you lose your cool? Did you say something you shouldn’t have? Take some time to remember what happened to help you understand how you felt and why you felt that way. Reliving a moment after it has passed and when you can think about it with a clear head will give you a clearer picture. Learn from these moments and record your progress.
5. Take accountability
If there is ever a time that you dealt with your emotions with an outburst, its important to hold yourself accountable for how you may have treated someone else. Despite your best intentions this will happen. Apologize immediately to the targeted person and to everyone around who may have heard. There is no reason for a detailed explanation, but merely taking the step to apologize will make everybody involved feel better, including you.
