Emotional management skills

Emotional management ability is essentially a comprehensive skill for living with emotions - it neither requires you to completely suppress your emotions and be a "robot" without sadness nor joy, nor does it require you to let your emotions vent freely and hurt others and yourself. The core is to be able to accurately identify the source of your emotions, accept the existence of emotions, and ultimately guide your emotions to help you make more reasonable decisions. Moreover, this ability does not require any "natural good temper", and ordinary people can master it through targeted practice.

Last week, she was having hot pot with a friend who worked in operations. Her eyes were still swollen, and she said that she had made a stupid mistake the day before: a user cursed in the comment area, "Is your product rubbish?" She got angry on the spot. She turned around to see the new intern still making short videos, and scolded him. By the time she realized it, the intern had run away with red circles. She hid in the stairwell and cried for half an hour. She kept blaming herself for "poor emotional management, and she couldn't even hold back the fire."

This is actually the biggest misunderstanding that most people have about emotional management: they equate "not getting angry and not showing off" with strong emotional management ability. To put it bluntly, it means treating suppression as management. Think about it, your emotions are like a courier who delivers a letter to you. If you don’t knock on the door, he will only knock louder and louder. If you force him to drive him away, he will bring a bigger package next time. Those suppressed anger and swallowed grievances will eventually turn into thyroid nodules, breast hyperplasia, and chronic gastritis to come to you. I used to know a Party A client. The senior who received the call always smiled at the customers and never saw him blushing. Last year, he was diagnosed with grade 3 thyroid nodules during his physical examination. The doctor only found out after questioning that every time a customer made unreasonable demands, he would bite his back molars to apologize. He would have a stomachache for half the night when he returned home. This was not a sign of good emotional management. This was trading his body for the reputation of a "good temper".

It's interesting to say that the mainstream methods of emotion management in academic circles and practical circles are actually two completely different approaches. No one is right or wrong, but the people they are suitable for are different. One is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which is the most widely circulated in the workplace. The core logic is that "emotions are not caused by the event itself, but by your interpretation of the event." If you are scolded by a user and you interpret it as "He is deliberately looking for trouble against me," you will naturally get angry. , you interpret it as "He is dissatisfied with the product function, and I can collect real user feedback." Your mood stabilizes instantly. This method is especially suitable for people who usually like to be aggressive and easily get stuck in the idea of "Why is he targeting me?" The other is the mindfulness school that has become increasingly popular in recent years. It does not require you to force yourself to change your thoughts. The core is "awareness of emotions without judgment." For example, when you are angry, you don't need to force yourself to "don't be angry, don't be angry." You can just quietly feel: Oh, my heart is beating fast now, my fists are clenched, and my chest is a little tight. When you are in an angry state, you don't need to scold yourself, "Why can't I be so calm?" You just need to see the emotion. When the anger has passed, you will naturally know how to deal with it. This kind of thing is especially friendly to people who usually have too many thoughts in their minds and move too fast. You don't need to force your own cognition, just stop first.

In the past two years, I have tried many methods to improve my short temper, but the most useful one is a stupid one: recording emotions. As long as the mood swings exceed 6 points that day (on a 10-point scale, 1 is no fluctuation, 10 is a breakdown), find a small notebook and write down what happened, what was my first reaction at the time, and after the emotion is over, look back and see what the real situation was. After memorizing it for almost two months, I found that 90% of the emotional outbursts had nothing to do with the incident itself. They were all made up by my own imagination: the takeout was half an hour late. I thought at the time, "The rider must have taken too many orders and deliberately took a detour and disrespected my time." Later, I simply set an "emotional pause button" for myself. As long as I felt the blood rushing to my head, I would immediately find an excuse to leave the scene, go to the toilet and wash my face with cold water, or stand by the window and look at the trees downstairs for 30 seconds. I would wait until the momentum passed and then come back to deal with the problem. It was 10 times more effective than talking while being angry. Oh, by the way, this method was shared by a sister who has been an HRD for ten years when she participated in an industry salon. She encountered two executives banging the table in the conference room and quarreling. She reached out and turned off the lights in the conference room for 30 seconds. After everyone calmed down, the issue that they had been arguing about for half an hour was settled within five minutes.

Don't believe those nonsense about "three steps to calm your mood" and "five seconds to calm down". When you are really angry, you can even count from 1 to 10 wrongly, and you can't even remember the steps. Emotional management ability never requires you to be a perfect, temperless adult. You can emo for half an hour because of milk tea today, or you can have a reasonable anger because your colleagues took your credit. As long as you know what you just did after you are done, and will not make decisions that you regret because of your emotions, that is enough. After all, we are all living people, not programmed AI. It is normal to have emotions. Learning to be friends with them is much more comfortable than holding them in.