Managing Disruptive Emotions

SUMMARY

• Do you find yourself always calm and control in emotionally-charged situations or do you go into complete overwhelm and lose control of your behaviour?
• Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence by learning to manage our disruptive emotions.
• Managing emotions is not about getting rid of them. Emotions are there for a purpose. They are cues and clues and signs to help us to navigate what's going on around us and within us.
• We want to learn a five step process so that we have a greater chance of responding in a way that's healthy, rather than react:
• Step one: Recognise and name the emotion that we're going through.
• Step two: Audit our thoughts.
• Step three: Decide on the outcome that you want.
• Step four: Control the sabotage.
• Step five: Decide on the strategy.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Do you find yourself always calm and control in emotionally-charged situations or do you go into complete overwhelm and lose control of your behaviour? Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence by learning to manage our disruptive emotions.

So, let me start by saying that managing emotions is not about getting rid of them. Emotions are there for a purpose. Our emotions are cues and clues and signs to help us to navigate what's going on around us and within us. The way we feel gives us an indication of how we are processing external stimuli. And depending on whether or not that is linked to a highly-charged experience, a memory or a belief structure that you have, that will determine whether or not you respond in your logical brain or react out of the emotion.

I don't know about you, but this is a major problem that I've had to work on for my entire life. I've been able to learn through my studies in Emotional Intelligence how to employ a strategy so that even though I have the emotion going on, whether it's positive or negative, I can allow the decision-making process to happen from the logical brain, from the prefrontal cortex.

We have the limbic brain, which is deep in the center of the brain, where the amygdalae determine whether or not there's a threat. If the amygdala senses that there's something that we need to fear, it will give the signal, "Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!" And it'll actually cut off all the sensory data from continuing to go to the logical brain.

The prefrontal cortex is the executive command center just behind our forehead here. It's there for emotional regulation. It's where our creativity takes place and where we decide on logic what we're going to do. If our emotional situation traps how we feel down in the emotional brain, we just go over and over it and react based on our beliefs and previous experiences.

So, what we want to do is we want to learn a strategy to get it back up into the logical brain so that we have a greater chance of responding in a way that's healthy. What we want to learn to do with our emotions is always to respond. Let me teach you a process that you can take away and use right now.

Now, this is a five step process. It firstly provides the power of the pause. Secondly, it helps us to light up the logical part of our brain by asking a series of questions.

Step one: Recognize and name the emotion that we're going through. We've got to increase our emotional vocabulary so that we actually know which emotion we're going through. To do this, we ask the question, "What is the emotion I am going through right now?" This engages the logical brain by asking a "what" question looking for data.

Step two in the process is to audit our thoughts. An audit is a logical process. When we do an audit on our thoughts, we're looking for information of things that we might be thinking that are creating the emotional disruption. We ask the question, "What am I thinking right now?"

Step three is to decide on the outcome that you want. When we are in emotionally-charged situations, we often forget what it is that we want in the first place. So, step three is to decide what do you want to happen right now. The question we ask ourselves is exactly that, "What do I want to happen right now?"

Step four is to control the sabotage. Even though I know the outcome that I want, I can do and say things that will make sure that I don't get there. We need to metaphorically put a piece of duct tape across our mouth. We can ask, "What could I do right now to sabotage that outcome?" or "What is one thing that I can do right now to move towards that outcome?"

Step five is to decide on the strategy. It's like a chess player who has a strategy that says, "If that move there takes place, I'm going to do this one." Choosing a logical path, a logical strategy, a next step that we can do so that we can respond.

So, there you have it, five steps that you can go through where you name the emotion, where you audit your thoughts, where you decide on the outcome, where you control the sabotage, and where you decide on the strategy so that you can respond and get the outcome that you want.

Well, that's it for me this week. Join me again next week when we continue to look at our behaviour and how we can change our behaviour to get the outcomes that we want. I'll see you then.