emotions Archives - The Performance Biz

Jun 25

Owning It – Part 3

Control of Feelings

The starting point to taking personal responsibility begins with getting some clarity around how you are responding to any given situation or how you instigate any given situation yourself. It’s about making a proactive decision to be responsible for the actions that you take.

In other EPiC Insights (Owning It Part 1 – Physical Control, Owning It Part 2 – Emotional Control) we touched on the importance of the Hierarchy of Control™. This is required to identify and correct the state of our minds, bodies and responses before we communicate with a sense of personal responsibility.

The Hierarchy of Control™ is:

PHYSICAL control
EMOTIONAL control
Control of FEELINGS
Control of THOUGHTS
Control of ACTIONS

Once our physical and emotional states are under control we can then move on to address the control of our feelings.

The Hierarchy of Needs™ is a process that allows us to unravel the jumble of physical, emotional, feelings, thoughts and actions that we have inside us and that, if we are not under an overall state of controlled awareness, we will respond inconsistently and fail to make the desired impact on any given situation.

We talk about the control of feelings or the feeling state in 2 layers:

Feelings when your emotional state is satisfied;

Feelings when your emotional state is not satisfied.

So, in other words when you are clear about your emotional state (i.e. when you have read, acknowledged, understood and managed the emotion, very often, with practice, instantaneously) then you can pinpoint the feeling you have about it and communicate it clearly either to yourself or others.

Examples of emotionally satisfied feelings:

Affectionate

Confident

Grateful

Peaceful

Inspired

Loving

Examples of emotionally unsatisfied feelings:

Confused

Embarrassed

Angry

Tense

Suspicious

Vulnerable

Sad

Feeling Exercise

This exercise is great to test how the feelings that you are wishing to convey might be interpreted. Very often, we might think that we are conveying a particular feeling but the interpretation may be quite different!

Choose an action and practice changing the feelings you want to convey with that action. Notice how it makes you feel and how other people interpret your actions – choose a friend to demonstrate it to.

For example:

Action: rocking arms to and fro

Feeling: tenderly

Outcome: sense of comforting a new born baby to a gentle sleep

What about if you rocked your arms suspiciously/sadly/angrily – what might this convey?

To find out more about how to be an EPiC leader, click here to arrange a conversation with one of our Consultants.

Best wishes

The Insights Team

Apr 20

Owning It – Part 2

By Lucy Windsor | Blog | No Comments

The starting point to owning it or taking personal responsibility begins with the mindset. It’s about making a proactive decision to be responsible for the actions that you take.

In another EPiC Insight (Developing a Feeling of Ease) we touched on the importance of the Hierarchy of Control™. This is required to identify and correct the state of our bodies before we communicate with a sense of personal responsibility.

The Hierarchy of Control™ is:

PHYSICAL control
EMOTIONAL control
Control of FEELINGS
Control of THOUGHTS
Control of ACTIONS

Taking personal responsibility begins with a mindset, but very crucially continues with tangible steps that we can take in order that our actions are proactive, specific, and uncluttered.

Today I’m going to talk about emotional control which follows the physical control discussed in an earlier insight.

We talk about the emotional state in 4 layers:

Reading Emotion

Acknowledging Emotion

Understanding Emotion

Managing Emotion

Reading Emotion

It is really important, in order to be able to start controlling emotion, that you first recognise its presence in you and others. It is vital that you are able to acknowledge that the way you respond to a situation differently to how you responded yesterday is driven by a change in emotion or mood, we might say. So if you feel that you are in a type of crazy where everything you do is affected by a negative emotion STOP it right there. Pause, breathe, allow the emotion in and let it pass away. Meditative exercises are useful at the beginning of the day too, to set you up in the right frame of emotion for the day, without any baggage hanging over from previous interactions or experiences.

For others, consider what is driving the intention of the message-giver and disseminate what parts are driven by logic and what parts are driven by emotion. Give the message-giver time to reflect on their own use of language with advanced listening skills.

Acknowledging Emotion

Once you have reached the state of reading emotion so that your emotional antennae is properly tuned, you can more quickly identify it in you and others. It allows you to make decisions, rather than wallowing in the chaos that a lack of control can allow in. In others, for instance, if you’re faced with an aggressive salesperson, rather than reacting in an equally aggressive way, a more emotionally intelligent decision might be to use non-verbal language to indicate that you are not comfortable with the approach and therefore give the other person the opportunity to adapt their own emotional state.

This tactic can work well in personal relationships too as the other person will be finely tuned into body language through their deeper understanding of you.

Understanding Emotion

Students of Emotional Intelligence will quickly become aware that the understanding of you and other’s emotional state is a bit like predicting the weather. It constantly changes and although you can take a fair guess at what emotional state you might be walking into, it has a habit of surprising you. However, with practice, we can prepare more and more accurately by forecasting what sort of emotional situation we are going to be entering by thinking through the situation. This requires a degree of strategy or big picture thinking in order to keep the mind open to the variations that you haven’t quite planned for. Stay nimble, and alert. Particularly, stay present!

Managing Emotion

The key to managing emotion is self-regulation. It’s not easy and we all fall off the wagon, but so long as your intention is to control your reaction, you are more likely that not to achieve a positive outcome. Ultimately this – the positive outcome – is what we are driving at. It is very easy to fall into a temper tantrum if you haven’t applied self-regulation.

Being able to self-regulate your emotion, to communicate in an emotionally intelligent way how you feel, the more smoothly your interaction with people around you will go. Good luck. Give yourself plenty of opportunity to develop this skill and be kind to yourself if it doesn’t work the first, second or third time to try it. It will improve each time.

Now you are ready to move onto the next level – Your Feeling State. More on that in a future article.

To find out more about how to be an EPiC leader, click here to arrange a conversation with one of our Consultants.

Best wishes

The Insights Team