So far in our Influence Skills series, we’ve discussed active listening, trustworthiness, likability, and empowering others.
What’s So Important About Managing Your Emotions?
Sometimes you need to exhibit passion and high energy to get people to buy in to your vision and strategy. At other times, you may need to present the calm, cool, composure and poise associated with executive presence.
To maximize your influence, you need to become agile in reading the room and bringing the correct emotion for the job to be done. To do so requires emotional intelligence. Emotional Intelligence has many components, which can be broken down into self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
Conveying the appropriate emotion is easier said than done. It requires not only understanding your audience’s personality style and the social and situational context, but even more challenging, it requires you to control your emotional reflexes and master your triggers.
Common Challenges to Managing Your Emotion
- Lacking awareness of your emotions and the hidden thoughts and the meaning that are attached to your emotions
- Lacking cultural, organizational, and/or social awareness
- Failing to understand how your behavior makes people feel
- Not adapting your communication style to the audience
- Not managing emotions skillfully in times of stress
- Not managing negative emotions effectively
- Avoiding conflict or viewing conflict as negative
- Lacking empathy
- Being rigid in your approach
- Holding a consistently negative or pessimistic point of view
Personally, managing my emotions has been a consistent area of development. During times of professional conflict, I’ve given in to anger and frustration, engaging in unproductive fights that only lead to hard feelings and embarrassment. I’ve worked with a coach to navigate my emotions with more ease and skill. (Yes, even coaches have coaches!)
One of the best, and simplest, techniques I’ve been practicing is to take five deep breaths when I feel triggered. This “executive pause” helps shut down the flight-freeze-fight amygdala response. This allows blood to flow back to your prefrontal cortex, where your rational brain resides. It’s a game-changer.
Knowing what (or who) might trigger me in advance and preparing for the interaction has also helped a ton. Some people just rub us the wrong way. It’s our responsibility to show up as our best selves, regardless of who or what is coming at us.
I learned long ago when you get an annoying or antagonizing email at work – do not respond immediately. Set it aside and go back to it when you feel more calm, cool, and collected.
Eight Practical Tips for Building Your Emotional Intelligence
- Increase your emotional self-awareness. Understand your emotional triggers and the thinking, beliefs and assumptions that might be behind them.
- Get feedback or commission a 360 assessment to understand how your personality and communication style impacts others.
- Think more intentionally about your personal brand and how you want people to experience you.
- Think explicitly about the job to be done when you are communicating, and emote accordingly.
- Maintain your centeredness, a key to being an inspirational leader. Have a plan to center yourself before entering what you expect will be a stressful engagement.
- Name your emotions. By simply labeling an emotion, you gain more control over it.
- Have a plan for managing your emotions in the moment, such as taking the “executive pause”, a few breaths before reacting.
- Listen empathetically, with the intent to understand the other person’s perspective.
For more practical tips on how to grow your influence skills, download this free e-book.
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