Greetings!It’s hard enough in business, career, sales and even in personal relationships to get an abundance of successful outcomes.
Often, our best intentions can be letdown by our wild and untamed emotions. Unless we are aware, motivated and educated to practice social emotional intelligence and apply this in our endeavours, we are often disappointed by our results.
Why? Because until we practice self-mastery over our feelings and emotions, we will find it difficult to master our goals. Until we can learn to avoid emotional hijack, we won’t be able to be true masters of our profession and business.
I suggest you spend time on a daily basis reflecting on how your different roles, and goals demand certain best behaviours to reach your outcomes.
Taming the Wild Emotions
Unmitigated, uninterrupted, unadulterated anger, fear or anxiety can create a terrible mess in human relationships.
Have you ever had these feelings when in a conflict or in a dilemma? Were you in control of your emotions or did you let loose your words with sarcasm or bitter outburst?
With our daily lives soaked with pressure from all sides – work, family, relationships, deadlines, things-to-do, priorities, pressures, goals, objectives – there’s a lot going on for us.
We try to keep things balanced, but between the rationale and emotionality of competing demands, we can become unbalanced and revolve towards a polarised position of flight or fight.
It is under these circumstances that we must beware of emotional hijack – that critical moment when we lose our rational selves to uncontrolled animal emotions.
We lash out or sulk or show hurt or run from the other by keeping silent and withdrawing from the melee.
Take the example of a couple – two important people on the path of their own destinations of career and success. Do they take time to support each other?
Do they take time to listen and understand the pressures of the other? Do they take time to love and truly understand and support the other?
Or are they all just living under one roof, each impatient to do their own thing, only sharing what’s important to be done like the caring for the children and keeping the house in order.
Does the couple spend most of their time on the non-ending obligatory duties of family commitments and a hundred other chores?
No wonder couples who live together, sleep together, work together can often find it hard to live with each other.
So often they do not prioritise time to come to love and respect each other, to find understanding and joy to be with each other.
They need to solidify their intimate relationships of understanding, mutual trust, mutual respect and a willingness to work with each other and to help each other by supporting their career paths and goals.
Couples don’t need to ‘fix’ each other. They just need to listen with compassion and understanding. The keys to the problem or solution are already there.
You just need to help the other to discover where the key to their challenge is, and help each other by emphatically listening, being curious, and not judging.
How about when at work? The same applies. When colleagues in a team do not get on well with each other because of a lack of trust, lack of respect, fear of conflict or unwilling to work with each other, there is hell to pay.
What happens if teams don’t get on well with each other? Tensions rise while productivity and results drop.
Until wholesome communication in the team is established as a priority the problem of fight/flight emotions will rear its ugly heads.
Teams spend copious amounts of money in training and conflict-resolution learning programs. Nothing wrong with education. But the leaders need to ensure that the learning is acted upon daily, and absorbed as part of the DNA of the teams working together.
All are punished from the lack of follow-through of wholesome communication in the teams. Because the focus is on targets and pushing through the processes and forgetting about the people relationships needed, that is where hurt, sabotage and resignations occur.
As technology keeps on getting better for business and for the pleasure and convenience of making life more pleasant and easier.
No wonder I see more and more people spend so much of their available time on their smart devices rather than relating and being aware of others.
With technology, we just touch and swipe the buttons to get our ‘fix’ of games, music and asking others to ‘like’ me. Peace. Happiness. Really?
Working with real people isn’t quite the same as with our hand-held devices. Working with others is a lot harder, we need to think first before saying the first thing in our minds.
We need to empower others, not to hurt others. We need to get along with others – to collaborate, to connect, to communicate so we can come to a common goal of win-win.
I suggest we need to be aware and to mindfully control the animal instincts that arise when we feel conflict or moments when we disagree.
We can do this by being mindful and allowing ourselves to breath deeply for two or three seconds, then calming ourselves before replying to the other.
Bring out our sovereign selves. It is harder, but well-worth it in the long run. Ditch the animal instinct of fight/flight. It does more harm than good.
Just make sure you live and interact with heartfelt joy and soul. It can be a good life.
What are your thoughts?
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