A colleague once shared with me a personal philosophy, ” Don’t worry when people you work with kid around with you and give you a hard time, when they stop is the time to worry.
Most of us have a hot button that set’s off an emotional response (usually founded on frustration or anger). The real trick is being aware your button is being pushed and using filters (shields up) to deflect and avoid just reacting.
How does it make you feel?
I have rarely encountered anyone; whom on reacting to a push of their hot button later did not regret how they responded. This is a good cautionary note and can be a bit of motivation to hold off responding in the moment. That is, thinking about the consequences and how you will feel afterwards.
SELF AWARENESS
One of the behaviors often listed as a foundation of emotional intelligence is self awareness. This refers to the practice of understanding how you feel, how others behaviors are impacting you and how yours are impacting them. Using a real time application of this knowledge guides your responses. Those with a high level of self awareness can as a rule make every personal encounter fruitful and achieve the objective of realizing their goals (what they want to get out of the conversation) while enabling the other party to achieve their goal. Win – win.
Collecting Stamps
As you progress through your day, events place a conceptual stamp on your back. In simple terms it is a happy face or a frown. You spilled your morning cup of coffee – frown. It was a spill onto a shirt you hated and wanted to dispose of anyway – happy face. These events occur throughout your day and generally one kind of stamp overcomes the other. That is, at any given point in your day you may have collected more happy faces or more frowns.
As you might guess the predominant number of stamps can impact how you feel – happy or depressed. This can impact how well you are able to deflect having your hot button pushed – regardless of how self aware you are. One suggestion to mitigate the negative impacts of too many frowns is to pause when you realize the accumulation has occurred and just pull the frown stamps off. It really is no value to carry them around. Actually when relaxing at home after a day at work, often unconsciously we simply spend time dumping our negative stamps. This could be by having a drink, listening to a fine piece of music, joking with your partner (if you have one) or any of numerous other techniques.
Summing Up!
Attempt to be aware when your hot button is being pushed and act positively for all concerned. As your day progresses pull off negative (frown) stamps and discard them. Try not to pass them to someone else – that’s the worst.