Effectively Manage Your Emotions to Achieve Success and Happiness
Why Understanding and Management of Emotions are Important?
Emotions play a very crucial role in our daily life. If managed effectively, emotions can help you in becoming successful, in strengthening your relationships, and in becoming happier. However, if not managed properly, emotions can derail your career, damage your relationships (in most cases beyond reparation), and can cause anxiety and depression. There are a lot of people who, despite being very intelligent, hard-working and knowledgeable, are not very successful and satisfied with their life because they are not able to manage their emotions effectively. Since they lack emotion management skills, they suffer and people around them also suffer. Despite emotion management playing a very crucial role in our daily life, majority of the people hardly try to understand the significance of emotions in their life, forget about they working on managing emotions.
As far as management of emotions is concerned, majority of the people generally operate at one of the two extremes. People coming under the first category hardly express their emotions, no matter how they feel about somebody or something. Especially if they have some negative emotions, they hardly express them or talk about those emotions. But the problem is that these people are not able to fully forget about their emotions or experience. They keep on thinking about those emotions and try hard to suppress them. In that process, they suffer more than anyone else. The more somebody try to control or suppress his or her emotions, the more strongly they bounce back. And when there is too much suppression of emotions, one day they explode and lead to undesirable outcomes.
On the other extreme are individuals who are overly expressive and who hardly control their emotions. They hardly think before saying anything or expressing their emotions or views. They hardly pay attention to issues, such as how their behavior and unhindered expression of emotions can impact others. They express their views even on small issues or things. They are generally insensitive to others and the context in which they operate.
Neither of these two extremes is good. Too much expression of emotions or behaving impulsively is not helpful. At the same time, too much control of emotions and not expressing them when you feel them is also not useful. To be effective, you need to find the middle path. You need to learn how to manage your emotions. If you are not able to manage your emotions effectively, you may have to pay a huge cost.
Cost of Not Managing Emotions Effectively
If people are not able to manage their emotions effectively, they pay a huge cost for that. The cost may be in various forms, like unhealthy relationships (both in personal and professional life), career derailment, anxiety and stress, psychosomatic disorders, lower productivity, and poor decision making. One of the major reasons why most of our relationships get damaged is that people are not able to control their emotions, especially anger, properly. When people are highly emotionally charged, they cannot think rationally because emotions hijack rationality. When people get angry, they hardly realize what they are saying or doing. Under extreme emotions, even highly intelligent people behave irrationally or stupidly.
Even worse, people hardly think about the consequences of their words or actions when they are highly emotionally charged. Without thinking people say or do certain things that they regret later. But once a damage is done, it is very difficult to undo that damage. In sum, people lose quite a lot of career opportunities, business, and relationships because of not being able to manage their emotions effectively.
Benefits of Effective Emotion Management
Effective management of emotions can lead to a variety of benefits for individuals in their personal as well as professional life. A lot of scientific research has already been conducted to understand the benefits of effective emotion management. Scholars have coined the term ‘Emotional Intelligence’ to signify the ability of an individual to effectively manage his or her emotions. Salovey and colleagues (2000) defined emotional intelligence as “the ability to perceive, appraise, and express emotions accurately; the ability to access and generate feelings when they facilitate cognition; the ability to understand affect-laden information and make use of emotional knowledge; and the ability to regulate emotions to promote emotional and intellectual growth and wellbeing” (p. 506).
Research has highlighted a lot of benefits of high level of emotional intelligence. Empirical research indicates that individuals who are high on emotional intelligence exhibit higher job performance, work engagement, citizenship behavior, and have higher life satisfaction and well-being than individuals who are low on emotional intelligence. If you look at some of the highly successful persons from various domains, you will realize that these people have a very high level of emotional intelligence. For example, Indra Nooyi, Ex-CEO of PepsiCo; Satya Nadela, CEO of Microsoft; Jeff Bezos, Executive Chairman of Amazon; M.S. Dhoni, former captain of Indian cricket team; Rohit Sharma, current captain of Indian cricket team; Novak Djokovic, Serbian tennis player; Viswanathan Anand, Indian chess grandmaster; are highly emotionally intelligent individuals.
Effective management of emotions may not only help you in progressing in your career and business, but it can also help you in strengthening your relationships. Ultimately, it can help you in becoming more successful and happier in your life.
How to Effectively Manage Emotions?
Effective management of emotions can lead to a variety of benefits for individuals and organizations. However, it is not so easy to manage one’s emotions. At any point of time, there is so much going on in an individual’s life that it becomes difficult to manage oneself. There are so many problems that people face in their personal, professional, and social life that overwhelm them. A small incident or a statement by somebody is enough to trigger people’s emotions and make them angry.
It is true that you have very limited control over the demands and challenges that you face in your life. Maybe you cannot change things. You cannot change other persons’ thinking, behavior, and their demands. You may have very limited control over them. However, there is one thing that is totally under your control. It is how you respond to the situations of your life. How well you manage yourself or your emotions is totally under your control.
If you can manage your emotions effectively, you can take charge of your life. Given below are certain tips that can help you in becoming more aware of your emotions and to manage them effectively:
- Identify your emotional state: First, it is very important for you to identify your emotional state. You may not always be aware of exactly what emotions you are having. But giving time to yourself to understand and identify how you are feeling at any point of time, especially in difficult situations, can be very helpful. Also, try to recognize and name your emotions. It can help you in becoming more emotionally aware.
- Understand the causes of feelings: Once you are aware of how you are feeling, it is also important to understand what is causing those feelings. Try to understand what is triggering the emotions you are experiencing.
- Be aware of the behavioral tendencies associated with various emotions: Out of control emotions can impair reasoning. You need to be aware of behaviors caused by extreme emotions. Think whether these behaviors are constructive or destructive in the current situation.
- Learn to postpone an outburst: When people are overwhelmed by emotions, their cognitive capability diminishes. They are not able to process very basic information. By becoming aware of the impact of extreme emotions, learn how to postpone the outburst.
- Differentiate between emotion and the need to act: When people have strong emotions, they are not able to properly analyze the situation, and act impulsively. Do I need to act right now or can I take necessary action later? Ask this question to yourself. You should try to get answer to this question before you act, especially when emotions are running high.
- Take time for mindfulness: Being fully aware of yourself, other persons and your immediate environment is very important to effectively manage your emotions. So, give time to yourself and practice mindfulness. It can help you a lot in managing your emotions.
- Develop listening skills: It is very important to attentively listen to other persons. It can help you in understanding their perspective and challenges. It also can help you in becoming more empathetic. When you are highly empathetic, there will be low probability for you to get angry.
