The premise of emotion management is

The premise of emotional management is to first allow emotions to occur, and then accurately anchor their true appearance - instead of forcing yourself to "not be angry" or "be an emotionally stable adult".

Last week, when I was working as an EAP resident at an Internet company, I met a female manager of the operations department. Her eyes were as red as a rabbit. Her first words when I sat down were, "Teacher, please teach me how to control my temper. I scolded my subordinates to tears again yesterday. My emotional management is so bad." I looked through her incident record: her subordinate missed filling in the coupon value for the event, and sent out more than 30,000 yuan in extra subsidies that day. She had to write a review to her boss, and had to deal with operations and finance for the whole afternoon on the write-off process. The nightclub ticket she had booked to take her daughter to Happy Valley was also invalidated. I asked her what was her first feeling when she cursed someone? She was stunned for a long time and said, "I'm just angry. I repeatedly emphasized the need to check the amount three times last week."

I asked her to think again, is there anything else besides being angry? She picked her nails for a long time and suddenly shed tears: "I told my boss last week that I could achieve a 1:5 ROI for this quarter's activities. Now that something like this has happened, I'm afraid he will think I'm not capable. Also, my daughter was looking forward to going to Happy Valley last week. I have already missed the appointment three times. I feel that I am neither a good manager nor a good mother. ”You see, she packaged "panic, guilt, grievance, and self-denial" into "anger" and dumped it all on her subordinates. Then she turned around and felt that she had "failed to manage her emotions" and in turn attacked herself. She was internally consumed and couldn't sleep all night long.

When I looked through research from different schools of psychology, I found that people have quite different opinions on "how to deal with emotions", but they are surprisingly consistent on the "premise": you have to see it first before you can talk about management. Researchers of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) particularly emphasize the concept of "emotional granularity", saying that the finer you can divide your emotions, the easier it will be to deal with them - for the same "unhappiness", you can distinguish between "anger at being robbed of credit", "anxiety about not being able to meet the deadline" and "grievance at not being taken seriously", so that you won't grab your eyebrows and beard and squeeze them hard when they come up. The mindfulness school has a softer approach and does not recommend you to do rational analysis at all. It says that you should not rush to label the emotion first, but just feel where it is in your body: Is anger stuck in your chest, making you want to tear up your throat when you speak? Does the grievance mean that the nose is sore and the back molars are clenched? Does anxiety mean your palms are sweating and your heart is pounding? Just stay with this feeling for 30 seconds. Don't run away or scold yourself for being so useless. When the intensity subsides a little, you will naturally know what it is.

There are also many people who refute this view, saying, "If I allow my emotions to come out and quarrel with customers and choke with my boss on the spot, then my job will be gone. How can I talk about emotional management?" ”In fact, this is confusing "allowing emotions to exist" and "letting emotions vent". Just like when you are driving on an icy road and it slips, your first reaction is definitely not to slam on the brakes or turn the steering wheel. It is to release the accelerator first, hold the direction, and then slowly adjust after the car body is stable. If you suppress your emotions as soon as you get up, it's like slamming on the brakes and you're 100% going to roll over. ； If you act according to your emotions, it is equivalent to turning the steering wheel hard and you will definitely end up in a ditch. Allowing emotions to occur is the "let off the accelerator" action - you don't have to have an attack on the spot, and you don't have to force yourself to laugh immediately. You just say to yourself in your heart, "Oh, I am really a little unhappy right now." That's enough. This one-second pause can already help you avoid 90% of regretful moments.

I have been through this trap myself before, and I always feel that "professionals need to be emotionally stable." Last time, I spent three days in a row revising the project plan, and the client said lightly, "Let's use the first version." At that time, I got so excited that I dropped the wireless mouse on the table, and everyone in the office looked over. Before, I would have been so embarrassed that I would have turned around and scolded myself, "Why can't I keep my temper?" But I didn't that time. I just sat there and felt it for two minutes: Oh, I'm not angry at the client for being difficult, it's just that my shoulder and neck have been hurting for two days and I haven't slept for five hours in three days. I'm tired. Then I told the leader that I went downstairs to buy a cup of coffee, rested for 20 minutes, walked around and bought a sausage and ate it. When I came back, I changed the plan very smoothly and didn't even work overtime. If I had held back that energy and corrected it while scolding myself, I might have made many low-level mistakes.

In fact, many people's misunderstanding of emotion management is that they regard it as "taming the beast". They always want to use an iron cage to lock their emotions tightly at the beginning. Either the beast becomes more and more ferocious in the end, and it rushes out and hurts people when they are not careful.

It's not that complicated. You open the door a crack first and see whether the person standing there is a cat with fried fur, a puppy wagging its tail and asking for candy from you, a rat soaked in the rain, or a little hedgehog with thorns on its soles. Once you recognize what it is, you will naturally know whether to smooth its fur, wipe it with water, or help it pull out its thorns - there is no need to come up and shout to kill it.