In Melody Wilding’s book, Trust Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Channel Your Emotions for Success at Work, she has a chapter on “Channel Emotions Into An Advantage.” Have you ever found yourself in a situation at work that has you so emotionally upset you are afraid of responding for fear that you would yell, or worse, cry?
She describes her client in a situation at work as “…she couldn’t concentrate, and her body felt shaky and unsettled…[then] by the time [she] got [her] act together, the day was practically over.” That is me, through and through—I can’t concentrate because I’m so focused on what happened that by the time I calm myself down, it’s too late to respond to the situation appropriately.
Melody states you should acknowledge the emotion and adjust accordingly. She uses an analogy of the weather–”When the weather is bad…it doesn’t mean you deny it, focus all your attention on it, or cancel your plans because of it. What you do is accept the weather and adjust accordingly.” Wow…what a powerful thing to remember.
But when you can’t concentrate to settle down, what do you do? She recommends several grounding techniques to settle down, such as the 5-4-3-2-1 Tool, Clench and Release, and Box Breathing. I haven’t tried these methods, but have found that if I used my Value-Based Decision Making in conjunction with the Situation Behavior Impact (SBI)™Model, I’m able to better respond to the situation. These two steps are what I did to address the friend issue in my Forgiveness post.
In Value-Based Decision Making, I am able to identify the feeling, refer to my values and evaluate the potential actions to determine not only how I feel, but the best solution I can think of as it relates to what makes me happy. To respond to the situation, I use SBI™.
As it related to my situation with my two cherished girlfriends (Forgiveness), my response was something like this:
Situation: I took the time to think of something special I could knit for you, spent the time to knit it and made soap for you.
Behavior: I was so excited to give it to you last night. Your thanks was followed by an ugly picture of vests referring to me as one would their grandmother and other requests for me to make various things.
Impact: I feel humiliated (what I gave wasn’t good enough). Is it possible not to bring up the topic of my crafting any more so I can heal from the humiliation?
This was much more effective in communicating my feelings and need from them—my first method of non-response to their text just left them bantering more about what I could make them. And because it opened up communication between us, I feel very satisfied on how I handled it.
My next step is to continue to use these two methods when needed, and hope eventually I’ll be able to respond more promptly as I get comfortable with both methods.
Weeks of life left: 1,160
Image by Ulrike Mai from Pixabay
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