Emotion management issues

It never requires you to eliminate all negative emotions and be an "emotionally perfect person" who is always peaceful. The essence is to learn to identify emotions, live with emotions, and even make emotions work for you.； There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and all methods must be adapted to your personality and the situation in order to be useful.

Believe it or not, you have most likely had a similar experience: a project proposal that you have been working on for three days was rejected by the contact person with a frivolous "The boss said we should use the first version". Blood rushed to the top of the head. The first reaction was "Be professional and don't lose your temper." You see, emotions never disappear out of thin air. If you suppress them under the surface, they will only leak out from somewhere else.

The current mainstream solution ideas are actually divided into two groups, and they have been arguing for many years without reaching a conclusion. Supporters of the cognitive behavioral school (CBT) will tell you that at this time, you should stop for 3 seconds and replace the subconscious thought of "He is just trying to trick me" with "He can't make the decision even if the boss's needs change." The essence is to use rational cognition to hedge emotional impulses. I know a project director who has been working as a project director for 6 years. He always keeps a small card in his drawer that says "None of your business, none of my business." When he encounters cross-department blame-shifting, he takes it out and takes a look at it, and he can calm down for the most part on the spot. This method is really useful for people who are more rational and used to solving problems. However, researchers of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) do not agree with this logic. They think that if you adjust your cognition immediately, you are essentially denying your true feelings: Why can't I be angry after being beaten back after working for three days? You have to allow yourself to be angry first, and even find a stairwell to scold the "unjust boss who slapped his head and changed his demands" for three minutes. When the anger reaches its peak and naturally subsides, you can then talk about solving the problem, which will not leave any emotional damage.

Speaking of which, last month I saw two completely opposite complaints in the practitioner community. A young man who works on products said that CBT saved his life in the workplace and changed his needs so that he would no longer be angry.； Another highly sensitive girl said that she had to learn CBT's "rational adjustment" and forced herself to "think from a different perspective" every time she got angry. In the end, she fell into deeper self-denial because she "can't even control her emotions well" and almost saw a psychiatrist. To put it bluntly, there is no right or wrong in the method itself, the most important thing is whether it is suitable or not.

What’s even more interesting is the current controversy over “emotion management” on the Internet. There are overwhelming copywriting saying that “emotional stability is the most advanced accomplishment for adults.” Many people regard this as a golden rule. Whenever they lose their temper, they blame themselves, “Why am I so useless?” However, many people directly criticize this as a new rhetoric of PUA in the workplace. Have you ever seen a boss who banged the table at a meeting and was called “emotionally unstable”? Why are ordinary employees not professional enough when they feel wronged and frown? This is really poignant. I have seen a young girl who just graduated before. She was wrongly accused of receiving kickbacks by a client. She shed a few tears after explaining a few sentences with red eyes. Then she turned around and was slapped with a performance C by her boss for "poor emotional management ability." To be honest, anyone who encounters this would feel aggrieved. This is not a problem of emotional management at all, but a problem of double standards in the evaluation system. You can't ask ordinary people to smile and turn the other cheek when they are slapped on the other cheek, right?

To be honest, I have gone through a lot of pitfalls in emotional management myself. In the past two years, I learned to keep an emotional diary online, requiring myself to write down "triggers, feelings, reflections, and improvement plans" one by one every time I got angry. I persisted for half a month, and spent an extra half hour reviewing the situation every time I got angry. It made me even more angry, so I simply gave up. Now when something bad happens to me, I either go downstairs to buy a glass of iced American style and stand on the side of the road to enjoy the wind for two minutes, or I go home and curse at my cat (it doesn’t understand it anyway, it just tilts its head and rubs my hand for snacks), but the internal consumption is reduced by more than half. I used to help a friend who worked in HR sort out her emotional problems. Her biggest headache was that every time she talked about layoffs, she felt guilty for a long time. She always felt that she had ruined other people's jobs. She tried CBT methods to brainwash herself, "This is the company's decision and it has nothing to do with me." It didn't work at all. Yes, and then she came up with a trick. After each negotiation, she would recommend two headhunting resources in her hand to the laid off employees to help see if there were any suitable new opportunities. The guilt disappeared immediately. You see, this did not follow any textbook method, but was the most suitable for her.

In fact, emotions are like an alarm in your home. When it goes off, it does not tell you to smash the alarm, but reminds you that something needs to be dealt with: anger tells you that your boundaries have been violated, grievance tells you that your needs have not been met, and anxiety tells you that you are not prepared enough for the future. You don’t need to force yourself to be an alarm that never goes off, and you don’t need to force it on yourself by looking at other people’s methods, and do whatever makes you feel comfortable. As long as you don’t let the flood of emotions overwhelm your normal rhythm of life, that’s enough. There is no such thing as perfect emotional management. To put it bluntly, it's just a matter of slowly getting used to your own temper.