HAPPINESS
We often hear tips and tricks for helping us to “control” our emotions, but that’s the wrong idea: Strong emotions aren’t bad, and they don’t need to be pushed down or controlled. They are, in fact, data. Our emotions evolved as a signaling system, a way to help us communicate with each other and to better understand ourselves. What we need to do is learn to develop emotional agility, the capacity to mine even the most difficult emotions for data that can help us make better decisions.
WHAT’S THE FUNCTION OF THE EMOTION?
To make the most of that data, ask yourself what the function of your emotion is. What is it telling you? What is it trying to signal?
By examining what your emotions are telling you, rather than pushing them away or focusing on the wrong problem, you can learn something new about yourself.
Our emotions can teach us valuable lessons. Let them shine a light on what you want to change, how you want to act in the future or what is valuable to you.
IS YOUR REACTION ALIGNED WITH YOUR VALUES?
Our emotions can also help us understand our deepest values. They can often signal what is more important to us: You feel love for your family. You feel ambition at work. You feel fulfilled when you’ve been able to help a direct report achieve their goals. You feel peace and satisfaction on a mountain summit. It’s far better to focus on these deeper values rather than on your immediate emotions, which can spur poor decisions.
Consider this example: Let’s say that you need to give some difficult feedback to one of your direct reports. You’re anxious about the conversation, and you’ve been putting it off. In examining your emotions, you realize that one of the values behind your procrastination is wanting to be fair. So ask yourself how the conversation could either bring you toward or move you away from your value of fairness. Looking at the situation in this light, you can unhook yourself from the thrall of your immediate emotions in order to make a better choice that is true to the values that underlie them.
This kind of thinking can help you avoid situations in which you do something that doesn’t align with your values in the long term. Avoiding a conversation is a typical example, but there are many others: brashly telling someone off for getting on your nerves when you value compassion, sticking with a comfortable job that doesn’t align with your dream, criticizing yourself for the smallest things when you value self-affirmation.
Managing emotions isn’t just doing away with them; it’s putting strategies in place that let you use them effectively rather than letting them govern you. Your emotions are your natural guidance system — and they are more effective when you don’t try to fight them
