Emotional Management Skills

Emotional management skills are abilities that help you regulate your emotional responses to situations. They are a key part of emotional intelligence, which is a term that refers to a person’s ability to identify and understand their own emotions and those of other people. Emotional management skills may take time and effort to develop, but they can help you become an effective professional and supportive teammate.

For developing emotion management skills, being open to one’s thoughts and feelings is not enough. You must have complete authority over changing your thoughts and feelings that are generated whenever your values are touched by the actions of a person or an event. This is important because the change in your thoughts and feelings is what helps change your emotions, preventing from reactive outbursts.

Professionals who regulate their emotions might find it easier to act rationally in high-stress situations and make effective professional choices. Developing emotional management skills can help professionals in a wide range of industries and jobs, including leadership positions. Emotional management skills can help you perform many tasks, including:

• Resolving conflict with colleagues or clients
• Giving presentations or speaking publicly
• Assisting customers
• Leading performance evaluations
• Training new teammates
• Mentoring colleagues
• Completing tasks under time constraints
• Adapting to changes in project plans

Emotional management skills

Reflection

Reflecting allows you to discover why you had a certain emotional reaction to a situation or person and can help you resolve conflicts by separating the emotion from the situation. For example, if you had a conflict with a colleague about a decision they made while you were absent from work, it might help to reflect on whether you disagree with their decision or whether you feel insecure that you weren’t present for the discussion. Knowing the cause of your feelings might help you reach a compromise with your colleague.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is a skill that allows you to predict how a situation or person might affect you by understanding your own emotional state. It can allow you to observe your emotional reactions to situations and learn how to improve your responses. For example, if you understand that being prepared allows you to feel calmer and more confident at work, then you can take steps to ensure that you’re as prepared as possible for the workday. Feeling secure in your work environment can lower your stress levels and make you more resilient to changes or obstacles.

Acceptance

A key emotional management skill is the ability to accept your emotions without assigning a value to them, which can help you react rationally to a situation that’s causing you to feel a certain way. By accepting your emotions, you can often recover from an emotional reaction more easily, allowing you to focus on the next task. Learning to accept your own emotions can also help you develop empathy towards others by relating your emotions to their own.

Empathy

Empathy is the ability to relate to how other people feel in a situation using your own experience. Using empathy in the workplace can help you build rewarding relationships with colleagues and prevent conflicts. You can use empathy to recognize when a colleague needs help managing their workload and understand when they become frustrated at an obstacle or delay. Understanding their feelings can help you work with them to create a solution to the problem.

Perspective

Developing a sense of perspective can help you manage your emotions by placing them into context. For example, if you feel nervous before giving a presentation to an audience, you can put that emotion into perspective by recognizing that it’s normal to feel some anxiety about public speaking and that many successful professionals feel this way. Perspective can remind you that emotions are a healthy response to situations and that you can overcome them to accomplish your tasks.

Steps to improve:

Stop. This may be the most difficult of all three steps because you need a very strong will power. The next time your emotions are so strong that you feel hijacked by them and feel a strong urge to take an action that you may regret later on, stop right there and think! Start looking for cues and the thoughts and feelings that have aggravated that behavior.

Drop. Now that you are through with the most difficult part, engage yourself in an activity that will help you calm down. Without dropping the intensity of your emotions you may never be able to think clearly and rationally.

Process. Now you’ll be in a better position to think about it all and come up with an appropriate reaction. First of all, identify the emotions you are feeling. It is better to update you ‘emotions-vocabulary’ for this purpose. Once you have identified what precisely it is that you’re feeling, think about its source and find out why you are feeling that way. Once you have the answers to both these questions right in front of you, you are the better judge of which is the best way to proceed, bearing in mind your ultimate goals as well as personal values.