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Manage Your Response To Emotions

SUMMARY

Do you find yourself constantly reacting to the things that happen to you and around you? Or are you able to respond in a way that gives you the behavior that you want?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year and Master Coach Trainer and today, I want to continue our conversation around all things  Social and Emotional Intelligence by helping you to manage your response to your emotions.   

Let's take a look at three key principles that you need to understand so that you can then have a healthy response.

Number one is that you need to Engage the Logical Brain.

Number two is to Recognise Triggers.

Number three is to Give Yourself Space To Change.

Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week where we will look at the first competency of Self-Management, which is Behavioural Self-Control; where we will go deeper into a five-part strategy to help you regulate your responses to those things that you're currently reacting to.

Make sure that you subscribe and that you're here each week. If you've missed anything that we've done, go back through those previous episodes and get yourself ready to come in next week when we talk about regulating your behaviour.

I'll see you then.

TRANSCRIPT

Do you find yourself constantly reacting to the things that happen to you and around you? Or are you able to respond in a way that gives you the behavior that you want?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Speaker and Trainer of the Year and Master Coach Trainer and today, I want to continue our conversation around all things Social and Emotional Intelligence by helping you to manage your response to your emotions.

Over the last few weeks, we've been talking about Emotional Intelligence. We've been talking about the basics and the first quadrant of Self-Awareness. You looked at being able to be more emotionally self-aware knowing which emotion you were going through in the moment and why. 

You looked at being more accurate in being able to assess where you were on our journey, from where you are now to where you want to go, in terms of your Emotional Intelligence.  Then you looked at what I believe to be the most important and foundational competency of all the 26 that I work in, and that is Personal Power.

You went through a journey from limiting beliefs and unhealthy dialogue to feeling more confident in having more self-worth; being able to set boundaries and to keep them, and to say yes and no appropriately.

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to be aware of your emotions in the moment, and then to use that information, to manage your behaviour. We've talked before about it being really important to realise that it's not about suppressing emotions, it's not about ignoring them, and it's not about managing them. What it's about is navigating those emotions and then managing the response that comes from that emotion.

An emotion is a physiological cue in your body that tells you that something is going on internally. How you interpret that, how you label that, how you think about that, will determine how you feel.

How you continue to navigate that particular emotion will determine whether that feeling changes and escalates, or whether you're able to manage your responses to what you're feeling in that moment.

The second quadrant of Emotional Intelligence is all about Self-Management. It's no use having that level of Self-Awareness if you don't then do something with it. It's in fact, even more frustrating to know what emotion you're going through, and then not be able to regulate how you navigate it.

Every single one of us is responsible for our behaviour. You are responsible for the way that you respond to those things that are around you.

So, the first thing I want you to do is to understand a little bit of a semantic that I look at, and that is the difference between a reaction and a response.

A lot of people will say, don't overreact. What I like to do is tweak that a little bit and only react to those things that are an emergency. However, in the regulation of what you do coming out of a feeling that came from an emotion, you always want that to be a response.

Now the key to this is being able to understand how your brain operates.

Looking at the brain in just simple terms for the understanding here (I'm no neuroscientist) is going to help you to understand why you behave the way you do, and then be able to regulate your behavior.

All data that comes into our brain comes in via the Thalamus, which is in the limbic brain or what they commonly call the emotional brain. And then, it distributes that information to various parts of the brain including the prefrontal cortex, which is the executive command center in the front of our brain, just behind your forehead.

Along with many other things, one of the purposes of your prefrontal cortex is emotional regulation.

What it allows you to do is to make sure that you respond logically to those things that are happening around you rather than purely react emotionally.

So, when the data comes into the thalamus (the limbic or the emotional brain), it then goes to two places: it goes to the amygdala, which are two almond shaped nodes (one on each hemisphere) that are designed to act like a thermostat, like a warning signal regulator. It also sends the data to the prefrontal cortex.

Now what happens is when the amygdala senses, based on a previously highly charged emotional memory, that there's something to be concerned about, there's something that you need to fight or flight from, then what it will do is block all that slow thinking going to our prefrontal cortex. So, instead of getting a response that comes from your logical brain, you react emotionally.

Now that you have a basic understanding of how the brain works and how it processes; how you think and behave around our emotions, let's take a look at three key principles that you need to understand so that you can then have a healthy response.

Number one is that you need to Engage the Logical Brain.

When you respond, it's a logical response; you've processed and navigated the emotion. You've taken your gut feelings, your heart feelings, how it is that you've interpreted what that emotion is, and you have channeled that through the executive command center in the brain so that it can actually make a logical response.  To do that, you need to make sure that you engage in language and processes that are logical.

Now, you've probably heard the old count to 10. I used to think that was just to give you space before you responded - and it is. What I've since found out, as I've studied this over the years, is that more than that, counting is a logical process. By counting to 10, you are actually lighting up the neural pathways in the neocortex - in the logical brain. Over the coming weeks, I'm going to teach you some strategies on how to regulate your behaviour.    

So, the first thing you want to understand is being logical is the baseline of being able to make that happen. 

Number two is to Recognise Triggers.

You all have things that trigger certain thinking patterns, certain behaviours. And the way that your brain is wired is by those synaptic connections and neural pathways being built. And, over a period of time of having an initial thought, you can go to a learned behavior in 1/250,000th of a second.

By recognising what buttons you have, that when pushed will take you from this thought to an unhealthy behaviour, is vital if you're able to tweak and adjust the way that you respond to those emotions.    

To do that, you need to be highly attuned to your emotions. You need to (as you learned back in Emotional Self-Awareness) understand which emotion you are going through in that particular moment. You need to be able to label those effectively and accurately so that you don't feel that you are in one emotion when it's actually a different one.

A lot of times people might say, "I am angry", when really they started off being frustrated or something totally different. So, you need to make sure that you increase the vocabulary that you understand to recognise when those different triggers are being pushed.

Once you do that, you are then able to deploy certain strategies to get a different response to what you used to.

Number three, is to Give Yourself Space To Change.

As I said, our neural pathways have been developed over a period of time. So, the way that you behave now is based on the conditioning in your brain. To be able to change that, and get a different response now, is going to take incremental change on a day-to-day basis. Give yourself time to build these new neural pathways. Recognise the things that you want to change; the behaviours that are not serving you and the triggers and reactions that are in your life right now that you want to shift. Reject those as being helpful and then replace them with new strategies. Then, repeat that new process over and over again until your brain is rewired with a new pattern that says, "when this now happens, I now go here instead of where I used to go before.

So, they're the three concepts that you need to understand before I can take you on a journey and give you the actual strategies over the coming weeks.

When you learn to respond to what's going on around you, in a healthier way, you have more energy, you have more fun; it's good for us, it's good for the people around us, and it's good for the greater good.

Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week where we will look at the first competency of Self-Management, which is Behavioural Self-Control; where we will go deeper into a five-part strategy to help you regulate your responses to those things that you're currently reacting to.

Make sure that you subscribe and that you're here each week. If you've missed anything that we've done, go back through those previous episodes and get yourself ready to come in next week when we talk about regulating your behaviour.   

I'll see you then.

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