Choose Your Response When You Are Triggered: A Four-Step Reset For Leaders Under Pressure

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Welcome to the Intentional Leaders Podcast.
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This podcast is where we give tips, tools, and ideas for leaders to be more confident, competent, focused, clear, and intentional.
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On today's episode, we're going to explore the intersection between the conflict and pressure situations you may find yourself in and the emotional agility to regulate how you want to show up.
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So three key things that you'll learn in this podcast today is one, a four-step process from moving from an automatic reaction to an intentional response, and then recognize those triggers and stories and patterns that quietly might take over when your stress is high, but also strengthen trust and psychological safety with your team by modeling emotional responsibility and emotional adulthood while not suppressing what you're feeling.
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Let's take a listen.
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Today I want to talk about the intersection of conflict, stress, and emotional agility.
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Now, I have covered all of these topics on podcasts before, but I want to bring them all together in a way to say what do we do in the moment when we're experiencing a conflict or a disconnect, and we want to manage our emotions on purpose.
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So the concept of emotional agility actually was coined by Susan David in her book, conveniently called Emotional Agility.
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But it is about the ability to experience your emotions without allowing them to automatically affect your behavior.
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So if you are a student of Victor Frankel et al.
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who was a Holocaust survivor who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, I think that's the name of it.
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But he talked about like between stimulus and response, we have a choice.
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And I think that choice is important to recognize in terms of how we navigate our emotional reactions.
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And he talks about response.
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And I consider a response a choice.
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I'm being deliberate and intentional versus being reactive to a situation.
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So if something happens, I get irritated, I get angry, and then I react in a way that doesn't build trust.
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So that difference between responsiveness and reactivity is huge.
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And in the middle of that lies emotional agility.
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And why is that important for you as a leader?
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Because one, you're your emotions are contagious.
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You have energy, and the more power you have, and I mean power dynamics, the more it is going to affect people around you in a good or not good way.
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And I remember, I think I've been thinking a lot about my career.
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I crossed paths with someone who I worked with many, many years ago as an outside consultant.
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And I remembered back to the days where I thought, ew, I wasn't not very emotionally agile.
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I don't even know like my emotions and how to manage them well.
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And I always look back on that as the dark times, the dark ages of Cindy Wetland.
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And like, oh, now I still can't always do it, but at least I'm cognizant of how important it is.
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Um, but I think when we get in that stress situation too, it narrows our perspectives, right?
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We don't see as much around us and we don't see the choices we could be making.
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Um, and the bummer is when we react in that moment, when we're reactive, people remember that, right?
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They remember it.
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They don't remember all the times we stayed calm and cool and collected.
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They remember the times we went off the handle or we flew off the handle or we didn't react in a way that was awesome.
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Those are the memorable things, right?
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That's the bummer.
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Um, and I think when our when the conditions around us are difficult, that's when leadership really becomes more authentic, right?
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Like there's pressure, there's stuff going on.
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How are you showing up when those conditions exist?
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That's important for all of us to know.
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So intentional responses create a lot of psychological safety, and that's what we wanted.
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So a couple weeks ago, this is true confession time.
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A couple weeks ago, I had a leadership experience that had been going on for a few months, and this was the culmination of that several month experience.
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And in between these classes, the um the teams were doing independent work, but in these last two classes, they had to work together as their self-directed work teams and do some additional work to officially graduate from the class.
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Well, that second to last day, we were doing two half days.
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Some people didn't show up, some people were late, some people were not on camera, some people were absent and didn't tell me they were not going to be there.
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And right away, I could feel my stress level going up.
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And right away, I got super agitated about it.
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And in that moment, I felt big emotions of like stress and irritation and frustration.
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And I uh and I felt it.
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All right, I felt it.
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And what I noticed is I was really trying to work through it simultaneously as experiencing it, which is very difficult, very difficult to do.
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Um, but I also learned a really important lesson that I could do a better job of preventing that situation from actually occurring to begin with.
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So I want to share a little bit of this reflection because I also want to talk about those moments when we're under stress or conflict.
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And again, I've done a lot of conflict uh podcasts and articles and blogs.
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Uh, conflict is a natural occurrence, right?
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We can't eliminate conflict.
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But when we understand where do we try to go when we're under conflict?
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And for any of you that have taken uh in many of my classes, we do the Thomas Kilman conflict assessment where you find out are you a fighter or flighter?
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Um, and typically I would be a flighter, but in that moment I went into fight mode because I I was there and I couldn't flight unless I like we're done for today.
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No, I couldn't do that in a class.
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But um, I went into fight mode.
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I could feel myself like, ah, I was upset about this.
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So the five conflict styles are if we're feeling less assertive and less cooperative, we can avoid or accommodate.
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We can also compromise.
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Um, and then the two most assertive are either compete, where I'm gonna tell you what we're gonna do, or be collaborative where we figure it out together.
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But those recognitions of our conflict style are important.
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And like I said, I typically would be a flighter.
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And then if that's not available to me, I'm probably gonna be a fighter, and not in a way that is collaborative, because that ability to regulate my emotions in the moment is still a journey for me.
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So, um, what happened in that moment is uh all that upsetness started coming out to the people in class, and that was not really appropriate for them to be a target of my reactivity because they were the ones that showed up, right?
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That's the irony, is like they weren't the people that weren't there or were late or whatever, they're actually there.
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I should have been like reinforcing the crap out of them for being there.
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But this was me navigating my emotions.
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So when you think about emotional agility, it's about the choices we're making in the moment.
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How in the world do we do that?
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And I want to give you four thoughts.
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When you're in that moment, when you feel that tension, that conflict, that problem that is occurring, and you start to feel yourself feeling the feels.
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And I was feeling frustration and upset and irritation and impatience.
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There's a lot of them.
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They weren't very positive.
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Um, is number one, notice before we're reacting.
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The number one important element of emotional agility is being is pausing and naming our emotion in that moment.
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And that's hard to do.
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It's hard for it, it was hard for me to do because at the time there were a lot of people in this class and I was trying to navigate through it.
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But in theory, if you can take that moment to feel it, right?
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Feel that emotion and feel and label it from emotional intelligence.
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We call that name it detainment.
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And I know I've talked about that before too, but you have to be able to name it in order to bring the emotional energy down.
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And so I was trying to process that, process what emotion I was feeling to bring the negative energy down so I could choose a better response because I felt myself getting very reactive.
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That is job one.
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If you can't name the emotion that you're having, it's very difficult to do something with it.
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But number two, separate the facts from the story that we're telling ourselves.
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So the story can sound like this always happens, the, you know, people don't care, blah, blah, blah.
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We can tell ourselves a lot.
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And our brain tells us a lot of stories.
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Our brain goes negative a lot.
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And why does it do that?
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It does that as a self-protective mechanism.
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It's a defense mechanism, right?
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We tell ourselves, like, oh, the world is a scary, horrible place.
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I'm doing the best I can.
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And we we do a lot of that storytelling because we fill in the blanks for things that we don't know, right?
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We don't know all the information, so we tell ourselves a story.
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And then our brain is like, okay, I got this.
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Now I know what's going on.
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But that is not true, right?
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So in my story, what I had to separate was what were the facts?
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Okay, there were a couple people that were late.
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There are a couple people who didn't have the camera on, there are a couple people that were absent.
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And out of those people that were absent, some communicated and some did not.
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All right, those are the facts.
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Like, do I have to be all dramatic about it when I look at the facts?
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No.
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But separating that story and telling our brain to like simmer down, like, here's the real scoop brain, we almost have to go through that process.
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So, number one is notice before we react.
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That choice and that space that Victor Frankel talked about is essential.
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Then we got to clean up our brain and all the stories it's telling us that are not true.
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And then get really number three is getting curious about the emotion.
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My emotion was frustration and irritation on the surface.
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But when I really thought more about it, that wasn't really it.
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It wasn't people not following the rules or not really.
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What I was really upset about were was this experience in the last two days of this experience, those people who did not attend or who were late or who not actively engaged in the training, it mattered to their teams that they were on, that they were going to be doing work in these last two days together.
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So if I didn't show up or I was late or I wasn't engaged, it was gonna affect other people on my team.
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And that's where I really understood the upsetness is okay, I people are having an impact on other people in their teams.
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Do they know that?
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Are they taking ownership over that?
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And that was the emotion.
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I was upset because of that.
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And and then I what was interesting about that is so the folks that were there and in attendance, they had to do some more heavy lifting for the people who weren't there.
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The the response that I could have chosen, and I got there.
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Thankfully, I got there.
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I hope I got there, but the in the moment, I was not being supportive of the people who were there, I was being resentful of the people who weren't there.
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Whereas, like what was really upsetting me was their experience.
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And so I was inadvertently contributing to the stress of how I was reacting in the moment.
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And when I got through that day and really thought about it, it was a powerful, it was a powerful thought process to go through to realize that my reactive self was actually going against what I really wanted to accomplish, and my true intention was to demonstrate empathy and compassion and focus and confidence for the people who were there, right?
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But I wasn't in the moment doing that, I was too irritated and upset.
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Um, so all of this cool was recorded, and I thought someday a more healthy, open version of Cindy might go through that video and actually watch myself because I was really curious, like, how did I show up?
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There was a lot of voices in my head.
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I don't know how I showed up as externally, as much turmoil as I had internally.
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What I do know is that I started out stressed and talking fast and being kind of agitated.
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And then I I felt myself being able to relax when I realized, like, what do I need to do here?
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And that is step number four in emotional agility is choosing the behavior relative to your intention.
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What do you really want to do?
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Right?
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Like, what is what is my purpose?
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My purpose is to be there for the people who are there and create the best experience and the best learning environment I can.
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And so that had to be my focus, and that allowed me to choose different responses.
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So I think if I want to be supportive in the moment, the ability to process all of that for all of us is very difficult.
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Um, and until we're aware of those behaviors, it's also hard to make a choice to do something different.
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So emotional agility is a journey, it's a practice, right?
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It's kind of like people would always tell me years ago about yoga, it's a practice.
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You don't get good at it right away.
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You do it and then you get better at it because you're practicing, but you always have to bring yourself back to yourself.
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And the same with emotional agility and to be able, the the difference between reactivity and responsiveness means we have to come back to ourselves and be really grounded in what's going on for us and what we're feeling and the story that we're telling ourselves.
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But all of those things matter, right?
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That self-regulation allows the choices to happen, right?
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If we suppress it, if in the moment I suppressed it, which is what I used to do many years ago.
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Well, I still maybe I still do, maybe I still do that sometimes a lot.
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But anyway, um, suppress it is suck it in, suck it up, compartmentalize it.
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I talk about this in emotional intelligence classes all the time because most people think they should control it, right?
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I need to control it.
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I need to zip it in, suck it up.
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And even when I think of the word control, my shoulders go up and I think, no, we're holding in that emotion.
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That is not healthy.
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Maybe short term, you think, okay, I gotta, I gotta hold it in till I can figure out what to do with it.
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But as a leader, when you're in front of people, how do you navigate that, right?
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Can you really control it?
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Because that control or suppression is still gonna come out.
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So we have to be thoughtful of the choices we're making in the here and now, and that's the tricky part.
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So here's what I want you to be thinking about as you navigate those difficult situations, those moments in time where you feel like, what is happening here?
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I'm in a staff meeting, I'm in a group meeting, I'm doing something, I'm doing a presentation, I'm just talking to my team, I'm talking to a coworker or my boss, and you feel that moment where you're just not where things aren't right.
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That's not what you expected.
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There's a gap between what you wanted to happen and what is, and then drop into that emotion without judging it.
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Right?
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We are we are wired to be angry and and mad and sad.
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We can react to all those things, but we have to figure out what is what is the feeling, what is it, and and then separate the facts from the story that we tell ourselves.
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And it's really easy to tell ourselves stories about people that we've known for a long time because we can we can say, well, historically this is the story, and then we drag that story into the future.
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That's not always true, right?
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So part of it is just separating that piece and then get below the emotion.
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And as I mentioned to me, it wasn't the irritation and the frustration with people who weren't there, it was the upsetness with the people who were there that they weren't gonna have as good of an experience as they should have or could have.
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That's what caused my upset was for them compassion for that experience and wanting them to have a good one.
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So you got to sometimes go below the surface.
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I've talked a lot um recently with people about fear.
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Uh, fear is an interesting emotion.
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A lot of the things that cause a stress or anxiety or overwhelm are actually fear in disguise.
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When we when we dig down into it, most of us don't say, Well, I'm afraid, I'm afraid of this, I'm afraid of that.
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Most people don't go around saying that.
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We say instead, I'm stressed, I'm overwhelmed, I'm anxious.
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But fear underlies a lot for us.
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So just think about that as you experience stress or overwhelm or anxiety.
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Is there any fear bubbling below the surface?
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And then the fourth one is choosing the behavior based on your intention.
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What do you really want to do?
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Reactivity tends to result in behaviors that erode trust, right?
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And create that unpredictability with us and others.
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Responsiveness tends to be the healthy choices that we make, the ones that we know, right?
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Breathing, active listening, getting curious, being open-minded, uh, understanding, compassion, all those beautiful things that we know we're supposed to do, but in the moment, they don't feel accessible to us.
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And we have to create the space to make them accessible to us.
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And if we could, um if we can really realize that emotional agility isn't about feeling less, it's not feeling less, it's creating the space between what is happening and how we're choosing to respond and making an intentional choice.
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And that is our power, right?
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That's our power as a human being, is the ability to decide.
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And that was a lot of Victor Frankel's message is we get that choice.
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But sometimes we feel like we don't have it, and we have to get back our power in order to do it.
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And I think one of the key things that is helpful for us as a leader is when we're able to do this, we're being a good role model for other people to do the same thing.
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We're not modeling being a victim of situations and stress and things that are outside of our control.
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What we're modeling is emotional adulthood, that we're going to take ownership over how we react and why, and that we're going to respond in ways that create trust, build our credibility, and help our teams feel better about the job they're doing, feel more confident, more competent, and they feel more trust in us to show up in a way that supports psychological safety.
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And I think that's the lesson is how do we do that intentionally?
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I mentioned in this podcast episode, Victor Frankel, his best known work is called Man's Search for Meaning.
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And it combines his surviving Nazi concentration camps with his belief that while we can't control our circumstances, we can retain the freedom to choose our response and find meaning in our life.
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And I think this is what this episode is all about.
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We are the only ones in the universe that can do this.
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And so emotional agility isn't about always being calm or never being frustrated or even pretending that bad things don't exist in our world and our feelings, but it means that we recognize that while we don't have control over those situations in the moment, we can take ownership over what we do next.
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And that is emotional adulthood.
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And when you practice that consistency consistently, what you'll do is give people around you the permission to understand and learn how to do the same.
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If this episode helped you create a little bit more space between those feelings and reacting, subscribe to the Intentional Leaders Podcast so you don't miss out on what's next.