Controlling your emotional reactions

Human brain is a tricky thing, but in most of the situations it does believe what it can see, hear and feel.  That is why the terms like ‘blink response’ and ‘first impression’ are so important as they create opinion and perception. Opinions may start with one person, but do travel quickly in the group and do stick longer than what we might think.

So here are a couple of tricks to control your reaction, when in a situation you do not like a comment or statement from someone.

Trick your brain. When someone says something that our brain does not like, it drops into this state of negative feeling. This is what makes us react in a manner that might not present a good opinion about us. Tricking your brain in believing that everything is up to its likeability seems to work. It is not an easy thing and does take practice, but once mastered comes very handy.  I even try to be preemptive and fill my brain with some positive thoughts before walking into a discussion with a person or a group that I was anticipating to generate some negativity.  Good thing about being positive is that it never hurts you or anyone.

Create a perception about you as a positive and a neutral person.  Even when you try to be positive all the time, there are times you might feel differently. This is when having a perception that is positive helps. Being passionate is good and it should be shown in the right forum; but it is even more important to not give an image of having too many strong opinions.  Having too many strong opinions can not only alienate you from certain set of people who might think otherwise, but these can be used against you to bring out strong emotions from you in a group setting. I will admit that people with passion and enthusiasm do make better first impression on me then a poker face. However, that impression remains good as long as we believe in the same things.

So I thought I was becoming good at not getting bothered by people’s comments, but that changed when I recently got pleasure of working with an executive coach Jill Bromund (www.becoachable.com). The best thing about working with Jill was this awareness about the situation that can impact our career growth and how to work on it. It so turns out that I still have some buttons left that can easily be used. Will share some of the insight from Jill in my next blog.