What is emotional regulation? Three ways leaders can keep their cool in challenging situations
Paying attention to what you truly feel, even unpleasant emotions, is a powerful and underutilized leadership skill. Here’s how to do it.
BY Chantal Laurie Below and Jo Ilfeld
Emotional regulation, the ability to modulate an emotion or set of emotions, is a requirement of strong leadership. This skill serves leaders in all industries. As executive coaches, we know that holding steady under pressure and exhibiting predictable, reasonable emotional responses to challenging situations can support both psychological safety and team effectiveness.
Too often though, leaders assume that regulation means suppressing or dismissing emotions, especially those deemed “negative” like anger, jealousy, loneliness, or shame. Paying attention to what one truly feels is a powerful and underutilized leadership skill. In reality, emotional regulation means recognizing, labeling, and thoughtfully responding to the full spectrum of emotions, even unpleasant ones.
Because unpleasant emotions can be hard to experience, clients that we work with instead ask for “tools, tips, and tactics” so they can sidestep “bad” feelings. However, in order to truly address the complex challenges, it’s essential to delve beneath the surface: Instead of just looking for information, explore the multiple layers of feelings. Here are three ways to do that:
Increase Emotional Literacy
People are good at separating positive from negative emotions, but less skilled at distinguishing negative emotions from one another. Too often, people default to the familiar: mad, sad, bad. Research, however, indicates that being able to accurately label our emotions—known as emotional literacy—(Is it mad or frustrated? Sad or disappointed? Bad or resentful?), leads to better navigation through stress, more skillful handling of conflict, and more positive interpersonal relationships—all key leadership skills.
Often we avoid clarifying our negative emotions out of fear it will amplify our unhappiness. The opposite is the case, however, according to research, which suggests that we’re less depressed when we accept our negative as well as our positive emotions. Too much focus on only positive feelings can lead to worse mental health. Excessive attention on being “cheery and optimistic” often requires hyper-vigilance, demanding we regularly scan environments for potential issues, mentally exhausting ourselves to avoid negative outcomes.
To increase emotional literacy, we recommend our clients pause two to four times a day and locate their emotional state on a tool like the feelings wheel. Tools and practices like this help us pay attention to the subtle nuances of each emotion and enhance our emotional vocabulary.
Pause and accept before taking action
It’s uncomfortable to feel negative emotions like embarrassment, fury, or insecurity. Because of this discomfort, people’s reaction to negative emotions is to spring into action, often averting their attention from feeling their feelings to instead focusing on “fixing” or “doing” something: e.g., hitting reply to a text message, checking things off on a to-do list, responding immediately after being triggered in a meeting. While this is a common way for our nervous systems to reduce the tension of feeling bad, it’s unwise for leaders to succumb to it. Our first impulse when in a negative state is rarely the thoughtful one we would leverage after examining our feelings through a curious and compassionate lens.
Leaders who have practiced being less judgmental of their emotions, accepting all feelings whether positive or negative, end up experiencing less stress than their peers. To navigate through daily life stressors, leaders must:
a) accurately name their emotions
b) accept that it’s okay to have the emotion even if it’s unpleasant
c) resist the urge to act impulsively to change their emotional state
Identify the unmet need first, then act
Researchers have found that negative emotions are how our subconscious gets our attention and points to a deeper, unmet need that we have. When we’re quick to move into action to dampen that feeling, we lose important data that is essential to highlight. For example, anger can signal that we feel undervalued or at risk of being exploited; guilt or embarrassment can signal we need to make amends.
Taking time to dig beneath an emotion and examine what it is you most want and need can provide actionable data about what to do next. Responsive action then comes from a measured and insightful place as opposed to the knee-jerk response that brings more trouble.
To be sure, not every fleeting, unpleasant emotion needs to be unpacked. But leaders should be willing to regularly attune to their emotional state and become curious when their negative emotions have staying power. In today’s dynamic and complex environments, leaders must pay attention, pause—not just act—and parse the underlying needs that their emotions signal in order to thrive in the long run.
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