How to Get Unhooked from Your Emotional Triggers
What pushes your buttons? Do you know? A lot of us aren’t very aware of how we actually feel or why we react the way we do in charged situations. It is not surprising that we can easily get hooked by our emotions. Reactivity shows up for a reason and while it often contains valuable information about our values and our goals, it isn’t always pretty. Better understanding your emotions allows you to manage emotions instead of being controlled by them.
Emotional self-awareness is the ability to understand what you are feeling and why you are feeling that way. It is the foundation of emotional intelligence. The good news is that it’s never too late to learn how to recognize and manage emotions and developing this skill set can help you have better interpersonal interactions and stronger relationships.
You may be asking, “What do you mean I don’t know how I’m feeling?” Our emotional brain or limbic system started forming during our first three years of life, often before we developed words and rational thinking. It recorded our earliest emotional experiences. These memories are held in our bodies and shape the way we react to situations, but they are mostly unconscious.
Why do we even have emotions? Humans developed emotions to help them survive and the emotional brain plays an important role in ensuring our survival. When danger is perceived, the emotional brain sets off an alarm. This alarm is advantageous if you need to react quickly to get out of the way of a speeding car. However, it’s not that helpful when the alarm sounds because a colleague questions your decision during a meeting or takes credit for your hard work.
Leaders who can get a handle on their emotional triggers better navigate challenging situations. Here’s why. When you are in the middle of an emotional reaction, your emotional brain runs the show. Your thinking brain (which is responsible for attention, impulse control, and planning) is not playing an active role. In other words, during an emotional reaction, you are not using your higher thinking for decisions! When emotional buttons are pushed, we tend to automatically react in a "knee-jerk" way that feels necessary for survival. Leaders who recognize this can step back and make a more thoughtful and rational decision on how to respond in a situation.
Being Aware of Triggers Is Essential to Emotional Intelligence
When we are triggered without much awareness of our emotions, we react in a certain way out of habit. Our typical emotional reactions develop because we have a need (conscious or unconscious). We all have needs that trigger us to react quickly (rather the thoughtfully). While specific needs vary person to person, common needs include:
Being in control
Being recognized, appreciated, and valued
Trust
Autonomy
Feeling competent
Fairness and truth
Being included
Strategies for Managing Triggers
Try these approaches to recognize and manage your specific triggers.
RECOGNIZE THE EMOTION/ FEEL IT IN YOUR BODY.
The quicker you recognize an emotion is triggered, the sooner you can discover if the “threat” is real or not. By taking your emotional temperature, you can take the first step toward managing your behavior. You can’t manage what you don’t recognize.
Our emotions can be felt in the body and are deeply connected with sensation. According to Dr. David Daniels, with practice you can actually start to feel your reactivity come on. “It is visceral.” He recommends gentle inquiry to identify where in the body the emotion is sensed and what the emotion is (sadness, distress, anger, fear).
Accessing emotions through the body is often easier than with the mind. Ask yourself, “Where am I feeling this strong emotion?” Leaders I work with commonly report noticing things like a racing heart, a knot in the stomach, a flushed hot face, or a tightening of voice.
IDENTIFY WHAT TRIGGERED YOU.
Think about what, specifically, caused the reaction. Use the list of common triggers (above) to help you narrow down the choices or consider others that resonate with you.
PUT IT INTO WORDS.
By verbalizing the feelings aroused, the sensations and the trigger, we can make better connections and calm down our emotional brain and bring higher thinking back online. For example, you might say to yourself, “There’s that feeling of being frustrated again...” Dr. Dan Siegel, refers to this as “name it to tame it.”
PRACTICE A NEW REACTION.
Once you are more aware of your common triggers, you can anticipate situations where they are likely to occur (e.g., when your boss reschedules your one-on-one meeting again or when your colleague points out your mistakes in front of the entire team). Preparing yourself for a common trigger by thinking through your “ideal” reaction will loosen the grip of your emotional triggers and break the habit. For example, a leader I coached deliberately chose to "count to 10" in meetings before responding with “Let me make sure I understand your concerns...” when someone disagreed with her point of view instead of immediately jumping in with an aggressive defense of her point.
Becoming an Emotionally Self-Aware Leader
Our knee-jerk reactions to challenging situations are well ingrained. These reactions will keep happening until we step back and look at them closely. With a little focused effort, we regain control of ourselves from our emotional brain and deliberately respond like the intelligent people we are. Not only will this emotional intelligence personally benefit us as leaders, emotional intelligence benefits our teams and companies.
