Series on soft skills. Part 7: Managing your emotions

They are often the deciding factor in a job interview: companies increasingly want to know whether their employees can complement their technical qualifications with social skills such as team spirit, networking and communication capability. In the seventh part of our series on soft skills, we look at the broad field of the emotions. Whether positive or negative – you get more out of life by learning how to deal optimally with your feelings.

Sometimes one really has to be a comic-strip hero: characters such as Superman and his ilk, Asterix and his band or the members of the Donald Duck clan usually give free rein to their feelings so that a mere glance is enough to tell the reader about their emotional state. That’s why these colorful stories abound with expletives such as “Yippee”, “Grrr”, “Aaargh”, “Sob” and “Sigh”.

Reality is rather more restrained. People are often economical with their feelings; show them only in concealed form, or when no one is looking. But what would we be without the shout of joy in response to passing an exam at university, the uninhibited pleasure in being praised by the boss at the end of a project, but also without the disappointment and anger against that ridiculous penalty against our team in the 89th minute? No doubt about it: emotions are the elixir of life.

But an elixir that can quickly go sour if we don’t learn to handle our feelings, especially negative ones, so that they stand in our way or even hurt us. What’s needed is a relaxed and mature attitude. Because anger with ourselves or others, a nagging conscience after a minor peccadillo, excessive reaction to criticism – all these feelings set up effective obstacles to our emotional growth.

Of course we need negative feelings because they give us important clues about life: anger and fury tell us that something is wrong, a nagging conscience forces us to re-examine our conduct, sadness and pain slow down the pace of our lives giving us the time we need to deal with them. But negative feelings also give us the energy to right wrongs in the first place.

However, this does not mean that we ought to experience them as often and as intensively as possible and be their helpless victims. To the contrary: the latest insights from brain research tend to suggest that the uninhibited expression of negative feelings merely strengthens them via a physical feedback loop! So the question is whether the strength of our emotions is always appropriate to the occasion and whether we can use them constructively. And that is unfortunately often not the case. All too often we react more or less automatically with our accustomed habits of thought and feeling, irrespective of whether they are helpful or harmful to us. However, thought habits are by no means unavoidable!

Thoughts, feelings and the subsequent reactions arise in a process that is not automatic but can always be changed. Imagine it’s late on Friday evening after a hard week’s work and your boss rushes into the office. An important customer had rung in and a report has to be ready by Monday. Your boss has picked you for the job. A picture of your planned hike in the mountains arises in your mind’s eye and a feeling of indignation seizes you as you answer irritably: “I’ve had enough: couldn’t someone else do it for a change?!”. Or in concise comic-strip terms: “Snort!”.

The internal process here is (with both positive and negative feelings) always the same:

However, you can influence all these elements with a little practice and self-discipline: for instance by guiding your perceptions. A different take on them will enable you to evoke a different emotion. But you can also become aware of the emotion, accept it and keep it at a distance, rather than giving it a negative value and thus boosting its power (after all, we are usually also annoyed about getting annoyed and thus strengthen our annoyance). And you can decouple the emotion from the reaction in order to avoid the negative blockage and gain more freedom of choice and flexibility of response. Keep calm, drink a cup of tea or distract yourself in some other way. After all, giving free rein to your feelings is only the knee-jerk response in cheap comics.

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