How many times have you – at the end of an
uncomfortable situation – walked away beating yourself up for how you reacted
to it? “I shouldn’t have gotten so angry.” “I don’t know why she always makes
me cry.” “I should have held my ground.”
For most of us, our lives are littered with shoulda woulda couldas –
often the result of our emotions taking charge of our behaviors with little or
no input from us.
The key to putting yourself in charge is
self-awareness. Understanding your emotions, not necessarily just where they
come from, but how they manifest themselves in your behaviors, is essential.
Once you have an awareness of how you typically respond to certain triggers and
in certain situations, you can choose a different response. It’s not about
avoiding certain emotions, or interpreting them as good or bad. After all, your
emotions are your emotions. It’s about understanding them and learning to be
emotionally agile so you can reframe your behavior into a more productive response.
Harvard Medical School professor and psychologist Susan David, author of Emotional Agility,
says, “We will find ourselves in situations where we will feel anger, sadness,
grief and so on. Unless we can process, navigate and be comfortable with the
full range of our emotions, we won’t learn to be resilient. We must have some
practice dealing with those emotions or we will be caught off guard. I believe
the strong cultural focus on happiness and thinking positively is actually
making us less resilient.”
When we experience an emotion, we should recognize
and act on it. You know you are feeling something, what are you going to do
with that? Are you acting in a way that aligns with your belief system, or are
you reacting to old baggage? Emotions are not good or bad, right or wrong. We
have to reframe and understand where they are coming from, or act on them and
make a change. Our emotions come into
play when our core values are compromised.
If our behaviors are not in line with our core values, it creates
discontent within us.
So how do you begin the journey from recognizing
emotions to managing behaviors? Lumina Emotion is the internal compass that
helps us align our behaviors with our values and beliefs. The Lumina Emotion Portrait uncovers the
relationship between your inner feelings, emotions and behaviors. It examines
unique patterns of behavior, including how you may tune up or tune down certain
behaviors to suit the needs of your environment. It also focuses on how you can
overplay your strengths and highlights potential blockers to interpersonal
effectiveness - those emotions we feel when we are overly stressed or under
pressure. Lumina Emotion helps you understand how you will react. It takes you
on a journey to composure, which helps you find the behavior that will rescue
you.
With self-awareness, you understand your core
values, your core emotions and the triggers that result in reactive behaviors.
You know with certain triggers you get angry, and you know what that looks and
feels like. With this knowledge, you have the power of choice. Now when
triggered, you can choose to take a step back, and leverage “the power of the
pause.” You may still be angry, but instead of reacting in the behaviors that
have not turned out well in the past, you use that power to choose to simply be
quiet, listen and then, calmly ask questions. You’re not discounting the
emotion, you’re simply reframing your response.
Most emotional intelligence tools on the market
today focus on interpersonal relationships. They look at how interpersonally
astute you are – how social, how engaging, how empathetic. Lumina Emotion is about
the whole gamut of emotions and the associated behaviors. It’s not just about
how well you get along with people, it’s also about what that quality might
look like when you are over-extended/stressed.
“People-focused” under stress may become “people pleasing.” “Modesty” under stress may become
“self-critical.” Lumina Emotion keys you
in to your emotional reactors and gives you a model you can use to reframe your
responses for more successful outcomes.
Interested in adding Lumina Emotion to your Learning
& Development toolbox? Join us for our next Lumina Emotion qualification, Oct.31-Nov.2 in Dallas. For more information contact us at
info-us@luminalearning.com.
Lead on,
Rebecca
