Connecting the Dots Between Emotions and Behavior

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