How to manage your emotions

One of the most common requests my coaching clients ask me is to help them learn how to better control their emotions and reactions in stressful situations.

Why do emotions run high when we’re in stressful situations?

Let’s take an example of an employee feeling threatened by a coworker who’s bad-mouthing their work. It’s a pretty common situation. People would react differently to this type of scenario.

Let’s take the example of Mary. Mary has grown up in an environment where she has never been valued, maybe her parents didn’t know how to express their love and did so too sparingly. She’s worked very hard all her life to get scraps of recognition from her closest family members. More often than not, she would be made to feel like she’s not good enough to be cared for, to be worthy of love. As a result, Mary has tried to be perfect in everything she does to fill that void: good behaviour to get approval from her parents, good grades to get praise from teachers, good work to get praise from manager. Being good was her coping mechanism to get love as a child and she is unconsciously replicating this pattern as an adult in her working life.

When Mary hears the comment from her co-worker, what she hears is not “she did not do this assignment well”, what she hears is “you are not good”, “nothing you do is good”, “you are not…