Attention – mardihumphreys.com

Even Keeled

Last week we talked about how to become aware of our emotions, what triggers them, and how they affect our decision making. Now that you know what they are and why they happen, let’s talk about moving from self-awareness to self-regulation.

You Are in Charge

When you start to feel out of control, what can you do to get ahead of your emotions and constructively respond?

Pause – For example, you are tasked with removing the bottleneck from one of your organization’s workflows. You email the project manager an idea. The reply you receive is harshly critical and dismissive. What do you do? You want to fire off a defensive response. Instead, take a breath, step away, and revisit the email later. The pause gives your rational mind a chance to kick in.

Reset – When stress builds, your decision-making suffers. Techniques like deep breathing or a quick meditation can help in the moment. On days you have to make important decisions, take a break to move your body in addition to those tools. Even a short walk around the block can make a difference. Give yourself a 15-minute “reset break” to clear your mind.

Adapt – Asynchronous work environments demand flexibility. For example, a teammate’s delayed reply may derail your plan. When it does, remind yourself that staying open to new solutions helps maintain momentum in the long run.

Get Social

Strong relationships pave the way for problem-solving as well as career advancement. Building those relationships takes deliberate effort.

Communicate – For example, you’re on a video call with your team putting together an agenda for a client update and they are all distracted. Instead of letting your annoyance show, try saying, “I’d love everyone’s input on this. What else do we want the client to know that I don’t have on this list?” Inviting engagement respectfully can shift the tone of the meeting.

Share – Teams thrive when credit is shared. If you’re leading a project, make it a habit to highlight contributions from teammates, even in small ways like Slack shout-outs.

Learn – Disagreements happen. It’s how you handle them that matters. Focus on solutions instead of assigning blame. For example, if someone misses a deadline, instead of saying, “You messed up,” try, “Let’s figure out how to avoid this in the future.”

Support – If you notice a team member struggling with a task, offer to be a resource. A small gesture, like volunteering to review their work, shows commitment to the team’s success.

Galvanize – Even when projects get messy, a positive outlook can help your team keep going. For example, if a new tool isn’t working as expected, reframing the setback as a learning opportunity can keep morale from plummeting.

Practice – Start with one small action each day. For example, pause before replying to an irritating email or ask a colleague how they’re feeling before diving into work. Over time, these habits become second nature.

Next Steps

Remember the emotion log you kept last week? Pull it out. Knowing what you know now, how do you wish you would have responded in those situations? Now you have an option to experiment with the next time those triggers go off. Here are a few ideas to maintain your progress.

Reflect – Spend five minutes at the end of each workday reviewing your emotional responses and interactions. If there is something you wish you’d done differently, make a note of it. If you responded instead of reacted to a trigger, pat yourself on the back.

Experiment – Try one self-regulation technique during a challenging moment. For example, box breathe, or silently count to three before speaking. Find what works best for maintaining your composure.

Ask – Request feedback from a trusted colleague on how you handle stress during collaboration. This is a private conversation maybe over coffee.

How do you self-regulate to function better at work? Please share in the comments.

Hurray for Quitter’s Day!

Are you getting ready to celebrate Quitter’s Day this Friday? Every year Quitter’s Day is the second Friday in January. Never heard of it? It’s the day 80% of Americans give up on their New Year’s resolutions. Why do I love Quitter’s Day so much?

Unresolved

Because I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. You don’t have to wait until January 1 to make positive changes in your life. When the pain of staying the same is too much, then please do something about it no matter what time of year it is. It doesn’t have to be a big change. In fact, Quitter’s Day is evidence that making big changes doesn’t work very well for a lot of us. Instead think about iterating your processes.

What’s to Love?

I was asked about my liberal use of the word iterate. I love the word so much because it is a shortcut. It is one word that encapsulates the entire process of continuous improvement. Let’s think about how you can apply iteration to your processes at work so you can make that work more painless.

It’s Science

Iteration is based on the scientific method which is a valuable tool for critical thinking. It helps you be more objective and find the real change you need to make instead of just focusing on the symptoms of the problem. For example, let’s say you are on a team of five people. You are the designated manager of a project. You are past the define and design phases and are stuck between the build and test phases. If you don’t do something, you’ll not reach the release phase by the deadline. Use the scientific method to get unstuck.

In Action

Observe: Analyze the current workflow. Identify the gaps.
Ask: Formulate questions about what you observed. What is happening? Where is the bottleneck? Why are you not getting the result you expect?
Hypothesize: What are the possible explanations for what you observed? Define the variables. For example, does the team member who is building the solution keep getting interrupted?
Design: Come up with an experiment that changes one of the variables. (Like, blocking an hour of the builder’s time and sending them off-site to concentrate uninterrupted.) Note the improvement you expect to get by changing the variable.
Test: Conduct your experiments for each variable to test your hypothesis. Collect the data. For example, did your builder make significant progress?
Evaluate: Use the data gathered from your experiments to draw conclusions. Did the change get you the outcome you wanted? Is it an improvement? Do you want to implement the change to the process? If not, do you need to conduct the experiment again but on a different variable?
Share: Iteration is a cycle. The cycle hinges on feedback. With each iteration, define your “Why”. In other words, what are you trying to accomplish?

Full Disclosure

The iteration process is additional work. But the more you use it, the better you get at it and the faster you move through it saving you time, energy, attention, and money in the long run. When you make good decisions up front, you have fewer messes to clean up on the back end.

How do you use the scientific method to iterate your work processes? Please share in the comments.

Leverage Your Impact

Anyone at any level of an organization can be influential. You don’t need a recognized leadership title to make a positive impact. How do you know whom you influence? How can you leverage it to benefit both you and your organization?

Collaborate

To identify whom you influence, understand your role relative to the entire organization. Influence happens through relationships.

Interactions

Peers: Do your decisions affect their processes? For example, if you’re a software developer, your code may directly impact a quality assurance teammate’s testing.

Managers: Does your input guide any of their decisions? For example, would having an intern help your team make the deadline on your current project? A well-reasoned suggestion in a meeting can influence high-level outcomes.

Cross-functional Teams: Do any teams outside your immediate work group rely on your deliverables? For example, do product teams use your reports to guide which features they prioritize?

Stakeholders: Does your work affect the user’s experience? For example, if you design workflows, who implements them?

Observations

Notice how people respond when you share ideas. Do they act on your suggestions? This signals influence.

Track Your Ripple Effect: Look for indirect outcomes. Did a new process you propose save time for other teams? Did a colleague adopt a tool you recommended?

Solicit Feedback: Ask peers and managers how your work impacts their tasks or decisions. Their responses can reveal areas where your influence might not be obvious.

Informal Mentoring: Pay attention to who seeks your opinion. Influence often shows up in casual ways like being the go-to person for advice in a specific area. For example, let’s say you’re a data analyst. Your influence may include other analysts who use your frameworks.

Empower

Leadership is about actions, attitudes, and the ability to both inspire and guide others.

Model: Lead by example. Qualities like ethics, expertise, and empathetic interpersonal interactions positively impact your team and your overall work environment. If you want to want to work with a team who has integrity, resilience, and enthusiasm, then you must demonstrate those values every day.

Recognize: Amplify the strengths of your peers. Say positive things about them in front of their managers. Value ideas from all levels of the company, not just from people at the top of the Org chart.

Catalyze: Leverage your networks to drive initiatives that are aligned with your organization’s goals. For example, be the hub that anchors multiple teams’ efforts and moves projects to completion.

Own

Part of owning your influence is aligning your team’s expectations.

Communicate: Clear and open communication is essential to influence. Transparency helps information flow freely within your team. Identify challenges and propose solutions to them even if they fall outside your immediate responsibilities. Actively listen to your coworkers, support their contributions, and encourage them to share their perspectives.

Mentor: Everyone needs mentors. Offer assistance to your peers, especially those less experienced. Look for people who are currently doing work you aspire to do and ask them about their career journey. Mentoring fosters a positive culture and strengthens relationships.

Reflect: What drives you? What skills do you have? What are your strengths? What sets you apart? Where do you see yourself in two years professionally? Armed with this self-awareness, you can make informed decisions about whose expectations you align with and whose you should respectfully disregard.

How does your influence show up at work? Please share in the comments.

Attention to Give

Last week we talked about how a mindset of generosity can positively impact your team’s energy at work in Part 1 of our series, Give a Little Bit. I received feedback suggesting my theory worked in a perfect world. Since none of us live in that branch of the multiverse, let’s discuss how being generous with your attention helps you both stand out and earn respect in a workplace filled with competition.

Some organizations intentionally set their employees up to compete against one another to drive job performance. (I’m lookin’ at you, Sales.) While ambition can be motivating, too much competition can create a limited mindset. For example, this research supports my theory that when you feel like the only way you win is when someone else loses, that is a limited mindset. If you have an unlimited mindset, then you believe your talent and hard work will produce growth; not only for yourself, but also for your team and organization. If you choose creating value over playing a zero-sum game, then you are generous. Your initiative produces innovation, opportunities, and a big payoff for everyone involved. Generosity, cooperation, and mutual growth become your strategies, and they set you apart in a competitive work environment.

Try Coopetition

Keeping tabs on your coworkers isn’t a bad idea. It can help you understand how to bring more value to your role and inspire you to up your game. But one-upping your coworkers can get toxic fast. Instead, focus on assisting your competition to achieve their part of the organization’s mission by cooperating with them. I like to call that “coopetition”. In this case, generosity is about sharing credit, knowledge, and encouragement. When you’re generous, you create a reputation for being reliable, approachable, and self-assured. People respect those who support others. Here are a couple of suggestions.

Shift the Attention: The next time you achieve a success, publicly acknowledge everyone who played a part. This expands the spotlight to shine on the team rather than just you. It makes you look both gracious and confident. You can do this in an email to your manager and the company’s leadership and copy the team.

Share Knowledge Regularly: Make a habit of sharing resources, insights, or tips that could help others succeed. When a coworker sees you aren’t holding back to stay ahead, it increases their trust in you.

Be the Advantage

The way to outshine your competition is by choosing collaboration over rivalry. In highly competitive workplaces, everyone is vying for attention individually. Standing out by being a team player when others are focused on personal recognition signals your strong leadership. While others focus on showing why they’re better than their peers, you are the one who knows how to leverage the strengths of everyone around you. For example, Take the initiative to propose projects that benefit multiple people or departments. By setting up opportunities for others to succeed alongside you, you create positive exposure for yourself while enlisting allies across teams. Generosity helps you build a brand that will last longer than any competitive win. Experiment with coopetition and let me know what happens.

How has generously giving attention to your coworkers differentiated you from your competition? Please share in the comments.

Civil Service

I’m hearing the word civility used a lot lately in reference to the power skills necessary to grow a thriving workplace culture and I am here for it. We talked about appropriate ways to treat coworkers in this space before, but what is the civility trend? Why does civility matter? How can you integrate civility into your workplace?

The Civility Trend

Civility encourages coworkers to actively listen to one another, respect differing viewpoints, and collaborate cohesively despite personal differences. It helps everyone feel seen and valued, which boosts both morale and productivity. Maintaining civility is a business strategy. Policies and practices that help your team tactfully navigate disagreements are tools for employee retention. According to a study by the Center for Creative Leadership, 93% of workers consider respectful treatment a key factor in job satisfaction. More companies are integrating civility into their core values because it leads to a healthier work environment. A 2022 study by Civility Partners found workplaces that promote respectful exchanges experienced a 30% improvement in productivity and a 25% drop in employee turnover. Interpersonal conflicts challenge organizational efficiency because differing opinions and ideologies can cause rifts in relationships. Civility promotes inclusivity and minimizes workplace tensions.

Why Civility Matters

There are quantifiable financial risks of not cultivating a civil work environment. When employees experience negative interactions, they quit. A Work Institute Retention Report found that replacing an employee can cost up to 33% of their annual salary due to turnover, training, and lost productivity. In addition, there is usually a loss in productivity and an increase in the emotional toll on the remaining employees. This makes incivility a costly problem for your organization to ignore. On the flip side, prioritizing civility can offer a competitive advantage. Civility bridges divides to build an infrastructure where employees feel safe to share ideas without fear of judgment or punishment. If civility is one of your company’s values, then you will attract and retain top talent, incubate innovation, and enhance employee job performance because civility gives voice to diverse perspectives which results in better decision-making and faster problem-solving.

Civility in Your Workplace

Civility is more than just being polite. It’s the foundation of effective collaboration and communication. A civil workplace welcomes open dialogue and values each team member’s contributions. First you have to have enough emotional intelligence to know and manage yourself. You can take a personality test like Clifton Strengths Finders, DISC, or Enneagram, etc., to gain some self-awareness. Once you realize what makes you feel respected, then you can recognize what makes your teammates feel heard. When you spend time working with them, watch their reactions. Adjust your communication to not only relate to them but also build relationships. For example, when I’m facilitating a discussion, and it’s a topic I’m excited about, I have to remind myself to be quiet and let others share. I recognize a fellow introvert when I see one. I know I need to be careful to offer them opportunities to contribute to the conversation without putting them on the spot. For example: asking, “Jane, did I see your hand raised?” even if I didn’t. Then Jane has both an in if she wants to speak and an out if she doesn’t.

How do you promote an atmosphere of civility in your workplace? Please share in the comments.

Heavy Weight

Do you ever stare at your computer screen then check the time and three minutes have passed without typing a single word? No? Just me? Okay. When this happens, it usually means my cognitive load has exceeded capacity. Cognitive load is how much information your brain can handle at one time and plays a huge role in how you manage your attention. High cognitive load overwhelms your brain making it difficult to process data, make decisions, or stay focused.

Results of High Cognitive Load

Increased Errors: When your attention is overloaded, it becomes harder to process details and avoid mistakes. For example, you’re working on a report and your email notifications keep going off. While your brain is absorbing multiple pieces of information, errors are more likely to slip through the cracks.

Reduced Efficiency: The more your cognitive load increases, the longer it takes to complete tasks. For example, going down a research rabbit hole can make a project that should take 30 minutes drag into an hour because you’re mentally exhausted and struggling to focus.

Procrastination: If you’re already feeling overwhelmed by cognitive load, the idea of diving into something complex makes you want to avoid it. For example, it’s the end of the day so you reschedule the call to your high-maintenance client. Again.

Why Your Cognitive Load Gets Heavy

Managing Multiple Tools: Have you ever been working away at your laptop, stopped and thought, “Why am I exhausted? All I’ve been doing is sitting here for the past hour.” Constantly switching between documents and spreadsheets, email, and messaging apps leads to mental fatigue. Your brain has to adjust every time you shift between tools, increasing cognitive load.

Dealing with Information Overload: You receive more information than you can process. For example, email threads you are copied on, minutes from meetings you missed, and notes from client calls. Sorting through all this data without a clear system overwhelms your brain.

Juggling Competing Deadlines: You have to constantly reprioritize projects and everything feels urgent. This strains your decision-making abilities. As you mentally switch between tasks, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus on any one thing effectively.

How to Manage Your Cognitive Load

Prioritize Tasks: Not all tasks require the same amount of mental energy. Categorize your to-do list by urgency and importance. Work on high-priority tasks when your attention is highest. This spends your cognitive resources on what matters most. For example, instead of answering low-priority emails first thing in the morning, focus on writing that activity report.

Break Down Complex Projects: When facing a difficult task, break it into smaller, manageable steps. For example, if you’re preparing a presentation, start by gathering the data one day, writing the script the next, outlining the slides the next, and refining the visuals on the fourth day. Each step requires less cognitive effort than trying to complete the entire presentation in one sitting.

Limit Multitasking: Instead of constantly switching between different tasks, practice focused work. Set aside dedicated blocks of time to focus on one task at a time. For examples read this.

Streamline Information Intake: Tools like email filters can help you narrow your focus to relevant data. For example: Set your inbox to show only emails from key contacts during work hours.

Take Mental Breaks: Short, regular breaks allow your brain to reset and improve your concentration when you return to work. For example, set an alarm to work uninterrupted for 50 minutes followed by a 10-minute break. During breaks, step away from your workspace, stretch, hydrate, and let your mind recharge.

How do you manage your cognitive load? Please share in the comments.

Focus on the Future

Visualization is vividly imagining yourself achieving specific goals. It is a mental rehearsal that prepares you for success by helping you see, feel, and experience your desired outcomes before they happen in reality. Visualization helped Michael Phelps win Olympic gold medals. Can it help you win professionally? Let’s dive into the concept.

Why Does Visualization Work?

You tell yourself stories all the time and perception is reality. Your brain processes your thoughts as truth and creates new neural pathways to help the rest of your body make what you think actually happen.

What Can Visualization Do For Your Career?

Clarity: Visualization doesn’t just stay in your mind. It influences your behavior. When you imagine yourself in a specific role or achieving a particular milestone, you start making decisions that align with your vision. You ignore distractions and prioritize the actions that grow your career. Your goals feel tangible and achievable.

Self-assurance: The more vividly you picture yourself nailing an interview, leading a project, or negotiating a higher salary, the more you believe in yourself. By the time you face a real-world challenge, you’ve already experienced it in your mind. You’ll approach opportunities with more confidence and projecting confidence is often the difference between success and setback.

Motivation: Regularly seeing yourself achieving your goals, reminds you of why you’re working so hard. This helps you be resilient when challenges crop up. When you visualize positive interactions with teammates, clients, or managers, you’re more likely to approach these interactions with a positive attitude, leading to stronger relationships.

How Do You Use Visualization?

Goals: Your visualization needs a clear target whether it’s landing a promotion, transitioning to a new field, or mastering a new skill. Write down your goal and be as detailed as possible. Visualize yourself achieving your goal, then break it down into actionable steps. This ensures you’re not just dreaming but also deliberately working towards making that dream a reality. Use visualization to give you ideas about what your process will look like, then reverse engineer a plan to achieve that outcome.

Imagine: By creating a multi-sensory experience, you make the visualization more real and impactful. Close your eyes and see yourself achieving your goal. What details do you notice? How does it feel? What sounds do you hear? For example, let’s say you are an individual contributor and want to move into management. What is different than what you do now? When you imagine a typical day, are you leading a weekly team catchup meeting? Are you in your calendar coordinating your team’s vacation schedules so everyone gets a break and the work still gets done? Are you on the phone with a client diffusing a conflict?

Practice: Make short, simple sessions a habit. You can visualize during your morning routine, on your lunch break, or before bed. The more you practice, the more you deeply ingrain these positive images in your subconscious. Start by visualizing a small win, like giving a great presentation. Notice the details: What time of day is it? What are you wearing? Who is with you? What emotions are you feeling? Get granular. The more details, the more your brain accepts this visualization as your reality.

Affirmations: If negative thoughts pop up, acknowledge them, then shift your focus back to positive images. For example, as you visualize landing a new job, repeat affirmations like “I am capable and ready for this role” or “I attract opportunities that align with my career goals.” This reinforces your belief in your ability to succeed.

Obstacles: Think about what could stop you from achieving your goal. For example, your technology isn’t working for a big presentation. Now come up with a plan to use the difficulty. Whether it’s a tough interview question or a project setback, mentally rehearsing how you’ll handle these situations can prepare you to face them confidently in real life. When you design a plan to deal with worst-case scenarios, you enhance your problem-solving skills. This helps you prevent the obstacles that are in your control and navigate the ones that aren’t.

Act: Let’s say you are visualizing a promotion, like moving from manager to director. Visualize what that looks like. Do you have more responsibility? Are you networking harder? Are you coaching new team members? Do those things. Make sure the decision maker who can give you that promotion knows you are doing them. Stepping up your game creates opportunities and attracts people who can help you achieve your visualizations.

Do you use visualization to further your career? Please share in the comments.

Employees Engage

If you’re just joining us, we are in part 3 of 4 in our Toxic Traits series. So far, we’ve thought about why toxicity in the workplace seems to be on the rise and what managers can do to make the workplace less toxic.

Have you seen any Reels like these lately? Social media amplifies discussions about workplace issues, bringing visibility to toxic behaviors that used to be overlooked. While these videos make you laugh as well as feel seen, they don’t exactly help you solve your toxicity problem. Through collaboration, inclusivity, communication, and mutual respect you can help transform your workplace into an environment where both employer and employees thrive. This solution seems simple, but it’s not easy. So, what can employees do to make your workplace less toxic?

Communicate Effectively: Interact respectfully with colleagues and supervisors. Commit to constructive communication and use the appropriate medium. For example: When you feel like someone belittled your idea in a reply-all email, instead of immediately defending your position, reply all with, “I’d like to learn more. I’ll set up a call for you and I to go deeper.” Showing curiosity in their input signals you have an open mind. Pulling the issue out of the group email demonstrates emotional intelligence. By the way, keeping your mind open does not mean you have to change it.

Support Peers: Foster a collaborative atmosphere by helping your teammates. For example: When someone new joins your team, think about what you wish you’d known when you were in their shoes. Are there certain reference documents in the shared drive they should know about? Does the team take turns buying coffee? Offer to be available to answer their questions.

Engage Constructively: Participate positively in meetings to build a sense of community. For example: When your weekly check-ins start off with what went wrong, call out a teammate who helped make it right.

Manage Stress: Practice self-care to maintain personal well-being. Establish and maintain healthy boundaries around time spent on work. For example: When you receive a work email during Jeopardy! do NOT reply.

Report Issues: Speak up about toxic behaviors using appropriate channels. For example: When you repeatedly get left out of emails containing information pertinent to your responsibilities on the project, get face time with the source and ask them to add you to the thread. You do not have to be confrontational. Concentrate on the call to action. You can say, “Will you please add me to the email list for the project? It has come to my attention I need that information to complete my part of it. I can wait while you do that right now.”

Help Others: Embrace opportunities to stay engaged. For example: When your marketing department needs an extra hand hosting a table at an event your organization is sponsoring, volunteer to help. This gives you insight into another department, feedback on how your work contributes to your organization’s brand, and a networking opportunity.

Both employers and employees have crucial roles to play in growing a healthy workplace culture. It takes perseverance, but working together will decrease toxicity, increase productivity, and promote overall well-being for everyone in the organization.

Have you ever worked in a toxic workplace? What did you do to make it less toxic? Please share in the comments.

Assess Your Systems

This is part three of four in the series, Stop and Think. In part one, we talked about reflecting on how you spent your time during the first two quarters of this year. Last week we put some energy into applying the insights you gained to update your goals for the rest of 2024. This week, let’s take your newly iterated SMART goals and turn our attention to your systems for reaching them.

What is the Difference?

SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals help you break down big ambitions into manageable tasks and set a timeline for reaching them. Goals are the results you want to attain. Developing systems focuses on your process to achieve those results. Now that you have updated your goals for 2024, you also need to update your systems. I’m thinking here of a quote from Atomic Habits:

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
James Clear

Reflecting on the last six months, do you see where your current routine led you to where you are now? How far off target are you? Gradual improvement is key to reaching your SMART goals. The purpose of your habits should be to help you keep making incremental progress. Flexibility and adaptability ensure that your incremental progress is in the right direction. Adjust your habits so they give you both the consistency and direction you need. For example, let’s say you got reassigned to a new department in May and are getting acquainted with four new team mates. Having a system to build relationships with them so that you can get to know, like, and trust each other will not only enable your team to complete work assignments faster, but also increase the quality of your projects’ results. Your system for getting to know your four coworkers is asking them how their weekends went during your project status meetings, so progress is slow. To get to know them more efficiently, calendar a 30-minute coffee meeting at the beginning of the workday every Tuesday for a month with a different team member. If during one of these coffee talks you discover it’s going to take more than 30 minutes to get acquainted with a certain team member, then schedule another coffee for next month. Experiment with your systems and adjust them to serve your goals. This helps you remain agile and open to change. Adaptability is crucial to your success at work. It is essential for navigating the challenges of your current responsibilities. It is also a highly sought after power skill.

What’s Next?

Let your manager know you have updated your goals and systems in your next one-to-one meeting. Give them a brief summary of your reflection including what you noticed was not working well, your updated goal, and your new plan to reach the goal. Tell them you intend to implement this process through the end of Q3, then report the results back to them at the beginning of October. This not only helps you be accountable, it also lets your manager see you are self-motivated, take initiative, and are a leader.

What modifications can you make to your routine to improve the systems that support your goals? Please share in the comments.

Emotional Granularity

You’ve probably heard the advice that when you feel nervous, like before a presentation, you should tell yourself that you are not nervous, you are excited. By doing this, you turn the negative emotion into a positive one.

You’ve probably sat behind your computer trying to solve a difficult problem and suddenly your body feels like it ran a marathon. You think, “What is wrong with me? All I’ve done for the last hour is sit here and I’m exhausted.” When you feel frustrated, it’s not always because something is wrong, it may be because something is emotionally hard.

There is neuroscience behind these mindsets. For the health of your brain, as well as the rest of your body, take your process for dealing with your fight, flight, or freeze response a step further and recategorize stressful emotions.

What Is Emotional Granularity?

The next level of emotional intelligence is emotional granularity. It is the ability to precisely label your emotions at the time you are having them. This is a coping mechanism that helps you be more spontaneously resilient during a stressful situation. When you can recognize an emotion and label it, you can regulate it. You gain more control over the outcome of the situation you’re in at the time you are in it. While you can’t stop feeling emotions, you can decide how to act on them to create the results that most benefit you.

How Can You Use It?

You probably mentally place the label “negative” on the emotions you perceive as unpleasant. But emotions are neither positive nor negative. Emotions are electrical impulses in your brain signaling that what you’re experiencing is something you care about. For example, let’s say you are gearing up for your annual job performance review and you are dreading it. What would happen if you told yourself you feel determination instead of dread? You would be able to change your reality. You would prepare differently. If you dread, then maybe you avoid preparing for the review until the last minute because you don’t like the way it makes you feel. If you recategorize dread as determination, then as soon as your review date is scheduled, you pull out your Atta Baby file and revisit all the goals you met during the last year as well as the praise you received for your job performance. Now you have the documentation to remind the organization of your value. Now you have the confidence to prove your worth. Now that emotion is a force driving you to a more positive outcome.

Why Should You?

When you are in a situation that makes you feel anxious, your body is trying to tell you something. Instead of making a snap decision, stop and ask yourself why you feel the way you do. Paying attention to those feelings and getting curious about what is causing them gives you options for how to deal with them. The discomfort is rolling around in your brain anyway. You may as well catch the emotion, unravel it, and make it work for you.

How do you reframe your unpleasant emotions? Please share in the comments.