About emotions (part 2)

In the previous post we reviewed the process of working with our own emotions. Of course, the topic is much broader than just one exercise and has multiple layers that can be uncovered via different techniques and approaches. What I wanted to talk about today is dealing with someone else’s emotions.

In my conversations recently this topic popped up quite often, so I thought it would be interesting to look at.

When we communicate, we naturally “read” or at least are trying to “read” another person’s reaction on our words, ideas, actions. And very often we will attribute whatever we observe to ourselves and what we have just shared or done.

One example can be an interview. We all know that at times it might not go as expected, and we will tend to blame ourselves for doing something wrong, sharing not the most relevant story, coming across in a wrong way, you name it. As we observe the reaction on the other side, we might immediately overanalyse it and lose confidence in ourselves.

However, should that always be the case? Imagine the interviewer got in a really bad traffic jam in the morning, and just five minutes before your interview has spilled coffee on the keyboard and is still very stressed, because after the interview there is another very important meeting and the laptop might not function properly. What emotional state do you think the person will be in? And most probably, even if you are the most brilliant candidate, the reaction from the interviewer might not be what you expect. But how much of it actually has to do with your professional qualities and job fit?

If we get out of the interview scenario and extrapolate it further, similar thing can happen in pretty much any conversation. Someone else’s emotions are not in our zone of control and even not always in our zone of influence, we often don’t know what’s behind someone’s state of mind and what is the root cause of certain behaviour. What we can do is to look at our own emotions and detach ourselves from situation, person, reaction attribution. Breathe and see what else can be done.