Tackling negative emotions

• It's not productive to suppress negative feelings. They burst out anyway.
• The key is to work at avoiding them in the first place.
• While not easy to do, being aware of what triggers them, monitoring yourself and having alternative actions available can help.
• Begin by indentifying your most common negative emotions.
• It is important to focus only on your 2 or 3 most common negative emotions, given that every human being will experience the full range of negative emotions at one time or another and we can't turn ourselves into emotionless machines.
• One negative emotion or feeling is the tendency some of us have to beat ourselves for every little fault we have.
• Use the following examples to develop your own list:
  • Anger - clouds your judgement and upsets others.
  • Anxiety - causes haste, panic and avoidable errors.
  • Pessimism - fosters underachievement and depresses others.
  • Worry - contributes to inaction and over immersion in detail.
  • Fear - makes you risk averse and submissive to others.
  • Acute sensitivity - easily hurt by criticism, defensive.

Steps for tackling negative emotions

• Notice that, when you feel negative emotions, you attribute them to causes outside yourself - ''He made me feel that way!'' or ''I'm upset because of what she said!''
• Can you onvince yourself that no one can force you to feel anything, that you have a choice as to how you feel? It's not always easy, but it is possible to respond differently to otherwise upsetting provocations.
• Monitor yourself- when are your 2 or 3 most unproductive emotions triggered?
• What specifically leads you to feel this way? What can you change about the way you perceive these situations and respond to them?
• What positive thoughts or actions can you substitute for the negative ones? For example, when criticized, instead of getting upset, can you thank the person for the feedback and ask for suggestions on how to improve next time?
• Or, when people oppose your view, how about pointing out the benefits of their idea and asking them what they like about yours?
• If you work with someone who is constantly critical of your ideas, get agreement to a rule: critical remarks are allowed after we list positive points.