All human beings experience and are driven by emotions, but the intensity varies person to person. What may kill someone within, may not even impact another. If you are that sensitive, hammy one and have skyrocketing career ambitions, managing emotions at work may be one of your biggest challenges yet! As Warren Buffet famously quoted,
If you cannot control your emotions, you cannot control your money
This great quote got us thinking about how important it actually is to build a solid emotional quotient to successfully meet our career goals. In the end, the core of professionalism is to ensure that no negative emotions interfere with our quest to be extremely task-oriented. The workplaces of today are competitive and challenging, to say the least. In between trying to meet deadlines and get through your task list, things can get truly stressful. Even after giving in our best, we may not meet expectations. It’s just very natural for one to get frustrated, anxious, nervous, jealous, insecure or feel generally down. At times like these, there are tonnes of things that we could do to feel encouraged and pep up to get-set-go!
1. Seeking help and support
It is extremely important to discuss doubts, fears and insecurities with our bosses or that one reliable friend at work. If we cannot open up to people at the workplace, seeking advice or simply talking our heart out with loved ones helps in ways more than one. We may end up getting much needed affirmations, important feedback or life changing tips and tricks. Staying bottled up on how we feel just makes it worse, impacting performance big time!
2. Stepping out to calm down
When we are having a bad day at work, stepping out in the fresh air and practising mindful breathing activities really helps in clearing the mind. A short outdoor walk or timeouts on the office terrace can help in calming those haywire hormones. Just sitting down and thinking over a cup of coffee or cooling down over an ice cream, whatever suits best has to be done!
3. Demarcating
At so many instances, a bad day at work translates into our personal life and vice versa. The best advice we have ever received from seniors at work is to leave our personal life and negative emotions out of the main door. Clearly demarcating our personal life with professional life is the key to maintaining an emotional equilibrium. Most of the times, we end up allowing emotions of our personal life pour into our workday and that’s totally unfair to either of the two.
4. Recharging ourselves
What better way than practising your favourite fitness and mental health activities to recharge, reboot and rejuvenate. According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, a minimum 30 minutes of exercise can help boost mood and memory substantially. We could add the much-needed fun element by choosing exercise regimes which makes the soul truly happy. Zumba, Pilates, dance meditation, power yoga or something even more conventional that suits our personalities. Let’s go for it!
5. Reflecting and preparing
Reflecting through the day spent at work before signing out to ensure being in sync with goals is something we totally swear by! It can do a lot of damage control by throwing light on smallest of tasks needed to be done to streamline things and making it stress-free. Also, preparing for the next day in tiny ways like knowing what you’ll be wearing at work, packing the perfect work bag to preparing for those big work-related tasks, its sets a great tone for a good next day!
Working on being mentally strong is as important as working on building physical strength. In the end, we need no convincing on Darwinian’s evolutionary theory of Survival of the fittest.
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