Breaking in the horse.... how to turn negative emotions into positive energy.
As we navigate these strange and often confusing times, the energy you bring to your business is more important than ever. In times of change and uncertainty your team will inevitably look to you for support and guidance. In my experience though they also look to you for cues and clues on how things really are and how things are going to be.
Put simply, if you aren’t walking the talk then your team will very quickly see through that. Managing your energy is everything.
I talk to my clients a lot about energy. The energy you bring to your work influences and impacts the entire organisation. The non-verbal cues you provide to your team, the general look and feel of the business, the likelihood of things getting done - all of these things, and more, come down to your energy. So it needs to be managed REALLY WELL.
To master the management of your energy takes well developed self awareness. Understanding not only how your emotions relate to the energy you feel but the also perception you create - the energy your team see, hear and feel.
Some energies fizz. You can feel them bubbling away in your body. They take over. The energy that comes from feelings like frustration, impatience, fear and conflict have a physical intensity. In my experience the kind of intensity you’d genuinely like to be able to draw on to apply to things you really want to get done.
Unmanaged though, this energy can distract, bubble over, exhaust you and disconcert the people around you.
A lot of the most successful people I work with feel a lot of all of these emotions. It’s actually a large part of what makes them successful. But there’s an unhelpful side to those emotions too and the energy that creates can be incredibly destructive to you and the team around you.
The good news is that managed well, you can use these emotions to your advantage.
Think of it like you’d think of breaking in a horse. Horses respond to trust and respect, and something like impatience is no different. You need to respect its needs. If your impatience trusts that you have its needs at the heart of your actions then it will let you lead it and not the other way round.
Impatience
Ah, good old impatience. What other emotion could come first?
Impatience can be nothing short of paralysing. I tend to find it comes from one of two things, either you’re so desperate to finish something that you end up not even wanting to start in case the end feels even further away. Or you’re dependent on timelines that are out of your control.
With the former, the problem is that avoiding getting started leads to even more impatience, a sense of build up and an even greater sense of relative inaction.
With the latter, you can end up focussing so much on the things you can’t control that you forget how much control you actually do have.
In both cases, your energy has such a significant impact that if you allow your impatience to get the better of you, your team could start to feel hopeless.
Lead yourself and your team through the process of working out what things you can control. Think about how much you believe that things are within your control? How much of this are you transferring on to your team?
Once you’ve worked out the things that you can actually do something about you can start to build an action plan. Not only that though, you can begin the process of reflecting on how much you believe in your ability to control things and whether they’re the right things to try to control.
Focus on taking positive action, testing and learning, creating consistency and building momentum.
Frustration
I work with a lot of very frustrated people! The people I work with are used to being able to move quickly. But as your business grows, sometimes you have to slow down to speed up.
One of the key ways coaching can help, and something you can do for yourself, is to spend some time identifying the actual problem.
What is it you are actually frustrated about?
Once you’ve worked this out, go back to the locus of control method.
Fear
Fear is the most physical of all the emotions. You can feel it in a much more visceral way than many others, and unchecked it can leave you feeling exhausted. Oh and yes, I know fear can also make you feel incredibly alive, but that level of emotional energy is unsustainable.
In a business or work setting it’s unlikely that your fight or flight response is going to encounter too many life or death scenarios. So if the thing you’re afraid of is not life threatening the first thing to do is to try and slow your thinking down and get reflective.
Ask yourself these questions:
What are you afraid of?
How likely is it to happen?
What can you do to assess any risk and work out what actions you need to take?
Conflict
Conflict takes two forms. Internal and external - external conflict derives from disagreements, arguments, tough conversations. Internal conflict tends to derive from decisions, choices and reactions to other people’s behaviour. It’s a very powerful emotion and, again, can be very draining. But if you manage it well and with the right level of perspective it can be a hugely generative emotion.
I once worked in a business where conflict was a core value. This was unfathomable to me - until I worked in a business where it wasn’t! It turns out, a fear of conflict can be very slowing and de-energising. Consensus can take literally years and in a fast growth business you literally don’t have that luxury.
Finding ways to lean in to conflict with humility and positive intent can speed up, energise and galvanise the people around you.
So here’s a question - what would happen if you didn’t take anything personally? If you allowed people to disagree with you with zero emotional response? What would you do differently?
And what if you trusted yourself to deliver difficult messages with humility and empathy? What if you focussed on being clear rather than managing emotional responses?
Conflict can help us learn, grow and create. Learning to foster positive conflict and lean in to tough conversations will strengthen your leadership position immeasurably.
Once you start to think about how to turn negative emotions into positive energy you start to feel exponentially more in control. Moreover, you gain far more control over the energy that flows within your business. As a bonus, your team have more energy to work on the things that matter because they’re no longer managing you!
If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a line on rebecca@rebeccamorley.co.uk or book a chat on the button below.
