Picture this: you’re in a meeting and your colleague gives you some negative feedback in front of everyone. You can feel a mixture of anger and disappointment rising in your chest. You can’t concentrate on the rest of the discussion. 

The reality is you can’t avoid strong emotions in the workplace. Feeling of disappointment, fear, anger and frustration are just as natural in your work life as in your personal life. 

The challenge is how to stay calm and composed in the heat of the moment, and respond in a way you can feel good about. 

Fortunately, you can learn how to control your emotions to avoid overreacting and knee-jerk reactions. 

It's all about the soft skill of self-regulation. 

What is self-regulation?

Self-regulation, aka emotion regulation, relates to how you control your thoughts and behaviours. 

Think of it as your inner discipline. 

Self-regulation is part of a bigger soft skill — emotional intelligence, or EQ.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, as well as recognise and influence the emotions of other people.

The ability to self-regulate means you can control your emotions so you're not reacting to situations in unintended ways. It means recognising that you can choose how to respond to something, despite how you feel. 

Imagine a basketball player in the last second of the game. Your team is behind, and the winning shot is all on you. You can feel the pressure rising. 

How you control your emotions and remain calm is the difference between being able to perform and get that winning shot, and falling short. 

Here’s the important bit: self-regulation doesn’t mean you should fight against your emotions. 

It’s about knowing what they are, why you're experiencing them, and how to control them under pressure. 

Self-awareness leads to self-regulation

To build your self-regulation, you first need to focus on becoming more self-aware. S

Self awareness is about being honest with yourself, about yourself. This is a powerful soft skill to help you reach your career goals. With self-awareness, we can better manage our emotions, build stronger relationships with colleagues, become better leaders, and much more.

When you’re more self-aware, you can better understand yourself and why you feel, think and do things in a certain way. That’s the key to being able to better regulate your emotions.

So our number one strategy for self regulation? Develop your self awareness soft skill.

4 strategies for self-regulation 

Tune in to what you feel

Pay attention to how you're feeling and know the physical signs of your emotions. When you feel frustrated or angry, do you get a churning sensation in your stomach? Do you feel a tightness in your chest? Or do you start clenching your jaw? 

If you are aware of when you are starting to lose your cool, you can start taking measures to stay calm and rational. 

Take note of whether you are feeling hungry or tired. These factors can exacerbate your emotions, but they are things you can control. If you've ever felt “hangry”, you’ll know how important it is to fuel yourself with healthy snacks during your work day!

Name it to tame it

Psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Siegel coined the term "name it to tame it". In other words, describing what you're feeling to yourself (naming it) can kickstart the rational side of the brain and control your emotions.

Once you've named the emotion, observe it and give your brain time to process the feelings. This is a simple way to prevent your emotions from overwhelming you and dictating how you react. 

Give yourself space

One of the top skills in self-regulation is knowing when to give yourself space. It might simply be pausing and taking ten seconds to breathe before you react. Taking a deep breath is one of the easiest and most effective ways to relieve stress. 

Research shows that deep breathing and other breath techniques help to calm us down during moments of stress. Another study shows that deep-breathing exercises can help us improve our focus so we can pay more attention to our reactions. 

Giving yourself space might mean removing yourself from the situation entirely. Go for a walk or do something different until you’ve calmed down and can get a clearer perspective. 

Practice mindfulness

Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention in the present moment and using your senses to notice what is happening inside and around you in nonjudgmental ways. 

If you can master the skill of mindfulness, you can stay calm and avoid engaging in negative thought patterns in emotional situations. It might feel difficult at first but stick with it – meditation has also been scientifically proven to help relieve stress after just eight weeks of a regular practice. 

You’ve got this!

Remember, when it comes to your emotions, you’re the driver. Develop your self-awareness soft skill and start practising different ways to regulate your emotions and responses to situations and people, keep disruptive emotions and impulses in check, and think before acting. You’ll soon find what works for you and be able to stay cool, calm and collected when it counts. 

To start developing your human skills today, simply download the Hodie app, or explore Maxme’s menu of human skills programs for organisations or schools.
Prefer to talk through your options? Contact us at any time.

More human goodness you might like