The Importance of Emotional Self-Management

Source: Freepik

[Originally posted date: April 7, 2018; Second-part Update Below.]

The last week was unusually difficult. We were short-staffed, faced with an extremely tight deadline, fending off a slew of last-minute requests, and coping with a mountain of technical issues. Some of these problems were, perhaps, preventable--others were not. There was chaos.

It is easy in the middle of chaos to become unproductive. Anxiety runs high, limits of all kinds get pushed, and reason takes a back seat. There is a spike in frantic activity (mental or physical) and damage control (rather than productive activity) takes the forefront. Now, panic is an appropriate and helpful response if, for example, some wild animal is going to eat you if you don't fight-or-flight quickly enough... but in my experience, needing to flee from wild animals is not a very common office activity. Since panicked activity is not helpful activity, how should I respond when touched by it?

A good first step is to take ownership of my own response. I do not pretend to control anyone else (nor would I want to--I am my own person, and I bestow upon others the opportunity to be their own people), but I ought to master my own self. So what if other people (or other companies) are being unreasonable? Or saying the wrong things? Or just generally dropping the ball on something? Should I allow that to disturb my peace?

It is easy, when someone is saying something unreasonable or panicky, to respond with unreason or panic. But a panicked response spreads panic, and the result is chaos. Instead, what ought to be spread is the confidence needed to re-align and re-balance (but not reactively try to control). I do not need to react the same way others are reacting; I may choose to behave differently.

If there is too much panic, I try to give off a sense of confidence, the sense that everything will be OK. Even if we miss a deadline, it will be OK; even if we can't get everything we wanted this time around, it will be OK. (Some of you may protest at this point that we should not be telling people that we will be OK if it is possible that we won't be OK--but this is a matter of belief, not of fact.) Calm confidence is not opposed to productivity (it is not complacency); rather, calm confidence is a necessary precondition for the highest levels of performance.

There are challenges to confidence: unusually high or competing demands, fear of missing deadlines, fear of what people think of you, fear of moving into new territory, high uncertainty--these can all throw you off balance, causing you to spend time and energy doing things that won't get you any closer to your goals. This is where self-management comes in: if I can restrain myself from action for long enough to identify what I'm feeling and why, then possibly I can see the situation clearly enough to select a course of action that reduces the level of panic and simultaneously restores a level of productivity. This keeps my sight on the most important problem at hand, and potential solutions of it. Who is to blame is not important, nor are the mistakes of the past; the only question worth answering here is: how to we get from where we are now to where we want to go? What's our direction? In breaking a wild, reactive, and destructive mental-emotional cycle, I introduce a virtuous one; it creates new possibilities and rejuvenates confidence, both in myself and in the surrounding situation.

Chaos, for all of its discomfort, presents a learning opportunity. It is not necessarily a sign of failure, and not always to be avoided, but it can be a sign of growth. Nothing shows the weaknesses in a system so clearly as a stress test; flaws revealed under stress are not failures, but opportunities to direct energies toward new strengths.

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UPDATE: 2025-04-05

I had not a clue what I was about to fall into (starting in 2018).

I had a sense of being called to do something, but I initially resisted it; I was imagining a grey brick in the way, a "thunk", as I had termed it. A "thunk" in Computer Science is an unimplemented interface, but at the time I was only imagining the thunk as an obstacle.

I was in a condition of professional frustration at that time.

The thing I recall resenting most is how incorrigible (read: resistant to my will) some of the software interfaces I was using actually were, as most of the delineations they had were structurally old (in time) and hard. It's like someone made a bad decision 30 years ago, and in practical terms it seems impossible to change them now.

The choices I was facing seemed to be: Either start a new project, which due to me as an individual comparing myself with large, established incumbents, I projected would fail to gain sufficient market traction and thus be abandoned; or otherwise, concede to the mighty economic power of whomever already had the resources and traction I thought was needed, and carve some niche there that would satisfy me. Horrific. So I took to hating or cursing these bad systems.

Looking at what I wrote 6 years ago, it is clear that I have been held accountable for every word I wrote there, even when I didn't know what I was doing. Heady stuff.

One of the things that I did in my frustration was go and take issue with catholicism itself, because I was adamant that something had to be done, and also because my grandfather felt that catholicism had turned its back on him. So I felt powerless in a world of miscellaneous factions, lacking even the one thing that I thought was always supposed to be there for me. The image is this: walking into an arena with a "TEST ME" sign on my forehead, as I demanded to know why I was not included in this.

I note that today's date is April 5. On April 7, it will be exactly 7 years since I first posted this article. On a 3-day "resurrection" calendar, it's precisely on time. It's real "destiny pipe" stuff.