Staying Afloat in an Emotional Storm

We bring our whole selves to work, whether we like it or not. That includes our mindset and emotions, which are influenced by whatever happens in and out of the office. Sometimes we also carry home the built-up stress and tension from work, which in turn affects our interactions with family and friends. When our emotions get the better of us, we tend to react in ways that can be detrimental to both our work and personal relationships.

In competitive situations, where the stakes are high and the expectations even higher, negative emotions like fear, anxiety and jealousy that are left unchecked can impact your performance. Whether it’s for a golf tournament or a high-profile business pitch, you’d ideally want a clear head to navigate the various challenges that pop up along the way. Furthermore, when you’re collaborating and striving towards these goals as part of a team, negative emotions running high can hurt team dynamics, elevating tensions between colleagues and detracting from the objective.

However, humans aren’t robots – we can’t turn off our emotions with the flick of a switch. Neither is suppressing our emotions the right approach, since they’ll just bubble up and re-emerge in other situations before long. It’s important to accept our emotional side without letting it loose to influence our actions, which is why we need to carefully manage it. How can we achieve this? Doing the right actions help, as well as making the right friends and having the right mindset. Before we can effectively implement these in our lives, we need to first understand what we are feeling and why we’re feeling the way we do.

Expectations, Baggage and Feelings

Imagine representing a country of over one billion people at the biggest tournament of your life, at the young age of 13. It’s also your first time in a foreign country, facing off against hundreds of equally talented players.

How would you feel?

For me, the initial pride and happiness of representing my nation in an international golf tournament in China eventually felt like a heavy responsibility. As I piled on the pressure of high expectations on myself, that responsibility then turned into a burden. I was immersed in an overbearing sensation – even as I was competing against everyone else, I was also competing against myself, and not in a positive sense. Having conjured up an image of the ideal golfer in my head, I felt like I had to transform myself into this vision in order to meet the expectations I imagined were placed upon me. In that intense environment, I could not find the genuine enjoyment and fun that I had experienced whenever I played golf. Being in unfamiliar territory made it hard for me to find my footing, both competitively and emotionally.

Your life may be shaped by different (but equally tough) situations. So you too might be familiar with the experience of heavy expectations and negative emotions that occur as a result.

The feeling of anxiety and discomfort I felt during that golf tournament in China was not just a thing of the distant past. As recently as January 2020, in a professional tournament in India, those heavy, suffocating emotions re-emerged and began to affect my golf play. While the first two days of the event progressed smoothly, once I found myself in the lead for the first time in my professional career, a wave of anxiety surged through me and I found myself worrying about maintaining my lead over 126 other professionals.

Before I reached this stage, it felt like the golf club and my body were in complete sync as one, but once I had attained a new level of success that I was unaccustomed to, the game I played for so many years suddenly felt very foreign and unnatural to me. I’m not alone in experiencing this feeling of anxiety during important moments – for example, anyone who’s founding a start-up for the first time likely understands the same feeling of being out of their depth in uncharted territory. However, time is an effective remedy for these situations. As you gain more experience and improve over time, you’ll gradually learn how to deal with such situations when they occur.

Whether you’re working, engaged in an event or back home, you’re still the same person – just as you may carry work-related stress and emotions home, it’s also possible that you may be bringing tension and anger from within the family to the office. It’s important to realise that we’re likely to absorb negativity from various places throughout our daily life, and that this energy may influence the actions we take. While strong emotions like anger and hatred can be channelled into work productivity very sparingly and in short bursts, they’re bound to create disharmony within the family when unleashed.

I love my family, but just like any other family, sometimes tempers run high and arguments break out. Even when I’m not directly involved, the environment at home is charged with strong emotions which I subconsciously take to work. If you’re not careful, such stress could affect office relationships and worsen any existing troubles at your job. That’s why you should aim to minimise the emotional impact of whatever’s happening at home to prevent it from hurting your performance in a work environment, and vice versa.