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.

Honestly Accepting Your Negativity

As a unique individual, you may find yourself more prone to experiencing certain negative emotions that can get the better of you. Think back to a time where you were put in a difficult situation, and identify the emotions that tended to bubble up. Personally, when I’m having a bad game of golf and not meeting my own expectations, I become agitated and hot-tempered. Unfortunately, when that happens, I also become less understanding towards my caddy when he makes minor mistakes or slip-ups. When placed under pressure, I tighten up physically while losing some of my rationality and self-awareness.

Jealousy is another emotion that I’m no a stranger to, even when I’m indirectly responsible for creating the situation that would make me feel that way. Some occasions where I’ve experienced jealousy (and then felt ashamed for feeling it) were when I did not receive the attention I felt I deserved after achieving a victory, or after someone I knew won a golf tournament; had a golfer less known than me won that tournament, I would have felt less upset. Even with the people close to me, there have been times where I neglected to maintain those relationships, but then felt jealous after they turned towards others who showed more care and concern.

Perhaps you’ve also experienced these feelings of envy and anger in your own life and opted to suppress them whenever possible. From personal experience, when I try to suppress my feelings of envy and anxiety, it works…for a while. Before long, they find their way back to the surface in the form of other negative emotions and I find myself expressing those bad vibes in other areas of my life. Moreover, when you suppress an emotion, you’re denying yourself the opportunity to acknowledge and resolve it in a healthy way, it’ll continue to circulate like a vicious cycle, and the effort to constantly suppress it is going to add to your emotional stress.

If I don’t embrace the reality of those emotions, but instead try and behave like everything’s okay, some event will invariably trigger those feelings to come flooding out. That’s why I feel like suppressing doesn’t work, and acknowledging your uncomfortable emotional side is very important. Thus far I’ve had good results when embracing my feelings by writing them down when they flare up. By putting pen to paper, I can come to terms with my feelings and understand that it’s okay to not be okay, to be pissed off or unhappy sometimes. It’s not something that you or I can easily master – it’s a work in progress that will require consistent effort to get better at.

The modern world is full of distractions, and they can function as an easy way out from needing to confront your feelings. It even works in the short term. But just like attempting to suppress your feelings, distracting yourself from them does nothing to resolve the issue. The negativity is still there, embedded in your subconscious and just awaiting another trigger to unleash itself.

With acknowledgement comes awareness, and with awareness comes the ability to better manage your emotions and how you express them. When you express feelings like anger, anxiety and jealousy without being aware of it, that’s bound to lead to disaster. Once an emotion gets the better of you, your actions and reactions will not be coming from a place of control. Instead of looking for solutions to the negativity you’re feeling, you might find yourself trying to justify feeling that way.

“The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.” – Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

Mark Manson says it best, but I’ll break it down further. Don’t justify or seek explanations for your emotions. Understand them and face them honestly. When you can be honest with yourself, you can then be honest with others – that positivity is going to spread out and influence any environment you’re in. When you’re dishonest with yourself, you’re going to be eaten up by your emotions from within. Sometimes it can be confronting to learn that you’re not as good a person as you thought you were. But you can become that person, and it starts with being self-aware and emotionally true to yourself.

When you’re stuck in the middle of an intense, high-pressure situation, there are a few ways to cope with it. Rationally speaking, nothing is permanent and everything will pass, including any negativity that you’re presently burdened with. But is this something you’d easily recall when you’re up to your neck in stress and overwhelming emotions? Without a strong level of self-awareness and some effort to get to that point, it’s not easy to maintain your composure when under fire. The good news is that calmness and composure can be developed.

Once you’ve dug deep into emotional understanding with honesty, a sense of composure tends to follow. It’s the same kind of steady confidence that one continues to build as he or she begins to know and understand more about a given topic. When you have fully accepted and embraced your feelings, you’re also developing the calmness and composure that is indirectly saying, “I know myself better now, and I’m capable of handling any emotional challenge down the road.”.

That composure also serves as a base from where you can build on your discipline. What does discipline have to do with emotions and feelings? Nothing – and that’s why it’s worth cultivating. When you’re disciplined, likely operating on a schedule you’ve set for yourself, there will be gaps and times in the week where you just don’t feel like doing anything. Despite all that, discipline is the secret formula to pushing past that urge towards inaction and getting the job done. Good discipline keeps you going even through feelings like lethargy or lack of motivation. It’s useful when you need to keep your eyes on the prize and continue your progress, even on the days where you’re just not feeling it.

Avoiding emotions is an unfeasible approach to controlling them, because as human beings we can’t just switch off emotions at will. It’s not possible to tell an angry person to cease his or her anger without them being even more enraged. But it’s very possible to help this person deal with their anger better. A short temper, developed through years of conditioning and difficulty with managing emotions, can be slowly but surely improved when one is surrounded with the right people and the right environment, doing the right actions and operating with the right mindset.

Along with honesty, calmness, composure and discipline, identifying the factors you can control is part of the right mindset to achieve emotional management. You might not be able to control what you are feeling at that moment, but you are quite able to control what words leave your mouth. In a difficult situation, instead of worrying about factors beyond your control, take charge of what you can control – and all this is made easier when you have built up emotional composure.

“If a problem is fixable—if a situation is such that you can do something about it—then there is no need to worry. If it’s not fixable, then there is no help in worrying.” – The Dalai Lama

Sometimes it’s better not to say too much or do too much, and silence can be the best option. It’s different from suppression, because you’re not denying your feelings, simply keeping quiet and taking a bit of time to reconcile with your emotions without saying something that could lead to the situation worsening. It’s not necessary to react immediately all the time – creating a short delay to find that inner composure can save you from having to undo any potential damage that might be incurred from a poorly considered response.

Supported by the Right People

Humans are social beings. So why not find support in other people? Speaking to a frank and trustworthy friend or acquaintance about your emotional difficulties can be a healthy method of embracing stormy or negative feelings like anger, hatred and jealousy. Besides simply releasing that pressure valve within yourself, an honest discussion can even guide you to some self-realisation regarding your emotional side.

Of course, even as you consult with caring and reliable individuals, do take care not to overwhelm them past the level of support they’re capable of giving. Moreover, it’s important for them to be able to maintain a neutral, truth-focused viewpoint. When they’re not afraid to point out when you’re wrong and back you up when you’re right, you’ll develop a more objective understanding of how to manage your emotions. While relying on sweet-talkers and people-pleasers may help you feel good in the short term, it distracts you from undergoing the necessary emotional growth.

How do we identify such upright people in our lives? From personal experience, the people who I’ve grown to know and appreciate on this front meet a certain archetype. They’re people who have the ability to share love and joy despite whatever experiences they’ve been through. They’re open, caring and nonjudgmental, but they weren’t born like that – something significant must have happened in their lives to push them towards embracing such a personality. Think back to your own experiences. Do you know anyone who sounds like that? They need not be family members or close friends; even an easy-going acquaintance may be the one to fill this niche for you.

It also helps to pay attention to how they make you feel when you’re with them. Some people make you feel at home when interacting with them, while others give off this vibe of empowering everyone they’re with. Some of the best individuals I’ve been thankful to know not only infuse their surroundings with great positivity, but also motivate you to be more independent and self-sufficient; even when they’re not physically present, their impact can still be felt. There are also others who might not be outwardly warm and may have cold or awkward personalities, but they have your best interests at heart and you can always rely on them.

Feeling and Taking the Right Actions

Just as our brains are part of our bodies, there is also a physiological aspect to our emotions. When you’re anxious, it’s quite likely that you’ll feel an uncomfortable lump in your throat, or the sensation of your heart pounding harder than usual. When you’re angry, your body might be shaking with agitation, and sweating may intensify. Through these observations we can see that emotional impulses bring about physiological responses.

In turn, physical activities can contribute to better emotional regulation. Practicing meditation, martial arts, or even going for a run are some well-established examples of improving one’s mood and mindfulness, ultimately cultivating self-awareness.

As a practitioner of meditation over the last few years, I don’t have the knowledge to say which method is best. I do know, however, that the effort taken to meditate and face your bare emotions contributes to a better understanding of yourself. When you focus inward on breathing and experiencing the sensations of your body, that’s the very definition of self-awareness: being aware of yourself, simply feeling your emotions as they flow through you, without obsessing over them.

You shouldn’t pick up these activities specifically to feel better emotionally in the short term. When practicing them, it should be followed with an understanding that they can benefit you in the long run - mentally and physically. For example, you’re not guaranteed to feel better if you meditate only when you’re feeling upset.

Things like yoga, meditation and martial arts are products of discipline, and better handling of situations will come as a by-product of constant effort – you won’t see benefits if you only do it when you feel you need to. With exercise routines and sports, you cannot maintain your fitness levels if you only do them occasionally. The same applies to wellness derived from mindfulness.

Besides meditation, sports also hold a special place in my heart. Besides physical and mental wellness, sports also teaches you to lose gracefully. Personally, I prefer to call ‘losing’ learning. In sports, regardless of whether you win or not, there’s always a learning opportunity. The ability to accept losses as an inherent part of playing sports also benefits your mindset, whether in a competition or in the workplace. In either environment, just as in sports, many variables are not in your control and the best way to function is to focus on what you can control to obtain success.

The next time you find yourself in a situation where your emotions are about to get the better of you, stop. Stop and take a breath to gather yourself and your feelings. With the composure that you’ve developed by taking the right actions, using the right mindset and speaking with the right people, you’ll be able to find clarity to manage the situation. When you’re able to do it once, you’ll be able to do it many more times, by constantly improving and using your ability to accept, embrace, understand and deal with emotions and difficult situations.

1. Practice Mindfulness Daily

Don’t suppress your emotions or distract yourself from them. Master your feelings by using honesty and self-awareness to understand and accept them. Practicing a routine of meditation can help develop the mindfulness needed to learn more about yourself.

2. Take a Deep Breath

When you’re agitated or anxious and about to react on impulse, take a breath to calm yourself down and think about what you were going to say or do. A poorly considered response could worsen the situation.

3. Don’t Skip That Workout

When you engage in a physical activity like running, sports or martial arts, it builds discipline and improves your physical and emotional health. Your body affects your mind and vice versa, which is why it’s important to keep both healthy.