Leader's Guide to Emotional Agility (Emotional Intelligence), The

5

Step Five: managing your own emotions

Wisdom comes with winters.

Oscar Wilde

Preparing an emotionally agile response

The components of managing your emotions are your immediate response to a provocation and the reaction that may occur later. For some people, their immediate response can be one where they are hijacked by the emotion which sends them head-first into a reaction without thinking. This may be further exacerbated when the other party is adept at manipulation or pushing your buttons and, in transactional analysis (TA) terms, your Child ego state is hooked rather than your Adult ego state. If this is familiar territory to you, let’s try to avoid this by preparing for the response:

1. Two scenarios. Typically, there are two possible scenarios: ...