Don’t Hit Send

• Emotional Intelligence is a super power that enables even the most junior team members to reason about proper emotional responses to work events
• Operating from high emotion states causes behavioral changes that are neither intuitive nor conducive to productive collaboration
• Human instincts that have evolved over thousands of years have not yet caught up to the rapid pace of our technological innovations

Everyone experiences emotions that ebb and flow in response to various interactions — even those individuals you encounter that have the most stable emotional intelligence or lack of reactive emotional responses. The degree to which they can balance those influences and/or filter them to produce objective reasoning is the fundamental difference.

Early in my career I was criticized by a direct report for being far too logical and emotionally dry which led to a painful — but very much appreciated — growth opportunity: I could no longer apply logical problem solving to emotional human conflicts. Compounding this observation was the notion that emotions can’t be “solved” and humans function in different ways when under different emotional contexts (including myself — even though I previously thought I was impervious to emotional influences).

I was able to find a pragmatic validation of these observations in the comprehensive report titled Fuel in the Fire: How Anger Impacts Judgment and Decision-Making led by a group of researchers from Harvard. What they found is that anger tends to lead to impaired decision making abilities by way of an increased appetite for risk while decreasing the perception of a possible negative outcome from that risk. Furthermore, they discovered that in situations of conflict, anger causes people to place blame on others. Can you remember a time when you felt your blood pressure rise and an urge to contend, defend, or argue a point?

Anger isn’t alone in its impairment of sound decision making. Both sadness and excitement are among other culprits skewing our thoughts. In the same report, the Harvard researchers indicate that sadness can have an opposing effect to anger, encouraging the perspective that others are not to be blamed, instead that the specific situation or context at play is the cause. Have you found yourself coming up with excuses for a certain result that you were a part of producing? What emotion was driving that excuse? Were you angry and blaming others or sad and looking at the circumstances as the factors for the reaction?

Excitement is, perhaps, unique in its impact in this same realm. In another publication by the same researchers, they indicate that despite the influence that emotions may have on a particular frame of mind, the excitement surrounding even an unrelated subject can, at least somewhat, alter the original negative perceptions. It appears that with time, the brain finds silver linings or at least has a natural tendency to oscillate between overriding emotions. How might time be a factor in forming a response or reacting to a specific situation? Could it be that an immediate emotional reaction to a situation is entirely at odds with a response that might be formed at a later time? Soak that in for a moment.

Finally, in a less than scientific, yet meaningful-to-me retrospective, one of my teams brainstormed how stress can most typically be boiled down to the fear of the unknown. That is, the Fear of the What If. What if I don’t get my work done on time? What if they don’t like my presentation? What if I get sick? What if I take a vacation and don’t get that promotion? These are all triggers that often result in stress, though are also things that are purely hypothetical until they actually happen. We asked ourselves, “how much mental real estate do these thoughts deserve in our minds?” The answer is: much less space than they typically take up. This shared understanding resulted in significant increases in the confidence of the team and a sharp rise in the work-life balance of the younger members of the group.

Of course these emotional responses serve as valuable and intuitive tools for reasoning about what’s right, wrong, or simply not aligned with your own personal values. To suppress emotion is to suppress being human. Instead, the path to higher emotional intelligence starts in recognizing when we are in heightened emotional states and that you — a dynamic and complex human being — are likely to act upon impulses you ordinarily wouldn’t act upon.

When humans were living in the savanna with rudimentary tools with the threat of starvation or a lion attack around every hedge, these emotional responses were instrumental in survival. Now, these emotional instincts frequently drive us toward actions that most often only result in an elevated heart rate. Our modern, technologically saturated world has appeared in the blink of an evolutionary eye and our natural human instincts haven’t even taken the first step in catching up to the pace and volume of information.

Take Action! Recognize instances where a thought feels like an emergency to share with others, if something feels so urgent to communicate it’s likely the wrong time to share it. Let an email sit in your inbox and don’t hit send! Come back to it an hour, a day, or a week later. Try this practice in real time during conversations with others. It’s okay if someone else states the same opinion you had hoped to share — if that happens, echo their sentiment and use that alignment to strengthen the collective group.