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Hello everyone, I’m Cody Nickol with Work Growth Thrive. As always, my goal is to provide you with the best personal development insights to help you grow, thrive, and reach your potential in the workplace. Today, I want to talk about emotional triggers and provide four ways to help you manage them, resulting in a more positive emotional experience and higher productivity at work.
What is a Trigger?
So, what is a trigger? It can be anything, from a situation or a person, to a smell or even a time of year. Triggers elicit strong emotional responses, causing us to feel flooded with emotions such as anger or anxiety. These responses are often automatic and exaggerated, even if the trigger is non-threatening. Consequently, we enter a fight or flight mode, which can cause our breathing, blood pressure, and heart rate to increase, making it difficult to respond in the way we would like.
Have you ever felt threatened or belittled at work? Maybe someone said something that made you angry, or you got upset because your colleague was showboating in front of the boss.
How to Manage Your Triggers
Although we’re not sure why triggers exist or how they come into being, we can learn to manage them. Triggers are often related to traumatic experiences we may have had in the past, and these memories can live outside of our conscious memory. When something happens that brings the memory back, we respond in an automatic, negative, and exaggerated way.
1. Label the Trigger and Identify How it Makes You Feel
The first step to dealing with triggers is to identify what they are and how they make you feel. Consider the exact situation and cues that trigger you, label it, and describe how you feel when you are triggered. Knowing your triggers will help you recognize what is happening to you in the future.
Once you know your triggers, consider some responses you could have ahead of time. For example, if a colleague says something critical towards you, and that triggers you, consider responding with, “That’s interesting. I’d like to think about that and get back to you later.” This way, you have an automatic response ready for the next time you are triggered. Once you’ve calmed down and you can consider the situation a little better, you’re able to respond more appropriately, or respond in a way that you would like to. Not just react but respond.
2. Examine the Evidence
I live and work in Germany, and I had to learn the German language. I communicate in German every day. Sometimes, when I spoke in German in the university or work context, I didn’t feel like I was being understood. This triggered me a little bit. Underneath that emotional reaction was the belief that those listening didn’t think I was competent, or that I couldn’t do a good job. This is often the case with triggers. There’s actually an underlying, deeply-held belief that’s attached to it.
To deal with this issue, I examined the evidence. When I said something in German, they just looked at me funny, but they didn’t say they thought I was incompetent. There’s no indication that they thought I couldn’t do a good job. The only thing that the situation indicated is that they just needed some more clarity. So, the evidence did not show that I’m incompetent, just that the others needed more clarity.
3. Engage in Cognitive Reappraisal
The third thing you can do is called cognitive reappraisal. And when it’s appropriate reevaluate the situation and change how you think about it. So in my case, I felt like them looking at me funny, or not being understanding, was kind of an attack on my competence. Looking back, I didn’t have to feel this way. I could have looked at this situation differently.
For example, I could have told myself, “No, this is actually a learning experience. I can learn how to communicate accurately with others in another language. This is really wonderful, and when things don’t go like I planned, it’s okay because I’m learning.”
Another way to change how you’re thinking about a situation is to not think in absolute terms, black and white, but to think in shades of gray. In my situation, I had this one interaction with a client, and thought that they’re always going to think I’m dumb and not good at what I do. Thinking in shades of grey looks more like this: Well, no, this is a working relationship. We’re going to have many more interactions and times to get to know each other and talk with each other. This is just one situation of many.
4. Deal with Yourself More Compassionately
The final tip is to deal with yourself a little bit more compassionately. Often when you’re triggered, you might be flooded with an automatic thought like, “I’m not smart enough,” “I’m not competent enough,” or “I can’t do it.” Or in my case, “I’m a bad communicator.” Don’t come down so hard on yourself. Don’t punish yourself emotionally. Speak to yourself like you would speak with a good friend. Comfort yourself like you would comfort a good friend.
You can have a different narrative. For instance: Maybe in this case, the communication didn’t work so well, but it’s okay. I’m learning and it’s okay to make mistakes. I’m a human being. We all make mistakes. You might get disappointed with yourself because you’re not 100% perfect all the time, but you can tell yourself, “I don’t have to be perfect. I make mistakes, and that’s okay.” My inherint value is not in what I can do or what I can accomplish. I’m valuable because I’m a human being. It’s okay that it didn’t work out this time. There’s always next time.
Summary
I hope that this video was helpful. Today, we talked about how to deal with our emotional triggers so that we don’t get stuck in negative emotions and can remain productive at work. The first thing I said is to identify what triggers you, label it, and describe how it makes you feel.
The second thing is to examine the evidence. Consider the facts of the situation, and more than likely, your automatic thoughts won’t be confirmed by the evidence. The third thing you can do is engage in cognitive reappraisal. Change how you think about the situation. The fourth thing is to be more compassionate with yourself.
By doing these exercises, you’ll be able to better deal with your triggers, or when you are triggered, have a better response. The experience of your negative emotion may not be as heavy as before. I hope this was helpful to you. If you would like some one on one coaching feel free to reach out to me here. Please like this video, subscribe to my channel, and come back again for more helpful content.
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