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Holding Steady and Leadership: When was the last time you blew your cool?

Authored by Christiane Montuori on Sunday, January 2, 2011 at 11:57 PM | Add the first comment!
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Last week, on an important teleconference about challenging internal issues for our firm, I completely lost it at a very inopportune moment.

What happened? My story is that my outburst was triggered by one of the other participants interpreting for the nth time an old event that in a way that shifted all the blame for unintended consequences off of him and onto me and others.

Whatever the stimulant, my losing it undermined my position. It was downhill from there.  I lost the argument.

We all have triggers, ideas or perspectives that are likely to set us off because they tap into strongly held feelings.  Some people are triggered by more things; and some are triggered more easily by a few things.

Some people appear to be wired to never be triggered.

Barack Obama may be one of them. He apparently never loses his cool. Sometimes I wonder what he is really passionate about, and what it would take for him to get really angry or, for that matter, uncontrollably happy or inconsolably sad.

His steadiness is an enormous resource for him, but like any strength, there is a countervailing constraint. Displaying emotion is sometimes necessary and Obama either won’t or can’t. That default is a handicap when some passion is useful in making progress.  His coolness enabled him to keep his eye on the prize and do what he had to do when Scott Brown was elected to the Kennedy Senate seat and again when the mid-term elections left him with only a lame duck session to move his agenda while the Democrats still controlled the House. But maybe he could have advanced those issues earlier if he had been more publicly passionate about them.

Nevertheless, my own personal experience and observation is that when trying to exercise leadership people undermine themselves more often by displaying too much emotion, rather than too little.

What can you do to keep yourself from shooting yourself in the foot by being too emotional?

My New Year’s resolutions on Holding Steady look something like this:

(1) Try and recognize my own hot button issues. What sets me off? If I know what those triggers are, I am more likely to see them coming and prepare.
(2) When I feel that emotion rising, train myself to work against my own defaults: neither repress it nor just let it burst forth. Notice it and move it from the gut to the brain where there is some chance of making a thoughtful decision as to whether or not to display it. Try to hold the emotion, rather than have it hold you.
(3) When I fail, quickly acknowledge doing so in the hope of minimizing the downside consequences.

When was the last time you lost it when you should have held steady? What triggered you? What will you do to manage yourself and not get in the way of your own purpose?

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