What if you could catch yourself in the moment before an emotional reaction turns a difficult situation into something much worse?
When you’re under pressure, dealing with mistakes, or faced with a person or situation that triggers you, it’s easy to react emotionally before you’ve had time to understand what’s really happening.
In this episode, you’ll learn a simple framework for recognising the difference between emotional and rational responses, so you can stay calmer, communicate more effectively, and create a better environment for the people around you.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- How to recognise the physical and emotional signs that you’re responding emotionally rather than rationally.
- How to get curious about “the story you’re telling yourself” so you can challenge your initial interpretation and consider what else might be happening.
- How labelling the emotion, self-soothing, and asking questions can help you respond more calmly when you can’t immediately move past the situation.
Play this episode to learn a practical framework for managing emotional reactions so you can handle challenging situations with greater calm, clarity, and consistency.
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Episode Transcript:
Ben Wright:
We all react emotionally and it can often harm our business. Thankfully, there’s a way to fix it to make you and everyone around you happier in your days at work.
Intro:
Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping seven to eight figure trade, construction and industry leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so that you can close more deals and grow faster.
I’m your host, Ben Wright and over the last 15 years, I’ve helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes.
Let’s get started.
Ben Wright:
Without doubt over my career, I have had to deal with being emotional when confronted with challenging situations, data I don’t like or quite simply people that trigger me.
At the same time, I’ve developed some frameworks by learning from some very, very intelligent people across my 25 years in this world that have helped me reduce my emotional reactions and in the end, stay calmer in a lot more difficult situations. Today, we’re going to go through what emotional versus rational responses look like and how you can help manage the emotional responses to not have that boom impact on others around you when you do get upset. I’ve worked with some unbelievably experienced and intelligent people across my 25 years but none more so than a business partner who was previously the head of learning for a serious global organisation and we worked together for about 10 years and I learned a huge amount of both what not to do but also what to do from this person.
One of the great things I learned was how to control your emotions a little bit better and I remember the tipping point for me around this in my career. I was early 30s so we’re talking about 12 years ago and I remember that one of our team members in the warehouse, in fact, he was our only team member in the warehouse at this point in time had made a mistake and I went downstairs and I was yelling at him, like proper yelling at this person. This person wasn’t necessarily qualified to be doing what he was doing.
We probably had him in the wrong job but here I was tearing this guy apart through a mistake that he’d made. It was awful. My behaviour was so bad at that point in time and I remember going upstairs and my business partner at the time, he said to me, Ben, what’s going on? That wasn’t cool.
We spoke about it for a little while and had a chat through about how it was very much an emotional rather than a rational reaction. It wasn’t that issue. It wasn’t the mispick that caused the rage for me but it was a buildup of lots of other mistakes and a number of other things that I thought this person had done and perhaps situations from the last half an hour in the day that had impacted how I responded.
It was very much an emotional reaction and at that point in time, that was definitely a turning point for me because whilst I didn’t become calmer immediately, I certainly over the last 12 or 13 years have developed to a person that I feel is pretty calm in a really difficult situation. Yes, I still have emotional responses but, gee, I’ve come a long way in that journey. What we’re going to go through right now is emotional versus rational reactions when you’re confronted with something you don’t like and how you can help control your response, how you can help improve the environment of everyone around you by responding in a manner that is calmer, more consistent, and doesn’t strike fear into everyone around you as to what’s going to happen.
Put yourself in a situation. Imagine right now you are in your business and someone in your team does something you don’t like. Let’s say that a sale gets lost because we deliver it poorly.
We’ve got an operations team that’s failed. We’ve got yourself as a salesperson that hasn’t stayed in touch but, fundamentally, there’s a person in your business that made a mistake and didn’t keep to a commitment. That can often elicit that emotional response.
The way that the frameworks that we roll out with our teams to handle this are to try and, before you respond, to label your internal reactions as being emotional or rational. If it’s a mistake, someone failed to communicate, and your response then and there is, okay, what did we miss? What step did we miss? Why didn’t this person communicate? Was it a missed email? Was it a missed phone call? What could we have done better? That’s a very calm and rational response. I’d encourage, and I certainly do encourage, every team that we work with to then go and solve that then and there.
When you have that calm, rational response that’s thinking very factually, you roll straight into solving it. First of all, you’ve got to be able to label it as a rational response. A rational response normally doesn’t include things like anger, disappointment, rage, feeling hurt, things like how could you, words like I can’t believe you’ve done it, sentences like I can’t believe this has happened, a racing heartbeat, feeling warm, feeling lightheaded.
They’re typically not rational responses. Rational responses are typically things like asking yourselves questions. What process was missed? What step didn’t we do properly? They’re very, very factual and objective.
When you have that rational response, encouragement is to go and handle it straight away because you can have a conversation that’s generally not going to upset anyone because your emotions or your temperament stay level. On the other side, when you are having that emotional response, all those things I just spoke about, racing heart rate, feeling hot, anger, it’s in your head, you start to see stars, clouded vision, the room closes in on you, all those emotional responses that we all suffer from at time to time, the most important thing I teach teams is to label that. Number one, label it as emotional and check yourself.
Stop right then and there. This process, by the way, once you get it right, you’ll be able to work through this in about five to ten seconds. It’s super quick, but in the early days it’s hard and you have to have some discipline to get yourself to do it.
The first one is label it as emotional. Second step here is to get curious or to ask yourself what is the story you’re telling yourself. When that mistake happens, was it all that person’s fault? Is there something you could have done? Could they have misinterpreted what a process was meant to be? Could they have just had a bad day and there’s things we can do to help them moving forward? Did they actually mean to do it or was it an honest mistake? Have they really made this mistake before? Often we’ll think that people, oh my God, they’ve done it again.
When was it really them or was it someone else, was it something else in the business? Has the business let this person down? Start to ask yourself questions by getting curious around what else could it be. When you get a response from someone that you instantly read, particularly text messages or emails that you instantly read as aggressive or threatening or wanting to walk away from dealing with your business, ask yourself the question, could they be meaning something else? Could it just be a badly written email? Could there be something else going on in that moment for them that’s impacted how they’re responding? By getting curious and asking yourself what is the story I’m telling myself, it’s another great way of phrasing it, it allows you to move towards self-soothing. Self-soothing is the best way to handle an emotional response because if you can buy yourself that 5 to 10 seconds to calm down, then often the response that you give everyone around you is so much more balanced, so much more level.
By labelling it as an emotional response, getting curious to ask yourself what’s the story I’m telling myself, you then give yourself time to self-soothe. Often personally, I’ll find that when I get emotional, I can self-soothe, particularly on the smaller things, move on from it and not create the train wreck that comes from me. But sometimes I can’t and I need to have that discussion, still with some emotion there, but almost always reduced levels so that it’s not that explosion of anger or being upset that invariably would have happened moments before.
When you can’t self-soothe and you need to have that conversation, my recommendation with teams is to always ask questions. Can you help me understand why? Can you talk me through what went wrong? Here’s what I’m thinking. Can you help me understand if I’m right? I’m thinking you missed a really critical step that you shouldn’t have missed.
I’m upset about it. Can you help me understand if this is true? So much better, so much better for everyone around you. You missed that step.
What are you doing? Why didn’t you call the customer? What’s going on? You’ve missed this such an important step. It’s so easy to do. By asking it a question, can you help me understand why? Can you fill me in on what happened? Am I right? We then open up a conversation that’s far less threatened.
So I’ve absolutely been guilty of emotional responses. I will continue to be guilty, but for me to sum this up, it’s all about being able to check yourself in the moment as to whether or not you’re responding emotionally or rationally. If you’re responding rationally, great, go and solve it.
But if it’s an emotional response, how can you label it? Get curious around what else could be the meaning of what’s in front of you or what the story is you’re telling yourself. Self-soothe it to try and solve it. And if you can’t, ask questions to help you understand, but also be far less threatening and emotional to those around you.
This is an unbelievable game changer of a framework for me. I’ve seen it be so incredibly impactful for others around me. Give it a try yourself as you’re leaving today.
Try and write this down. Grab the show notes and find one situation in the next few days that you can apply this to. Because for me, I’m certainly emotional at times.
And in fact, if you’re someone who know you need to grow your sales in your business, then often I find that emotions are more prevalent. They’re around a lot more when you’re under pressure, when you’re stressed because sales aren’t closing, when you’re stressed because you can’t get enough deals done or you don’t have enough money coming into the bank for your business. These emotional responses happen more and more.
Well, thankfully, we’ve got a great sales and marketing workshop that’s kicking off in a few weeks. It is invite only. I’m partnering with someone who’s brilliant at the marketing side of business.
And we’re going to run some amazing workshops. But the first cohort is only going to be by invite. So if you’d like to get told when it’s coming out, no commitment.
But if you just want to hear when it’s going to be launched, please jump onto the show notes. Register. It takes 30 seconds and you’re there.
We will let you know when it’s coming out. That’s it for today. Please keep thinking about how you can be 1% better each and every day because it does make all the difference.
Bye for now.