Behavior Trumps Emotion

When you look at work places nowadays, there's a change that has come in the last decade where more attention is being paid to soft skills than some of the harder skills that we used to look at in terms of academic training and specific training that has gone into somebody's title. Nowadays there's a different perception of what it takes to make things work in the work place.

I remember almost a decade back, a good friend of mine bemoaning the fact that a lot of business schools were not spending enough time on a key aspect of what he felt was important in the work place – to be able to behave relationally. He was talking about the fact that not too much was emphasized in training individuals to work together as a team, to check how each personality worked with another personality.

Emotional Triggers

I wonder whether you have ever been party to a meltdown at the office – a situation where, in the course of a normal discussion or brain-storming, a comment was made which was taken too seriously and the reaction that followed was totally disproportionate to what was said. Everybody is surprised; the person involved bangs down a pen, storms out of the place and leaves everybody scratching the heads.  It was a very innocuous comment; there was nothing overtly serious about it, and yet major offence was taken, in serious disproportion to the remark, at least that's what everybody thinks.

I've been in the presence of these kinds of meltdowns before and it always brings up some interesting questions. I'm sure you've experienced them as well. But what happens at these meltdowns? What is going on in the mind of this hapless colleague? Well, it's an emotional trigger that just went off. Suddenly there's a 'blast from their past,' as it were; this event, or the words, brought back emotions that were attached to an incident way back in their history.

Facing Emotions

The other day I was listening to somebody talk about a friend who had lost a pet dog, which hadn't been too old, but suddenly developed some issues. It had been a week or two, and this person was telling his friend that it was time that he got over it and moved on, because they found that this person broke down when somebody at the office inquired about the dog. This person had started crying and couldn't carry on after that. When this friend heard about it, she tried to tell her that one couldn't keep thinking about the loss of a pet and one had to move on.

My heart went out to this person who had lost a pet (I'm a pet lover too). But listening to this, it made me think about grief and how sometimes we try to rush through grief without really understanding that it's a process of settled-ness that needs to come to the mind for one to be able to move on.

You may be familiar with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who brought out the 5 stages of grief. A person going through a loss, whether it is a loss of a loved one or a pet, or even the loss of a job, can go through these 5 stages and spend various periods of time on these 5 stages. It starts with denial à anger à bargaining à depression à acceptance. Acceptance is the point at which they are able to move on, either saying that they can't do anything about the situation or decide that it's time to move on. But it's very important that people process through these stages because jumping over any of these stages can have a detrimental effect on the well being of the person. You give people time to go through and you will see different aspects of these. People spend varying amounts of time, too, in each of these areas. Some go through it very quickly, some take time while some get stuck in anger or denial or depression. But everybody goes through this.