Work/Life
Don’t Ignore Your Check Engine Light
How to use emotions as information.
By Francie Kilborne
For centuries, lawyers and judges have posited that logic is supreme and
emotion has no place in the legal world. Aristotle said: “The law is
reason, free from passion.” The image of blind justice—shutting out all
input except the relative weight of each side’s logical
argument—epitomizes our profession’s discomfort with and disdain for
emotions. Whether you believe that emotion has a role in legal
decision-making, there is no denying that human beings are emotional
beings, and, jokes notwithstanding, all lawyers are human. That means
that lawyers are emotional beings. The horror!
How do we deal
with these pesky emotions that we seem to be saddled with? We can do
what my son did when the check engine light went on in his car: Ignore
them and hope they go away. Indeed, that’s what many of us are taught.
Pretend that emotions don’t exist or at the very least, that they don’t
matter. Even purportedly “progressive” or “enlightened” people seem to
think that you can meditate away your anger or sadness. Mindfulness
practices are powerful tools, but swallowing your feelings and putting
on a happy face isn’t a good long-term solution for dealing with
difficult emotions. It’s like putting tape over that check engine light
and hoping your car will fix itself.
If you ignore or suppress
your emotions, what happens? Consider this scenario: Someone at your
office—we’ll call him “Bill”—repeatedly tries to take credit for your
ideas and work product. You want to be seen as a “team player” though,
so you don’t say anything. Bill keeps doing it. Then, one day, after
Bill has just taken credit for something you put many hours into, your
4-year-old knocks over her milk and spills it all over the floor. What
happens? You explode and yell at your daughter. And then you feel
terrible for exploding, thus reinforcing the idea that anger is bad and
should be repressed at all costs. But ignoring your emotions never makes
them go away. They resurface, sometimes misdirected at the wrong people,
sometimes as depression, and sometimes as physical illness.
And the alternative? What would happen if you vent your anger, yelling
at Bill when he takes credit for your work? If others are present, you
end up looking like an out-of-control toddler. Other time-honored
tactics for dealing with anger at the office are sarcasm and backbiting.
These approaches might make you feel better in the short term, but over
time will do nothing to solve the underlying problem and will erode
others’ trust in you.
So what’s the answer? If it’s bad to
suppress emotions and equally bad to vent them, how are we supposed to
handle them? Are they just a curse that we have to suffer with for our
entire lives? Or is it possible that they serve some purpose?
Consider this: Perhaps emotions are intended to work like that check
engine light—they are meant to alert us when we need to take action to
keep ourselves in good working order. According to Linda Kohanov, author
of the bestselling leadership book, The Power of the Herd, that
is exactly the purpose that emotions serve. Further, she outlines a
simple, analytical process for interpreting what our emotions
try to tell us. Allowing our considerable brainpower to work together
with our emotions may contradict centuries of conditioning, but if it
can provide us with a way to make productive use of emotions, it may be
worth a try.
The process, known as the Four-Point Method for
Emotional Agility (herein the “process”), was developed by Kohanov,
inspired and informed in part by the work of Karla McLaren, an
award-winning writer and researcher on emotional intelligence, and is
based on extensive observation of another species of highly social
mammals (horses) as well as extensive follow-up research in the fields
of neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and history. Kohanov and
McLaren are among those researchers who have observed that there are
“predictable, rational messages behind emotions like fear, anger,
frustration, sadness, grief, disappointment, and even
depression.”1 Horses use these messages to inform their
decision-making. In other words, horses use emotions as
information, which allows them to engage in course correction in
response. After having received and acted upon the message contained in
an emotion, a horse goes back to grazing. The emotion has served its
purpose and naturally dissipates.
To recap, the process works
like this.
Step 1: Feel the emotion in its purest form.
Step 2: Get the message behind the emotion.
Step 3: Make a change in response to the message.
Step 4: Go back to your grazing (or if you’re a human, get back on task).
Most social mammals repeat this process
effortlessly several times a day and in so doing, live without the
gnawing angst, worry, and relationship dysfunction that we humans seem
to battle daily. Most humans, however, have to re-learn this skill due
to lifelong societal pressure to deny the importance of emotion.
Let’s apply the process to the hypothetical above. First, you feel the
emotion in its purest form. Physical sensations are the first indication
of an emotion. For most people, anger brings a feeling of heat, a
flushed face, increased heart rate and respiration, and a surge of
energy. You may feel an urge to punch someone in the face or yell or
cry. When your brain registers that these body sensations signal anger,
you can experience them without losing control. Deep breathing helps,
not for the purpose of suppressing the emotion, but rather to help you
remain calm enough to get the message.
Your body manifests the
emotion of anger with feelings of heat and energy because anger is a
signal that a boundary (physical or emotional) has been violated. You
need the energy that anger provides in order to take action to restore
the violated boundary. Second, ask yourself the following questions to
get the message behind the anger: What must be protected? What boundary
must be established or restored? You want to protect your right to
receive credit for your work. Armed with this information, your brain
can devise the optimal strategy to achieve your goal. A spontaneous
outburst or snarky email are clearly poor strategies. A face-to-face,
private conversation with Bill, by contrast, may well achieve your
goal.2
After talking with Bill (step 3), you will
have made the required change, and you will be able easily to move to
the final step and “go back to grazing.” Of course, the process does not
ensure that Bill will stop the offensive behavior. It may take a few
more rounds of increasingly strong boundary setting3 to do
that, but it will enable you to manage your anger in a productive way.
A key part of this process is using your brain to offset the
intensity of your emotion, take the edge off so to speak. When you are
overcome by an emotion, your brain floods your body with hormones that
adversely affect your cognitive ability.4 Shifting your focus
to the questions that should be asked of the emotion that you are
experiencing likely short-circuits that hormone surge. Unlike
suppressing emotion, shifting your focus to questioning mode after you
have registered the emotion in your body allows you to get the message
behind the emotion. Engaging your cognitive ability also keeps the
emotion from overwhelming you and causing potentially regrettable
behavior.
The process works the same way with all emotions.
It’s only the questions that you ask to get the message that change.
Understanding and engaging this process has transformed my relationship
with emotions and consequently my relationships with people. Rather than
curse my feelings (as I was raised to do), I now see that they are a
gift. They alert me when I need to take action—just like that check
engine light.TBJ
FRANCIE KILBORNE
has been practicing corporate law for energy companies since 1989. In
2016, she opened a center for equine-facilitated learning and therapy
(Solace Equine Center) just north of Dallas, where she and her staff of
human and equine facilitators teach people to maximize their untapped
potential by practicing emotional intelligence skills such as the one
discussed above.
