Emotions don’t hurt our performance necessarily; thinking must include feeling. Although we’ve been driving this idea home in this book, you don’t need to be a psychologist to realize that people know their feelings can truly mess things up for them. Our petty jealousies, unbridled anger, and baseless fears derail us and wreak havoc on our lives and the lives of those we touch. As we have pointed out, these problems are usually due to an inaccurate emotional appraisal of the situation or to the way we typically view the world.
As we’ve mentioned before, the typical way we feel is sometimes called a mood, as opposed to an emotion. Emotions are brief and attributable to some identifiable cause. Moods are the background noise and the diffuse feelings we have. Often the reasons we feel the way we do are unknown. Our interpretation of events is often based on our moods.
The impact of mood on feelings is illustrated. If you are starting out in a negative, or bad, mood, then little things will quickly get to you and annoy you. Soon you find yourself feeling angry, but you’re not sure why. But start out in a fairly positive, or good, mood, and the same events don’t upset you as easily. Eventually, you might feel angry, but it’s going to take a lot to make you feel that way.
Mood Filtering
What if you are often in either a good or a bad mood? Some people do have typical ways of looking at the world and interpreting events, and they filter experience through their own mood lens. Such ways of behaving or viewing the world are sometimes called personality or dispositional traits. Some important dispositional traits are depression, anxiety, hostility, optimism, pleasantness, stress, and trust.
Take the example of depression. If you are depressed, then you may tend to exaggerate negative events and ascribe negative motives to certain events. You look on the dark side of things. You will be open to emotion but tend to be more aware of sad emotions and events. You’ll take a neutral event and ascribe negative connotations to it. When you are depressed, you see depression in the world around you.
We’ve all heard about the importance of treating dispositional or personality trait problems of depression, anxiety, and hostility. These “irrational” emotions and thoughts are usually seen as negative and destructive. However, to manage emotion successfully, we should be aware of any tendency to minimize or maximize any type of emotion, not just sadness, anxiety, and anger.
For instance, the tendency to see things in a positive light and always to put a positive spin on events is one of the outcomes of being optimistic. Even though optimism has been linked to important and positive outcomes, in the context of emotion management, optimism can derail successful emotion management as much as depression can. When we are in a happy, expansive mood we can miss details. Our error-checking ability might be disabled. We can fail to recognize or to accept problems. Feeling positive and optimistic, we fend off criticisms of our marketing and advertising plan because we “just know that it will work.” And if our judgment was based more on the optimistic feeling as background noise rather than a positive emotion based on real data, chances are we’re going to have some explaining to do.
A related dispositional trait is that of agreeableness, or as we call it here, pleasantness—the tendency to get along with others, defer to people’s wishes and needs, and be generally easygoing. Such a person is non-confrontational and easy to be with. Often such people trust others and have faith in the goodness of others. It’s difficult for a pleasant and trusting person to see and to admit that someone is, for lack of a better phrase, a real jerk.
You can turn to Assessing Your Emotional Style to help you better understand your moods, or dispositional traits. We’ve developed a special set of questions to help you figure out what sort of moods you may use to filter your experience. These questions help you discriminate the signal function of emotions from the noise of moods.
Emotion Filtering
However, when the feeling you have is based on an emotion—a feeling containing data—you still should not always act on it. The emotionally intelligent manager has to be clear about emotions and gauge how typical and influential these feelings are. Being clear requires that we neither minimize nor exaggerate the emotions. We also have to be clear about our openness to certain emotions and to determine whether we selectively filter out, or filter in, certain feelings.
We may “do” happiness well but have a tough time being open to feelings of anger. Or we may be quick to embrace a sad feeling but shy away from feelings of joy and happiness.
Positive and Negative Emotion Filtering
When certain emotions are less acceptable than others, we may filter out those unwanted feelings. We selectively attend to certain feelings and ignore others.
There are two general forms of emotional filtering: (1) positive-emotion focus and (2) negative emotion focus. We’ve heard about the power of positive thinking, but what about the power of a positive emotion focus? Without discounting the importance of optimism on health and other outcomes, positive thinking or a focus on positive emotions can lead to a lack of emotional awareness. This is especially true if we spend resources looking for positive emotions, leaving fewer resources available for the processing of negative emotions. Negative emotion focus works the same way, only in this case we are focusing on negative emotions.
Accepting Certain Emotions
Another way to view the emotional filtering process is to examine whether or not we allow only certain feelings to rise to the level of conscious acceptance and awareness. Some people may not filter out negative emotions in general, but they may find that they don’t allow themselves to process anger. To them, anger is not an acceptable emotion to experience.
Although it may seem that the negative emotions are likely to be deemed unacceptable, it is common for people to see strong, positive emotions like joy as unacceptable or as unwelcome emotional guests in their daily work-life.
Overgeneralizing Emotion
Deciding how typical a feeling is can be made more difficult if we tend to believe that a single fleeting feeling is the harbinger of more to come. We become convinced that our feelings will intensify. We can also believe or convince ourselves that we are always feeling this way, and we become overwhelmed by the emotion.
Jumping to Emotional Conclusions
When we believe that our current emotional state will have drastic consequences for ourselves, we jump to the conclusion, prematurely, that our feelings are incredibly influential and powerful.
The following exercise may create an experience of insight that will allow you to determine which emotional filters you tend to use.