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Mastering Your Mind

Emotion-Regulation Strategies That Work and One That You Should Never Use

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IMAGINE YOURSELF AS a five-year-old. You’re sitting in a small room with nothing but a piece of your favorite candy right in front of your nose. A friendly adult tells you that you can eat the candy right now, or you can wait 10 minutes and get two pieces of candy instead of just one. And then the adult leaves you alone.

You may recognize this “cruel” little experiment as the “marshmallow test” by Stanford University psychologist Walter Mischel, originally conducted in the 1960s and 1970s with preschoolers between three and five years old. The experiment aimed to measure the children’s impulse control and ability to delay gratification. Some kids contorted themselves into pretzels trying to wait out the agonizing period before the adult reentered the room with the additional treat, while others barely waited for the door to click behind the departing researcher before wolfing down the temptation in front of them.

After the original experiment, Mischel and his researchers tracked the kids over several years to see how they did in terms of successes and failures and published their findings in 1990. The results: Kids who were able to control their impulses and hold out for the bigger treat went on to demonstrate higher intelligence and overall more productive behaviors later in life.

Only, this famous experiment was largely debunked when Mischel’s results failed to replicate in a much larger study by researchers from New York University and the University of California–Irvine. That study, published in 2018 in Psychological Science Journal, and involving 10 times as many kids, found that once a child’s family background, home environment, and early cognitive ability were taken into account, the differences between the delayers and the grabbers by age 15 were so minimal that they were statistically insignificant. In other words, it wasn’t so much a child’s ability to delay gratification that determined future success, but a variety of social and economic factors that failed to make it into Mischel’s original research.

Of course, as working adults, we don’t need a longitudinal study to tell us whether practicing impulse control makes us more successful or not. Take the manager who yells and routinely lashes out at others in frustration. He’s unlikely to be on the radar for bigger leadership roles—at least not in more evolved organizational cultures. Or imagine the emerging leader who would rather blend into the safe background than face the scrutiny that comes with presenting new ideas to senior management. Both types would benefit greatly from learning to manage their worst impulses and regulate their emotions in order to improve their reputations. Leaders who easily get rattled can quickly lose credibility in the eyes of those they lead, not to mention their ever-watchful bosses.

Self-control, calmness, composure—those are some of the key characteristics that signal executive presence, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association.

Fortunately for those interested in developing executive presence, these qualities, also known as “emotion regulation,” have been heavily researched by behavioral psychologists and neuroscientists. In the following pages I’ll share several of the most effective strategies you can use to manage your mood and emotions overall, to prepare for emotionally tense situations, and to stay composed once you find yourself right in the middle of one of those situations. I will also share one commonly used emotion-regulation strategy that can actually harm your health and relationships and that you should avoid whenever possible.

Welcome to the Emotional Roller Coaster

Unless you’re a real-life Mr. Spock—the fictional half-Vulcan science officer in the popular TV series Star Trek—then you’re a regular passenger on the emotional roller coaster. You leave your house for work in the morning, still humming your favorite song, when you realize your Uber driver just canceled your scheduled pickup. You timed your departure just right, but now you’re running late for your morning meeting. Your anxiety rising as you scramble to find alternative transportation, you get a text from your teammate that a proposal you’d worked on together was accepted by the client—Yay!—but the client wants to renegotiate the fee schedule. As you arrive at work a few minutes late, your boss’s boss recognizes you by name in the lobby and stops to congratulate you on the inspiring sales forecast you presented last week. From the corner of your eye you notice your actual boss over at the coffee shop, sharing a laugh with your rival for a position you’re both gunning for.

It’s barely 8:10 a.m., and you’ve already completed several rides on the emotional roller coaster.

So what is emotion? Is it passion, feeling, mood? We often use those terms interchangeably, but it makes sense to distinguish them from one another. For example, lawyer and psychologist Delee Fromm defines emotion as a psychological state of “high intensity, short duration, and directed at an object, person, or event,” while mood is a more stable state. For many of us, mood and emotions tend to align—more positive folks will generally experience more positive emotions—but most of us can experience a wide range of emotions on any given day. If you’re generally positive and in a good mood, you may find yourself in the dumps when your favorite team gets a thrashing from a hated rival, while the curmudgeon next to you may experience a dopamine squirt and unbridled joy when his team wins. That is, until someone blocks his parking space and he’s right back to curmudgeon-ness. You get the picture.

Scholars James Gross, Jane Richards, and Oliver John get a bit more technical, referring to emotion as a process, rather than a single event, one that “begins when an external or internal event signals to the individual that something important may be at stake.” In other words, something happens that sets off a whole series of responses that “involve experiential, behavioral, and central and peripheral physiological systems.” The important thing for us to understand is that these responses can be modified—regulated—in different ways, which in turn means you can change your behavior.

To elaborate: Gross and his colleagues distinguish between the experience of an emotion and its expression; so, for example, you might feel angry, but you don’t necessarily act angry. This is a key aspect of our emotion-regulation strategies: Sometimes we’re able to control that initial experience, while other times—say, in “count-to-10” moments—the feeling rushes in, but we’re able to put a brake on its expression. This plays into their discussion of strategies that are “antecedent focused” (trying to regulate emotion prior to a moment) versus those that are “response focused” (in the moment). I’ll talk about these two strategies later in this chapter.

There’s another distinction that matters: that between “integral” and “incidental” emotions. Harvard professor and social psychologist Jennifer Lerner and her colleagues Ye Li, Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Karim Kassam note that “integral” emotions, or those “arising from the judgment or choice at hand,” are directly related to a situation you’re experiencing and affect your behavior in that moment. For example, you might be someone who usually avoids confrontation, but when you see someone mistreating your favorite server at the diner, your anger leads you to step up in defense.

“Incidental” emotions, on the other hand, are less about the moment than they are about the shadow of a different moment. As Lerner et al. put it, “Incidental emotions pervasively carry over from one situation to the next,” stringing together unrelated events in one big emotion. The train is packed or the highways are jammed so that by the time you get to work you’re tense and frustrated; someone steps into the elevator just as the doors are about to close and you seethe; then, at your desk, the file drawer jams and you go off, swearing at the “stupid @#!$ drawer!”

That bad traffic cast a long shadow.

So making sense of our emotions means we have to have a dual focus—from what’s right at the surface of their expression down to the roots of the experience. Understanding this puts you in the driver’s seat of that proverbial emotional roller coaster (I trust you’ll forgive my tortured metaphor). Emotions are powerful, but so are the ways we can control them, as you’ll learn shortly.

Why Emotion Matters

People often think of emotion as the opposite of reason—heart versus head, feeling versus fact—but the relationship between the two is actually one of interdependence. While we might think we ought to prize rationality over emotionality, especially in work settings, social science and neuroscience research clearly show that paying attention to both reason and emotion in negotiations or in decision making will lead to better outcomes than focusing on reason alone.

Consider the emotion-laden challenges that leaders regularly face:

•   Presenting an idea or results to senior leadership or boards and staying composed when challenged or asked tough questions

•   Showing appropriate enthusiasm when offering new ideas or sharing an exciting vision of the future

•   Responding productively when facing angry shareholders or customers

•   Managing conflict in meetings when discussions get heated

•   Demonstrating assertiveness in defending an idea or course of action, without appearing aggressive

•   Projecting confidence in situations where more senior leaders are present, rather than hiding for fear of appearing unprepared, inadequate, wrong, etc.

•   Listening with empathy and without judgment when others present their point of view

•   Accepting negative feedback or constructive criticism after a failure, without shutting down

•   Demonstrating patience with members of your team who fall short of expectations and electing to mentor them instead of venting frustration

Rick, a VP of project management at a health insurance carrier that I have advised, furnishes a good example of the last point. He is generally well liked and balanced in his approach with people, but under stress he can come across as a perfectionist with impossibly high standards. He’s been described as having little patience for people who “don’t get it” and aren’t performing to his expectations. Rick’s coworkers note that he “wears his heart on his sleeve—both a strength and a weakness.” They appreciate his drive and intelligence, but they also observe that “he holds things in and seems stressed out a lot” and that he’s “had a few outbursts” that have resulted in high turnover among his team.

To improve his reputation Rick needed to better regulate his emotions, either before they emerge or when he’s in the thrall of the moment. When he feels people are falling short of the standards he has set, rather than driving them away with emotional outbursts, he needs to provide them with opportunities to learn and improve.

Lacking impulse control under stress can lead to all kinds of undesirable consequences. Consider LeBron James, one of the best basketball players in NBA history. James is physically gifted, intelligent both on and off the court, and possessed of an incredible work ethic: This is an athlete who wants to win. Why, then, would he risk injury by punching a whiteboard following a close loss in Game 1 of the NBA finals against Golden State? “I was very emotional, for a lot of different reasons,” he said after his team eventually lost the finals. A win in that first game would have buoyed the underdog Cleveland Cavaliers; instead, the loss deflated them. “I had emotions on how the game was taken away from us,” he explained. “Emotions got the best of me, and I pretty much played the last three games with a broken hand.”

“Emotions got the best of me”: There it is, “emotion as flood,” drowning out all sense.

We do know, of course, that emotions aren’t inherently bad, even if we want to occasionally punch a whiteboard, literally or metaphorically. After all, passion is emotion, and passion is what got James to the NBA finals. It’s usually not raw ability, technique, or skill that wins in overtime when everyone is tired and everything is on the line. It’s the heat of passion. The trick is to control those passions, those powerful emotions, channeling them into only productive uses, and this is as true in the boardroom as on the basketball court.

How Emotions Affect the Body and the Brain

You’ve been there before. You walk into a room full of people, and before you know it, your body registers all kinds of emotions: You blush, your heart beats faster, your muscles tighten, and your jaw clenches in anticipation. In anticipation of what, though? Why did your body just switch to fight-flight-or-freeze mode? The answer: Because your body knows something’s up, and those physiological changes, putting you on high alert, are precisely what kept our cave-dwelling ancestors alive in potentially dangerous situations. If they had remained calm and spent leisurely moments pondering whether that rustling grass signaled a curious lion or just a gentle breeze, they could easily have selected themselves right out of the gene pool. Instead, the hair on the back of their necks told them it was time to make a quick exit.

Consider it your hardwired personal alarm system—the body’s reaction to perceived danger. Unfortunately, this ancient system kicks in just as efficiently in today’s corporate jungle, during high-stakes presentations, say, or an important status update to the executive committee, or the introduction to your new boss. And if you tend to freeze, fight, or, God forbid, run, in those situations it’s likely that you might get deselected from the high-potential pool, or worse.

Unfortunately, in our highly competitive work environments, the threats to our psychological safety just keep coming—and that can be bad for your physical health. Monash University senior lecturer Dr. Craig Hassad notes that there’s a biological cascade effect when your body enters high alert. Your adrenaline surges, leading to an increased heart rate and blood pressure and faster breathing. You sweat more, as your body’s biochemical processes are redirected toward instant readiness—the levels of your blood glucose, fats, white blood cells, and inflammatory hormones are all altered, and your gut shuts down. Finally, your blood itself becomes “stickier,” as it anticipates the need for greater clotting power to stop bleeding.

This all sounds dire, but in the short term some of these physical changes can help you meet various modern threats. An increase in adrenaline, for example, can enable you to focus on a niggling problem at work, and a surge in energy can speed you up when you are facing a crucial deadline. As long as you wind down after the threat passes, there’s little risk to your overall health.

Fail to decompress occasionally, however, and health problems can take root. Constant stress and anxiety, putting your body in nonstop flight-or-fight mode, can erode your overall health. It’s like that old Spinal Tap joke: If everything is dialed up to 11, there’s nowhere else to go. And a body dialed to 11 is vulnerable to inflammation, diabetes, atherosclerosis, and bone loss, which can lead to immune system dysfunction, depression, and poor work performance. Even your ability to manage your emotions can be undercut. If everything is an emergency, then you may overreact to small irritations and underreact to truly urgent situations. Yikes!

But health issues aside for a moment, as a leader you need your most sophisticated mental resources in the daily battle for increased market share, revenue, and profit—not to mention the Herculean task of getting people to cooperate and thrive in their jobs. And those mental resources—primarily the prefrontal cortex—can take a serious hit when you’re under constant stress, unable to regulate your emotions.

That prefrontal cortex, located at the front of the brain, is generally agreed to be responsible for what are called the “executive functions”: our ability to plan, reason, use logic, or form memories. Impair the prefrontal cortex, and those functions may be correspondingly impaired.

To give you a bit more insight into this topic, we turn to Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman, who is famous for his research on emotional intelligence. Goleman has focused on how a small section of our midbrain that plays an outsized role in the processing of our emotions, an almond-shaped set of neurons known as the amygdala, can overwhelm the restraints that the frontal regions usually impose on our emotions. The amygdala, he explains, holds a “privileged” position in the brain that allows it to override the functions of other areas—a kind of supervisory dispatcher rerouting normal calls to emergency services.

Goleman calls this process the “amygdala hijack,” which, in a real emergency, is exactly what you want: the aforementioned flight-or-fight response. The amygdala shuts down the more measured functions of the prefrontal cortex to focus all of the brain’s resources to ensure one thing—survival. Goleman himself was building off the work of neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux, who discovered what he called the “neural back alley,” which allows for the hijack. Incoming information that would usually be routed through the prefrontal cortex before being further processed elsewhere in the brain would—in case of a perceived threat—take that neural back-alley shortcut into the amygdala, which is then able to hijack the functions normally performed by the prefrontal cortex.

Again, in a real threat situation this shortcut could save your life, but with all the perceived social threats tickling our amygdala on a regular basis, the shortcut itself could lead to reputational disaster.

One such reputational disaster is “choking”—a phenomenon that you don’t have to be a Wimbledon-ranked tennis pro or champion golfer to experience. One of my clients, Seth, a VP and corporate controller at a global software giant, is a talented executive who had been in consideration to succeed the company’s CFO. But he suffered from this affliction in those crucial moments when he was giving quarterly updates to members of the board. He would lose his train of thought in mid-sentence, stammer his way through financial projections, and draw a blank when presented with a simple question about operating budgets. He’d choke even during the rehearsal of his presentations, while he would be perfectly fine sharing his updates with a colleague in a casual conversation. What was happening?

Sian Beilock, a University of Chicago psychologist and the author of Choke, who’s become an expert on the topic by studying pro athletes, notes: “Choking isn’t just poor performance. It is worse performance than you are capable of precisely because there is a lot on the line.”

What happens is this: The more important the outcome or the bigger the reward, the more likely that some people, like my client Seth, are to scrutinize every aspect of what they’re doing rather than relying on their finely honed skills and knowledge and trusting that they’ll deliver like so many times before. Golfers who choke, according to Beilock, think too much about what they’re doing, whereas those who don’t have mastered the art of tuning out the prefrontal cortex while letting their subconscious take over. And this doesn’t just apply to golfers.

Like the athletes Beilock studied, corporate managers and executives also can have much to lose if a performance goes badly. Just as the Olympic athlete may have just one shot to get into the annals of her sport, the corporate leader in a tough question-and-answer session may not get another chance to show his board that he’s up to a bigger job.

And it isn’t necessarily a hostile audience that causes you to short-circuit either. In the world of sports at least, the friendlier the audience, according to some studies, the more self-conscious some players get. Meanwhile, back at the cubicle farm, this would explain why some people have a harder time giving presentations to well-meaning colleagues than to emotionally distant audiences, such as customers or complete strangers at a conference.

Other insights from research have shown that smarter people, who tend to be able to retain and process more information in their short-term memory than the rest of us, are also more likely to choke under pressure. The theory behind this pattern is that their reliance on their above-average problem-solving abilities puts them off-guard when the amygdala shuts down part of those precious resources to attend to more pressing matters—like an incoming threat in the form of a pointed question or cold stare.

A heightened aversion to loss is another reason why we choke when the stakes are high. Winning is everything to some people, but for those who fear losing much more than they enjoy winning, the mental pressure they feel makes choking more likely.

How can you avoid the potentially career-limiting effects of choking? Beilock recommends distracting yourself by focusing on something meaningless—like the dimples on a golf ball if you’re a golfer—or simply speeding things up to avoid deliberating too much while executing a critical task or performance. In the workplace you might focus on the pattern of someone’s tie or quickly summarize a point you’re making to avoid getting stuck in the minutiae, which could make choking more likely.

While golf ball dimples and the like are good as far as they go, the businessperson intent on burnishing an executive presence needs broader, more widely applicable strategies for emotion regulation, which I will present next.

General Emotion Regulation

It’s often the big event—a job interview, a performance review, an important presentation—that has us wishing we’d be better at managing our emotions and staying calm under pressure. But the fact is, keeping on an even keel day-to-day can help us improve our mood and mindset overall, as well as prepare us for when the big day arrives.

Craig Hassad, who noted the wear and tear of emotions on our bodies and brains, suggests that making ourselves less reactive overall can make it easier for us to deal with intense emotions when they do arise. Various forms of mindfulness, including meditation, may help to “remodel the brain and thereby protect the body from the damaging effects of chronic stress and depression.” Some people might prefer meditation, others might practice yoga, and still others might favor walks in which they pay attention to nothing other than what they see in front of them. Below I suggest some specific exercises to increase mindfulness. The point of such mindfulness is to declutter your senses and give you more direct access to what is happening around you, a process that may help to rewire the brain so that when things get hot, you stay cool.

A few years ago, I was about to board a flight from Denver to Milwaukee, to work with clients over the weekend. As I sat in the waiting area, I became acutely aware of the constant low-level hum of anxiety that I’d been feeling in my gut for months. My mind was constantly racing, and I couldn’t seem to get any reprieve from the onslaught of random thoughts at all hours of the day. I had a few minutes before boarding, and I headed over to a nearby bookstore. I’d heard about Eckhardt Tolle’s The Power of Now and figured I could use the flight to see if this mindfulness thing would work for me. I found a copy, I boarded the plane, and by the time I landed, I’d managed to get through a good chunk of the book. I learned a few things. Most importantly, I learned how to quiet my mind. The instructions in the book were simple, along the lines of “Try to empty your mind of all thoughts. If they come, gently swat them away. Don’t follow them. Just be in the moment.” The idea of just being resonated with me. I found I could ignore any incoming thoughts quite easily. And while I don’t remember all the particulars from Tolle’s book, I also took away the concept of focusing on something I could feel in my body, like my breath, or the pressure of a chair I was sitting in. This would reliably bring me back to the moment whenever my mind was about to power-boost me into the stratosphere.

To be sure, mindfulness takes practice. A wandering mind is a powerful thing. But the act of bringing it back to the moment when it wanders is what actually builds the “muscle” of focus and concentration, ergo mindfulness. I entered my clients’ office that Saturday morning in Milwaukee with a sense of calm and mental clarity I hadn’t felt in a long time.

One easy way to practice everyday mindfulness is to focus on physical sensations. For instance, take a sip of water like you mean it. Feel the temperature of the liquid against your tongue. Notice it filling the cavity of your mouth. Explore the blunt edge of the glass with your lips. Inhale as you drink. See what scent you might notice. You can practice the same focus on the moment by eating a piece of candy or smelling a flower. These are simple actions you can take any time of the day. Caroline Webb, an economist and former McKinsey partner, suggests working “micro-mindfulness” into your schedule: You don’t always have 20 minutes to focus on your breathing, but maybe you could take 10 or even fewer counted breaths while you’re in the middle of a meeting. That pause, however brief, can help to reset your response and infuse your body and mind with a sense of calm.

Mindfulness as both a general practice and a specific tactic in dealing with stress can bring physiological and psychological benefits. It reduces blood pressure and improves memory, according to Hassad, and makes a person less emotionally reactive overall. Social psychologist Matthew Lieberman, who has studied the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, or what he calls the “brain’s braking system,” notes that regular meditation can increase the efficiency of this system, giving you more control over what you feel and how you express it.

Using your mind, then, can help you to keep your brain from short-circuiting—and you from blowing a fuse.

Emotion Regulation Before the Moment

There are times when you can predict, with some confidence, that you are going to lose your cool. You know it either because you’ve been there before or because you recognize emotional triggers that will likely set you off. This may include a dreaded public speaking engagement, a meeting with someone you loathe or fear, or a task you abhor—like doing your taxes or giving someone negative feedback. The common thread here is that while these scenarios may still be in the near or distant future for you, you can predict your emotional response to them. And that’s where the opportunity lies.

James Gross is the go-to scholar for modulating your emotions: Almost every other thinker refers to his and his colleagues’ discussion of “antecedent-focused” and “response-focused” strategies. The first strategy, antecedent-focused, requires you to game out how you’ll manage yourself during a potentially charged situation and involves the following options:

•   Situation selection

•   Situation modification

•   Attentional deployment

•   Cognitive change

These options basically enable you to change the fate of your emotions before you actually experience them, or as Gross puts it, “the modification of future emotional responses.” Here’s what these strategies mean:

Situation selection involves choosing whether to accept or avoid a situation. Simply put, if a situation is likely to make you happy, you’re more likely to opt in; if unhappy, you’ll opt out. If you hate to fly, for example, you might choose to drive or take the train. On a more work-related note, if the thought of presenting the financials at the next board meeting makes you sick to your stomach, you could delegate the task to someone else and thereby remove yourself from the situation. However, and Gross echoes this in one of his papers, avoidance may not be an adaptive strategy if presenting the financials is part of your job. There’s only so much sidestepping you can do before someone calls you out on it.

Situation modification is the emotion-regulation strategy you may use when you’re unable to avoid a stressful situation. In such a case you seek to alter some aspect of the situation—the environment or the task itself—in order to make it more manageable.

For example, people often freeze up at the thought of a big project. One way to modify this daunting situation is to break the one big project down into multiple smaller projects. For example, writers don’t write an entire book at one go; they work paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, section by section. Similarly, you can split a complex presentation into its different components, such as introduction, closing, key points, charts, graphs, and videos, and tackle them one by one.

If, as in our earlier example of the financial presentation, your fear is public speaking, a possible modification would be to present the financials sitting down, as opposed to standing up in front of everyone. This would transform the presentation from a speech into a conversation.

Changing the environment is another way to modify a situation. If you’ve been dreading giving someone negative feedback in a performance review, take the meeting out of your office and into the coffee shop. The feedback is still there, but instead of feeling queasy about the power differential that is obvious in your office, and that may hamper a productive dialogue, you’re blunting that feeling by relocating to a more power-neutral environment for this important conversation.

Attentional deployment refers to how we use our focus—what we choose to pay attention to. In the financials presentation example, you may focus not on the ever-frowning curmudgeon on the board, but on the more approachable members. Please note that I’m not recommending that you ignore your tougher audience—that wouldn’t be wise—but rather to inhibit your limbic system from going haywire due to your outsized focus on the skeptics in your audience. You still must know your stuff and make your case to the critics, but by keeping your cool you preserve your most sophisticated mental resources for the pointed questions that come flying in your direction.

Cognitive change involves reinterpreting how you think about a situation. This can take the form of “reappraisal,” or reframing a situation to change its emotional impact on you.

Writer and advertising professional Jenny Cooper offers one example of how reappraisal can lead to change. She wrote in Slate about her workplace anxiety and how it led her to frequently interrupt and correct her coworkers whenever they were giving presentations. She recognized that this behavior “was coming from a fear that my manager thought my new teammates were more knowledgeable than I am.” Cooper subsequently challenged her assumption and considered whether this was true, decided there was no evidence to support this fear, and as a result “started pausing before each meeting to remind myself I had nothing to prove.” She reframed the situation from one in which she was on trial to one that was more collaborative and where others’ knowledge did not cancel out her own.

Other forms of cognitive change for emotion regulation include what Columbia University professor of psychology Kevin Ochsner calls the adoption of an “acceptance and allowance perspective” (recognizing that “this too shall pass”). There’s also “distancing,” a strategy in which you “imagine yourself experiencing an event not in the first person but in the third person.” For instance, in anticipation of a difficult conversation, you might imagine the scene where you see yourself sitting across from your fellow interlocutor, as if you were the proverbial fly on the wall. And you’d want to observe what’s happening in a dispassionate way, without judgment. This creating of emotional distance has been shown to lower the heat in people’s emotional response. And if you took the acceptance perspective that Ochsner suggests, you would simply square your shoulders and say, “All right, I’m going to get this done and move on with life.”

Researcher Natali Moytal and her colleagues Avishai Henik and Gideon Anholt suggest one refinement to Gross’s model: They would add emotion recognition as another option to Gross’s list. They note that “labeling,” in which a person literally names an emotion as it arises, is a conscious process of emotion recognition for “dealing with highly intense emotional situations.” Say, for instance, your boss is angry with you about a mistake, and you expect him to call you out in a team meeting for it, as is his habit with anyone in the doghouse. The emotion you expect to feel at that meeting is embarrassment and humiliation, especially with your peers looking on sympathetically. In this case it can help to consciously say to yourself beforehand, “Calling me out like that in front of my peers will make me feel embarrassed and angry.” As simple as it sounds, this labeling of the emotion alone has been shown by research to weaken its intensity. And while I always tell my clients this labeling won’t fully solve their problems, it does enable them to keep their wits and consider a more reasoned response than just to shoot an insult right back at their boss.

Labeling can also make cognitive change more effective. For instance, after regaining your self-composure, you might then reappraise your boss’s emotional outburst not as evidence of his disdain for you (or incompetence on your part) but as a sign that he’s under intense pressure himself to deliver on business objectives in light of a crucial deadline.

These various strategies for reining in your emotions can be combined in different ways. Danish sociologist Anette Prehn, for example, adapts the label-and-reappraisal strategy to her “Framestorm” method of emotional regulation, which I’ve used quite successfully with my own coaching clients. Prehn notes that our emotional experiences echo and reinforce one another in our brain, which, if those experiences are bad, can make new situations even worse—a negative neurological and emotional feedback loop.

Let’s say, for example, that the last major presentation you gave was an unmitigated disaster. The PowerPoint projector kept switching off, the battery in the remote died, you stammered your way through the Q&A session, and to top it all off, you referred to your client by the wrong name. As a consequence, the idea of presenting anything ever again fills you with dread. Now, you do give smaller presentations here and there, and they go fine, but the higher the stakes, the more anxious you get.

In order to pull yourself out of this emotional feedback loop, you need first to recognize that you’re in it. Once you realize this, Prehn recommends the Framestorm, which consists of three steps:

1.   Ask calibrating questions. What is my current view of this situation? What emotional reaction is triggered because of it? Does my current framing get me closer to my goals? Do I want my current frame to become reality? Do I feel good about the current frame?

2.   Start the Framestorm. Pepper your current negative frame with an exhaustive list of questions, from the substantive to the silly. These can range from asking yourself what benefits you could get from the current situation, what someone else might find positive about the situation, and how your mentor or a role model would view this situation, all the way to what your first grade teacher or your mom would think of this. Then, Prehn recommends that you come up with 15 to 30 alternative frames, however out-there they may seem, to break the hold that the anxiety-inducing frame has on you and to give yourself as many options as possible. The point of these questions and alternative frames is to “pause and disturb” the automatic connections our brains make by guiding our focus away from the worst-case scenario to perspectives that are either neutral or positive, and just as plausible as the negative conclusions we jumped to.

An example: Maria was a high-potential manager at a U.S.-based multinational IT company, with direct reports of different generations, from baby boomers to generation Z. Maria, herself a millennial, knew that an important part of her job was to provide regular performance feedback to her team members. But whenever the time came for a conversation where she’d have to deliver developmental feedback that she perceived as negative, she froze and would either delay the meeting for months or skip it altogether. This was especially the case with the older employees. The more she avoided the difficult conversations, the more anxious she got around her team. The automatic connection her brain made was that the more experienced members of her team wouldn’t respect her if she criticized them and would end up resenting her for thinking she “was better than them.” Maria became so uncomfortable around certain members of her team that her mood suffered and she felt like a failure as a manager.

So after deciding that her current frame about this situation was anything but helpful to her reputation, not to mention team morale and output, Maria tried framestorming. She developed a number of alternative perspectives that would dislodge her from the unproductive emotions attached to her current frame of “They will resent me.” Some of the alternative perspectives that she came up included:

“My team will appreciate my honesty.”

“No team members want to be in the dark about their performance.”

“They are resilient adults who can handle constructive feedback when delivered tactfully.”

“Delivering regular feedback will help me get more comfortable doing it.”

“By not providing certain feedback, I am cheating my team out of the opportunity to grow.”

“We can’t win as a team if we’re not aware of our strengths and weaknesses.”

“I will ask them first so I can get their views on what they need to improve.”

“I have their respect in general, so they will know that my feedback is coming from a good place.”

“These conversations will help me build stronger relationships based on honesty and transparency.”

Maria ended up with 20 to 30 different perspectives, and just by generating them she helped to calm her frayed nerves—nerves that were stressed simply by her original, negative perspective that she’d be resented for providing negative feedback.

3.   Choose your reframing. This is the step in which you prune that mega-list down into something usable and something you feel good about embracing. Choose a couple of the options you generated that make sense to you and on which you can focus in place of your far less productive default frame. Maria decided that a respectful approach to feedback and the genuine intention to develop her team would make it easier to have these conversations as well as enable her to build her executive presence.

Again, the point of this process is to disrupt that negative feedback loop and reroute your response along more productive lines.

Each of the suggested antecedent-focused (before the moment) strategies is meant to change how we experience an emotion, and that, it seems, changes how our brain processes that emotion. So instead of the threatening information taking a shortcut via the neural back alley straight to the amygdala (which hijacks it for its own purposes), it takes the longer route through the frontal regions, which allows for a more modulated response to the situation.

Lieberman, for example, cites a number of studies demonstrating that the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in a variety of forms of self-control, including emotional self-control. These studies, he explains, “suggest that each time we engage in self-control we are activating a system that might cause several kinds of self-control simultaneously.” In fact, exercising any form of self-control can activate the brakes on the whole system, thus slowing down your emotional response.

A number of other scholars, looking at MRI studies, have noted that deployment and reappraisal strategies are particularly correlated with higher frontal lobe activation and lower amygdala activation—that is, with greater emotional regulation. In fact, in terms of tamping down on an overactive amygdala, the various forms of cognitive reappraisal appear to be quite effective in regulating emotion. As Gross and his colleagues note, “Our findings suggest that everyday use of reappraisal is related to greater experience of positive emotion and lesser experience of negative emotion.” Those who make use of reappraisal “also have closer relationships with their friends and are better liked than individuals using reappraisal less frequently,” are also less prone to depression, and are “more satisfied with their lives and more optimistic.” Adding the labeling strategy to the process to increase emotion recognition appears to activate the brain’s braking system, which can further boost the power of reappraisal.

In short, taking charge of your emotional response to a situation gives you some control over your brain—which in turn gives you control over the situation itself.

Emotion Regulation in the Moment

Regulating emotion in the moment, which Gross calls “response-focused” regulation, is often more difficult than the antecedent-focused methods, not least because you are attempting to manage both the experience and the expression of the emotion simultaneously. It’s one thing to game out in your head how you’re going to act in a situation; it’s quite another to actually go through it. Unfortunately, angry customers don’t always announce themselves before venting their frustrations at whoever will listen; nor do meetings with colleagues always go as planned. An offhand comment that inflames dormant feelings, an ambush accusation that rattles the nerves—it’s situations like these when response-focused strategies can keep your emotions in.

Conveniently, the strategies that work for in-the-moment situations are mostly the same as the ones described for antecedent-focused situations, just with a little adaptation. One response-focused technique that works particularly well is time delay, or trying to outwait whatever emotion pops up. Social psychologist Lerner and her colleagues note that this is a remarkably effective strategy—even a 10-minute delay between experiencing an emotion and acting on it can change the emotion itself. I personally don’t believe you need even 10 minutes, however. When you find yourself in the throes of a strong emotion but stay completely aware of what is happening and consciously observe the abating of the hormonal rush, you may find yourself in calmer waters much sooner. Try it the next time someone cuts you off in traffic. Try to follow the entire process, from the generation of your emotion to the moment you calm down. Be intensely curious about perceiving every sensation during every stage of the emotional response—emotion recognition is part of the time-delay strategy. Instead of focusing on the other driver with grimaces and outraged gestures, notice the physiological effects that the mix of fear and anger have on your body and brain, and try to closely discern when the feeling subsides. You’ll find that you can quickly regain the ability to think clearly, not to mention make better choices, than if you weren’t consciously observing this process.

Harvard-trained brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor talks about waiting out the rush of chemicals in her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey: “Once triggered, the chemical released by my brain surges through my body and I have a physiological experience. Within 90 seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood and my automatic response is over. If, however, I remain angry after those 90 seconds have passed, then it is because I have chosen to let that circuit continue to run.”

And this too is an important point: Unless you are in a life-and-death situation where fight or flight makes sense—boardroom presentations don’t count—wait until the physiological reaction has subsided, and realize that if you still feel the need to scratch that emotional itch, say, to slap back at someone who has insulted you, it is because you want to, not because your emotions carried you away. To help with this calming behavioral pause, you can use a variation of Webb’s “micro-mindfulness” technique by taking a few deep breaths. (The breathing-out part is more important than the breathing-in part.)

Lieberman and Moytal highlight labeling—the “emotion-recognition” strategy described above as useful for antecedent-focused situations—as another way to switch your emotions to a lower gear, as in “I’m being challenged in front of my peers, and this is causing me to feel embarrassed.” This emotion-recognition strategy can also help you to deal with the long shadow cast by incidental emotions, those unrelated joys and irritations that intrude on a current situation. Lerner and her colleagues note, for example, that people who can identify these emotional leftovers are less prone to be influenced by them.

The ability to detect these leftovers can be especially useful when it comes to triggers, because it is within the leftovers that these triggers—things you overreact to—often lie. Our earlier example involved the irritation you feel at the packed train or highway, the slow elevator, the sticky drawer, so that when the meeting doesn’t start on time, you start huffing and snorting over the waste of time. These “leftover” triggers are like a series of small pokes that make you more and more sensitive to the next small poke.

But sometimes those small earlier pokes are not necessary. You may be in a good mood or neutral mood and be fully triggered by a comment or action that taps into something deeper in your past. Delee Fromm identifies a number of different types of triggers that can occur during negotiations; if the other side is being dismissive, and you are sensitive to that kind of attitude due to something in your past, it may be all the trigger you need. As a regulation technique, if you can identify what sets you off, then you can dial it back down—whether by taking a break, addressing your concerns directly with the other party, or adjusting your own negotiating stance.

In addition to recognizing triggers, NeuroLeadership Institute founder David Rock recommends both perspective-shifting and increased focus. Ochsner, too, includes perspective-shifting (“distancing”) as part of the process of cognitive reappraisal, and Prehn uses this in the second step of her Framestorm. But Rock notes that this can be used in real time as a way to step out of the moment in order to grasp the big picture: “Practice seeing things from completely different points of view regularly so that you literally build your switch function.” And like so many others, he suggests that you learn how to focus better through mindfulness.

Finally, let’s look at a regulatory strategy that’s been proved over and over not to work: suppression. Trying to put a lid on your boiling emotions can actually make them boil more, as well as make it more difficult to figure out why you got so upset in the first place. Kevin Ochsner cites a study in which one person’s attempt at suppression during a conversation made him more distracted (the person was trying to control his expression while also keeping up with the conversation) and made his blood pressure go up—and his partner’s, too. So trying to pave over your own feelings can make both you and those around you even more emotional. That’s not something you want in an already heated debate at work. In evidence, Ochsner points to work by Gross et al., which shows that suppression can lead to an increase in amygdala activity—precisely that area of the brain that you want to keep firmly in check.

More ominously, suppression has long-term effects on your state of mind. Gross and his colleagues point to evidence that those who deny their emotions have fewer positive and more negative emotional experiences, higher rates of depressive symptoms, and lower levels of social and emotional support. Those who deny their emotions are effectively denying a part of themselves, which can lead to a downward spiral marked by increased feelings of inauthenticity, greater avoidance of others, and overall lower life satisfaction.

So the research is clear, and everyday life is our laboratory for practice. Whether we use before-the-moment strategies to keep us from experiencing unhelpful emotions in certain situations, or in the heat of battle we engage in impulse control and regulate our emotions up or down, the resulting perception that we are cool, calm, and collected under pressure can add greatly to our perceived executive presence.

In the next chapter you’ll learn various strategies to improve your social intelligence in order to foster more fulfilling and productive relationships with everyone around you. This is another crucial way to boost your perceived executive presence.