Our long-term success in any major area of life depends upon our ability to effectively manage our emotions, especially the big scary ones.

Emotion management and long-term success

Emotion management is how you react when you get hit with strong emotions (e.g. how do you handle a sudden spike in anxiety?).

What is emotion management?

Most of us don't learn much about emotion. We have pretty crude and unsophisticated emotion management skills which translate to the simple solution of "just ignore it" or "there is a pill for that".

We don't learn about emotion

The key to improving our work and productivity in the long run is to develop better emotion management skills such as realistic self-talk, improved emotional vocabulary, and attention training via mindfulness.

A few observations about emotion management and productivity:<ol><li>Mindlessness or a lack of self-awareness is always Enemy Number 1.</li><li>The mind will always resist challenging work. It doesn’t mean something’s wrong.</li><li>Procrastination provides a quick relief from the uncomfortable emotion generated by critical self-talk.</li><li>Procrastination is a form of impatience that says if you’re not succeeding right away that means it’s hopeless.</li><li>Procrastination isn't a disease or a character flaw, it is a natural answer of our mind as a result of doing challenging work.</li></ol>

How poor emotion management sabotages our productivity

<ol><li>Pay attention to your self-talk: learn to identify your self-talk and try to suppress it.</li><li>Improve your emotional vocabulary: we typically lack a vocabulary for thinking about our emotional states. By expanding it, we can become more self-aware and improve our way of managing emotions.</li><li>Practice mindfulness: train your attention in order to better navigate difficult thoughts and feelings.</li><li>Work with a therapist or coach: try to talk to a specialist in order to get support from an expert in the field.</li></ol>

How to improve your emotion management skills

We all tend to think that the tools we use are the main reason why we tend to be underproductive. However, this is far from the truth and in this article a psychological explanation is given with some interesting takes on emotions.

To improve your productivity, focus on emotion management. This means cultivating emotional intelligence and psychological mastery.

NICK WIGNALL

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