Prepare Your Leadership: Take A Breath

Hello. Hello. Happy Monday, August 12. Hope you're having a great start to your week so far. Just started. Give it about 1 minute people to join. Yeah. So title today is take a breath. I'm a currently I've talked about breathing and emotions and stuff like that. Hi, doctor Susie. Welcome. Talking about taking a breath today and talked about a lot about emotion regulation or in the workplace, it's called emotional labor a lot. Since my research is in there, I currently in school for psychology, organizational psychology.

So it's one of my favorite areas. So first I'll start talking about emotion regulation. And what is emotions. They are powerful. They can navigate our environment. They can enhance our social interactions, our performance at work, our memory, a lot of different things in our lives. But then if they're too intense and we can't manage them properly, they can create problems in these same areas. So James Gross, 1998 famous model of what is emotion regulation? And I'll use some kind of psychology terms here, but I'll be sure to explain what they mean.

James Gross came up with the model of emotion regulation and the different ways that we can regulate emotions. First is called situation selection. And just like the name explains, it's deciding what situations that we could handle. So if we feel that this situation is going to be too much for our emotions, we're just not going to go in there. And that's one way to manage your emotions. Another one is situation modification. Situation modification. So it's similar, but instead you're actually in the situation and you decide, I can't handle this situation anymore.

So maybe it's a tough conversation, and you just say, I need a break. So you get out of the conversation and you take a break, you walk away from it. That's one way to change that, your emotions there and manage them. Another one is called attentional deployment. And so it sounds kind of weird, but it's kind of deploying where your attention deciding where your attention goes to. So if you're in a meeting and, you know, it gets too tense and you're not really in the conversation, but you kind of getting riled up by it, so instead you think about lunch real quick while you're sitting it, it's kind of spacing out, your emotions are getting too much.

So you think about something more pleasant to deal with that. Or if you're in a tough situation, it might be instead of talking about the problem switching and talking about the solution and how we can handle that. So it's kind of switching where your attention is, and then there's response modification. This is kind of like the suppression. It's changing how you appear, but not really how you feel. And the last one has been shown to be the best way to modify your emotions. It can lead to less burnout in the workplace, and that's cognitive change.

So that's things like working with your emotions to change how you view it, change how you view the situation. Now, when it comes to mindfulness in the workplace, Jerry Slutsky out of the University of South Florida had a great article along with some colleagues talking about how mindfulness can affect emotion regulation. And I'll kind of explain this with a scenario. So imagine you're in a meeting, a big meeting, and you spill your coffee. You're going to feel embarrassed and tense, probably. But a mindful approach to this would be to kind of notice those feelings.

As Victor Frankl and George Mumford always, George Mumford always quotes Victor Frankl saying, between stimulus and response, there's space. So in that space, you notice things like your physical sensations and the feelings that arise without quickly trying to suppress these feelings. So by observing these, not judgmentally being objective to your thoughts, you could find that they might pass quickly, or maybe you can find some humor in the situation and make a joke without making it. And to deal with these emotions that arise of being embarrassed.

Some other ways that mindfulness can kind of help in different situations is that mindfulness overall attends to the stimuli. I've talked about having resources before, so it's kind of like your bucket. So mindfulness kind of adds a whole other set of water in your bucket so you don't ever get drained too low. So it kind of helps with all different formats of emotion regulation. Hi, Jules. Welcome. Just almost in time for the activities. So overall, if you're going to work with emotions or kind of get out of a situation, mindfulness overall kind of just puts more water in your bucket so you have more energy to work with emotions.

It draws you towards a stimuli and leads you to be more accepting, even if you can't handle the emotions and you need to suppress them. Mindfulness, later on, when emotions come back, they can help you cope with it better. So mindful individuals choose more adapting coping strategies. So how can we use mindfulness at work or throughout the day? And one technique is just to be more aware of ourselves throughout the, throughout the day, and maybe take a conscious breath every once in a while. Be aware of your breathing.

And breathing is a good indicator if you're feeling too tense, feeling stressed out, if your breathing is getting short taking a moment just to have a quick breath and settle back into whatever you're doing. Be more objective to how you're feeling. Mindfulness can help with that during the work day. And Siegel and Farb up in Canada had some great research looking at how you don't need a big meditation practice. And I've talked about this study before in their research before. You don't need a major meditation practice where you hear all the influencers online talking about how they get an hour of meditation every single day.

But one big step you can take to reduce that cortisol. So that feeling of stress, the fight or flight sensation throughout the day is just taking a conscious breath and noticing where your feet are, for example, or maybe how the seat feels underneath you, or maybe just feel the coffee cup. Practicing the mindfulness technique can reduce cortisol dramatically throughout the day. And so another mindfulness technique is breathing. And if you want to just do a little bit more than a conscious one breath, you could do a quick 15 2nd breathing technique, which is where you breathe in through your nose for 5 seconds, hold for two, and then exhale for eight through your mouth.

So, and then while you're doing that, setting intention where you want to go for your next, where you want to go for your task, what your mindset wants to be. And it's kind of a good reset. Just like you press reset on the wifi router, a good breathing technique can reset your mind and your body for the work and task you're doing. So that is a lot about emotion regulation and mindfulness and then how that can play in part into your day. So I hope you have a great rest of your Monday. We got JC coming on here in a little bit at 1230 any.

But then you can check the whole calendar right here on the app on the little calendar icon. I hope you have a great rest of your Monday and a good rest of your week. I'll talk to you next week. Bye.