Self-Management and How to Manage Our Emotions

What is self-management?

Why do we show up for work when we don’t want to go? Why don’t we eat cake for breakfast and eat some healthy but less delicious food? The answer is self-management, an individual’s ability to self-regulate and gain a sense of control over one’s behaviour and life.

In the context of psychology, psychologists divide the term self-management into two smaller concept areas: behavioural self-management and emotional self-management.

Behavioural self-management

“The ability to act in your long-term best interest, consistent with your deepest values” (Stosny 2011). In other words, it allows us to feel one way but initiate self-regulatory efforts in order to achieve personal goals. For instance, we might have felt reluctant to get up and go to work in the morning but convinced ourselves to do it anyway after remembering our goals (e.g. mortgage, basic needs, pay raise, promotion).

Emotional self-management

It involves control of or influence over our emotions. If we have experienced moments when we felt angry but managed to calm ourselves down, we displayed effective emotional self-regulation.

Definitions of self-management

Definitions of self-management are many. Mayer and Salovey (2018) stated that self-management is the ability to track our feelings, distinguish between emotions, and call on this knowledge to manage emotions. Goleman (2020) defines self-management as the ability to think before acting, regulate emotions and actions – redirect challenging thoughts or moods. While Andrea Bell (2016) has a straightforward definition of self-regulation: “It’s control of oneself by oneself.”

There are a variety of terms used to explain self-management including:

• Self-regulation

• Self-discipline

• Cognitive control

• Emotional management

• Emotionally adjusted

• Emotional maturity

How self-management develop

The ability to self-manage as an adult has roots in our childhood. Children develop emotional self-regulation under the guidance of caregivers and peers. Very young children will find it difficult to deal with their emotions. They may throw tantrums when things do not go their way. If adults help them name their feelings and rationalize with them, children gradually learn to appraise situations by themselves and make more reasonable behaviour choices.

Longitudinal studies and evidence have shown that individuals who have strong self-control in early childhood are more successful in school and are more likely to have successful careers and harmonious family relationships in adulthood. As a result, self-control at an early age has positive effects on preschool and middle-childhood academic, social and emotional stability.

Qualities of self-management

In general, people who are adept at self-management tend to be able to:

• Act in accordance with their values

• Calm themselves when upset

• Cheer themselves when feeling down

• Maintain open communication

• Persist through difficult times

• Put forth their best effort

• Remain flexible and adapt to situations

• See the good in others

• Stay clear about their intentions

• Take control of situations when necessary

• View challenges as opportunities

Self-management and well-being

Self-awareness will become useless without an equally important skill: self-management. That being said, self-management is an important component of emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence is strongly related to well-being.

There are tons of evidence suggesting that those who choose to address their feelings head-on and display self-regulation in everyday behaviour report greater well-being, enhanced life satisfaction, feeling less lonely and improved psychological health overall (Verzeletti, Zammuner, Galli, Agnoli, & Duregger 2016).

In contrast, an adult with poor self-management skills may lack self-confidence and self-esteem, have trouble handling stress and frustration. In more severe cases, it can lead to being diagnosed with mental health conditions.

Self-management and effective leadership

In the workplace, leaders need both self-awareness and self-management to be effective. That means they need to have a good understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, feelings, thoughts and values – how they affect people around them and choose to act on behavioural choices that are believed to be the most productive.

In practice, even a highly self-aware leader still finds it hard to make self-management. It’s because behaving in a way that contradicts our habits can make us feel uncomfortable, unskilful or even unpleasant. With a habit, our brain creates a shortcut and moves from stimulus to response without thinking, saving both time and effort. The auto-pilot efficiency of habits is what makes them so hard to change.

Despite all these barriers, self-management is a learnable skill. To become as effective as possible, leaders need to move beyond self-awareness to self-management. Starting with recognising current situations, considering alternative options and then putting in the hard work required to resist what may be most familiar or comfortable.

Self-management strategies

In the book Emotional Intelligence 2.0 co-written by Dr Travis Bradberry & Dr Jean Greaves (2009), the authors introduced 17 strategies to improve self-management, as follows:

Breath right

If we breathe in short, we aren’t giving our body the full amount of oxygen it needs. Shallow breaths will deprive our brain of oxygen, which leads to poor concentration, forgetfulness, mood swings, restlessness, depression and anxious thoughts. Focus on taking slow deep breaths, we’ll notice the effects as being calmer, more relaxed and having a clear head almost immediately.

Create an emotion and reason list

Our emotions will create trouble if we let them lead us around without any reason, but our rational thoughts can be just as problematic if we try to operate like a robot that is without feeling. Creating an emotional and reason list can help clear our minds and see whether we should allow the emotional or rational sides of our thinking to have more say in our decisions.

Make our goals public

Much of self-management comes down to motivation, and we can use the expectations that other people have of us as a powerful force to get us up and create an incredible sense of accountability. If we have a goal that we are setting out to accomplish, clearly tell other people, either friends, family or a spouse.

Count to ten

When we feel ourselves getting frustrated or angry, stop ourselves by taking a deep breath and counting from one to ten. The counting and breathing will relax us and stop us from taking rash action long enough to regain our composure and develop a clearer and more rational perspective of the situation.

Sleep on it

Giving ourselves extra time, either days, weeks or months to digest the challenging situation before moving forward is all we need to stay in control. Time helps us to self-manage because it brings clarity and perspective to the thousands of thoughts, it also helps us to gain control of emotions and while we’re waiting, things may surface that make our decision much easier to make.

Talk to a skilled self-manager

One of the most powerful ways to learn self-management is to seek out a master self-manager and ask what tactics he or she relies on to self-manage so well. We will learn some unique and effective ways to manage ourselves that we would have otherwise never been exposed to.

Smile and laugh more

When we’re stuck on a frustrating or distressing thought, forcing ourselves to smile counteracts the negative emotional state. While smiling and laughter won’t eliminate feeling down and they shouldn’t, a legitimate smile (where our cheeks push upward) will trick our mind into feeling the mood we need for the moment.

Set aside some time in our day for problem-solving

Spend about a 15-minute period each day where we turn off our phone, walk away from our computer and take time to just think, is a great way to ensure our decisions aren’t muddled by our emotions.

Take control of our self-talk

We all have an internal voice inside our head that affects our perception of things. By learning to control our self-talk, we can keep ourselves focused on the right things and manage our emotions more effectively. Some of the tricks include:

• Turn I always or I never into just this time or sometimes.

• Replace judgmental statements like I’m an idiot with factual ones like I made a mistake.

• Accept responsibility for our actions, but not when we carry someone else’s burden.

Take control of our self-talk

We all have an internal voice inside our head that affects our perception of things. By learning to control our self-talk, we can keep ourselves focused on the right things and manage our emotions more effectively. Some of the tricks include:

• Turn I always or I never into just this time or sometimes.

• Replace judgmental statements like I’m an idiot with factual ones like I made a mistake.

• Accept responsibility for our actions, but not when we carry someone else’s burden.

Visualise ourselves succeeding

Learning to self-manage well requires a lot of practice. Visualising ourselves managing our emotions and behaviours effectively is a great way to practice new skills and make them into habits. Do it in a room that’s free from distractions, picturing ourselves acting the way we’d like to (e.g. calming voice and without losing our control etc.) and allow ourselves to feel the satisfaction and positive emotions that come from this.

Clean up our sleep hygiene

Getting more sleep at night will probably help us manage ourselves better, but not necessarily. The critical factor for an alert focused, and balanced mind is the quality of our sleep.

For good sleep hygiene, some of the following steps can help:

• Get 20 minutes of morning sunlight

• Turn off the computer at least two hours before bedtime

• Keep our bed for sleeping only

• Avoid caffeine, especially in the p.m

Focus our attention on our freedoms, rather than our limitations

Every time when we find ourselves thinking that we have no control, take a closer look at how we are reacting to the situation itself. Rather than focusing on restrictions that trigger negative feelings, we must take accountability for what we have control over and focus our energy on remaining flexible and open-minded despite the situation.

Stay synchronised

Synchrony is a term to describe our body language that matches the emotions being expressed. In life, we will have moments where our emotions are getting the better of us.  To keep ourselves synchronised, direct our attention away from our emotions and onto the task at hand.

Speak to someone who is not emotionally invested in our problem

It can be such a relief to talk to someone when we are feeling confused or emotional about a situation. Their unique perspective will help us to see things differently, and expand our emotions. Avoid someone who may be personally affected by the situation or simply agree with us. While their support feels good, it keeps us from seeing the entire picture.

Learn a valuable lesson from everyone we encounter

Approaching everyone we encounter as though they have something valuable we can learn from, either their feedback or just from how they are behaving. This is the best way to remain flexible, open-minded and much less stressed.

Put a mental recharge into our schedule

Taking time out of our day to get our blood flowing and keep our body healthy is giving our mind an important break – the most significant rest and recharge we can give our brain beyond sleep. It’s important to schedule these maintenance activities into our calendar at the start of the week, rather than waiting to see if we can the time to squeeze things into our day.

Put a mental recharge into our schedule

Taking time out of our day to get our blood flowing and keep our body healthy is giving our mind an important break – the most significant rest and recharge we can give our brain beyond sleep. It’s important to schedule these maintenance activities into our calendar at the start of the week, rather than waiting to see if we can the time to squeeze things into our day.

Accept that change is just around the corner

Admitting to ourselves that change will come at our least expectations and understanding our options if changes occur will prevent us from getting bogged down by strong emotions like shock, surprise, fear and disappointment when changes actually happen. Set aside a small amount of time either every week or every other week to create a list of important changes that we think could possibly happen. Write down all the possible actions we will take in those scenarios.

References

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Bradberry, T and Greaves, J 2009, Emotional intelligence 2.0, San Diego, CA: TalentSmart.

Bell, A.L 2016, ‘What is self-regulation and why is it so important?’, Good Therapy Blog, available at <https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/what-is-self-regulation-why-is-it-so-important-0928165>.

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