STOP letting emotions influence behavior

so I want to share a topic that is super top of mind for me because it's something that I experienced in my own business a portfolio CEO brought up to me the other day how people use emotions to influence others behaviors what I used to think for example was that emotions were a reaction to something that I did but what I have learned over time in studying more of behavior science and psychology is that a lot of people actually use emotions to get something right so if somebody comes to you and they're angry or somebody

comes to you and they're sad it's it's not necessar that you made them angry or sad but they know that if they act angry or they act sad they're going to get something they want from you because you going to respond in a certain way that they've probably seen works in the past and so an example of this is I was speaking with one of our portfolio CEOs and she was telling me that one of her teammates constantly is coming to her stressed and anxious and talking about how anxious she is and I said well

what do you do when she acts anxious and when she acts stressed and she said well I usually ask her what's on her plate and then I take some of it off of her plate what she's doing when she takes things off of her plate is she's actually reinforcing the anxiety and this is something that I didn't understand for the longest time I used to think that I caused people's emotions but what I've learned is that often the emotion actually comes first because of Behavioral conditioning so a lot of times what people come into your

company and they act mad or they act stressed they act a certain way because they've seen that in the past when they act that way with their boss something happened and so so they've been reinforced to realize that something has happened and so this example that I'm giving you is actually a very common one the reason for this guys is and this is something that I've had to learn myself and I've had to teach my team and I constantly recognizing in people a lot of people are never taught how to actually use their words to

get what they want and how to be clear and direct and so instead of using their words they act on their emotions and they display emotions in hopes that somebody is going to do the thing that they've seen people do in the past asked when they display that emotion so I learned that years ago when me and Alex would be at odds meaning he saw something one way I saw something one way and I would get incredibly frustrated what I would do a lot of the times is I would just end up feeling myself crying

and it's not like I would yell or I would scream at him or I would do anything but we'd be having a conversation I would just start crying what I recognized was that I was crying then he would get angry at the fact that I cried and then when he got angry I would shut down and then what would happen is that normally one of us would fold at that point so we came to no compromise it was just like either I fold or he folds and usually I would fold because I would shut down

and be like it let's just do whatever you want and this was about four years ago that I recognized that that was a pattern in me and once I understood that I wasn't crying because of the conversation I was crying because I lacked the skill of understanding how to properly communicate and so the only way that I knew how to resolve this situation was to cry which led to him being angry which led to the shutdown so once I understood this I made it a concerted effort that I didn't want to cry and it's not

that I want to cry because it didn't feel the urge to cry I did feel the urge to cry because I conditioned myself I just told myself no matter how hard like truly I said this I was like no matter how much you want to cry you don't cry and if you feel like you're going to and it's like it's just starting to come out then leave the room and the funny thing is is that as soon as I removed this tool that I had in my tool belt I had to learn other ones and

so what I realized is that I lacked the skill of properly conveying my point of view to my husband and to my business partner and I lacked the ability to communicate it in a way that he understood what I was saying and so what that looked like is for the most part when I'm speaking with my team uh and they're in the weeds with me I don't have to present a ton of data to them because they are know the data because we're all reviewing it together every day and every week Alex is not in

the week to week and he doesn't have access to all that data for the most part because he's not in all those conversations he's much more removed and so I was making arguments to him with zero data to present so what I realized is that one he only cares about logic and what will work logically he has no appeal to emotion and he has no appeal to an argument that does not have data to support it and so so what I was forced to do once I was taken away once I took away my own

crutch of crying is that I had to use data to present to him and so I taught myself how to present an argument to him in a way that would convey him and what I realized is he likes data he likes logic and he likes to be sold just like anybody else on an idea and so once I realized those things I realized that it wasn't that I was actually upset about the situation it was that I lacked a skill and so a lot of the times when we have a large emotional reaction to something

it's not actually the emotion it's that we lack a skill and then we substitute with acting out in hopes that we're going to get somebody else to react in the way we want so what I wanted to do is give you guys three examples that I notice in the workplace specifically with my own teams that I've run with portfolio companies and just that people have brought up to me and I want to give these to you because if you're a leader and honestly this could apply to even if you don't have a business just friends

spouses whatever these are three situations that I see come up quite often where people are using emotion because they lack of skill and if you recognize that you can help that person get that skill and so I want to help you spot that so the first one is acting cranky or pissy when you have a lot of work so there's certain people that what I observe is that every time they have and these are usually people that have lower amounts of work but anytime their workload increases their mood drops they start to act cranky they

start to act pissy and it makes no sense to me because I'm like well these people don't have that like you know these are people that don't have a ton of work and so they usually have excess capacity and what I realized is I had two people in gym launch that did this consistently it was like every time I asked them to do something they'd be like oh okay yeah like there would be a visceral reaction and I'm like dude I'm asking you to do your job like this isn't like me asking you to go

do somebody else's job like this is the basic stuff I hired you for but what I recognized that both of them were just always had these viscal reactions anytime I ask them do work so I realized that they had probably been reinforced in the past by past bosses that when they act cranky or when they act pissy people don't end up giving them more work or people take the work away and so what I told myself is I was like no matter what somebody's reaction is to when I ask them to do something I'm not

going to stop I'm not going to say oh I'm going to give you a break because I don't want to reinforce that acting cranky or pissy gets you less work in a company one I don't want to feed into that I don't think that's the proper way to communicate and two I don't want to re enforce that behavior so what ends up happening eventually those two people stopped acting cranky all together I remember there was a time where I was on a meeting and one of them I was assigning out tasks and I was like

I'm going to assign him the most amount of tasks I have anybody here and I ended up assigning him the most amount of tasks and ironically he had no reaction because at that point I'd probably put two months of concerted effort into not reacting to his piss and so at that point we had extinguished the behavior he no longer felt like if he acted cranky or pissy that he was going to be able to avoid work and so this is something that a lot of business owners deal with is that you have someone on your

team and they constantly are repelling work and so what I want you to recognize is that you also reinforce that if you stop it it only takes one person in a relationship to change that relationship and so that with you as the boss is your responsibility and now that you're watching this video and you understand that you have that capability by how you respond to their emotions you can do it too you know another situation that is similar to this is like if you have a spouse and say you guys have housework and in the

beginning you're like oh we're each going to do our part of the housework and this is very common for a lot of people in relationships so what happens is that one person I hear this all the time starts acting pissy starts acting cranky and they start procrastinating the housework now why are they doing that is that because they really don't want to do it but the ultimate reason is that they know what happens is that typically the other person picks up the slack and then what happens over time is you've got one person that does

all the chores in the house and the other person has completely escaped it if this doesn't apply to you within an employee context it absolutely can apply to you within a relationship context because people do this in relationships all the time as well they use an emotion to get the other partner to do something and so if you don't want to end up doing all the housework don't let your partner put it on you the second scenario that I see a lot in companies and I've experienced a lot within myself is that people who act

sad or frustrated or down and that is typically an attention-seeking technique and so what I've realized given enough time is that I have had so many times in my companies where somebody has acted really down and I have tried to understand like what's going on what all these things Etc and then I realized why what does this person benefit from acting down from acting sad from acting depressed because we do things when we get more benefit from doing them than not doing them and so the benefit is that you get attention and so I think

there's this quote I heard which was if you have to tell more than three people what's going on you don't want to solve the problem you want attention and this is something that's very common in companies a lot of people have been conditioned that the only way that they can get attention is by acting adversely acting stressed acting sad acting frustrated rather than just communicating hey I would like to spend more time with you let's just pull a real example that many people can relate to how many people's girlfriends cry when you leave home get

upset when you're at work too long get upset when you go out with the boys why do they do that because they would rather you stay home and instead of using their verbal communication skills to say I would love if you just stayed home instead they cry because they've been conditioned by past boyfriends that if they cry you will stay with them and give them the attention and so the same thing go goes for when you have employees and this took me a long time to understand because I would indulge in that behavior and I

would meet with the person you know literally every day I would console them I would stay on late with them you know I remember one time I had an employee who had a call and she would not stop crying and I stayed on until I wanted to say it was like 9:30 p.m. with her because she just wouldn't stop crying and what happened when she was crying what did I do I kept consoling her saying oh my gosh I'm so sorry is everything okay what can we do doing all these things right paying attention to

her and so I was reinforcing that behavior and acting that way and so what a lot of people don't realize is that they keep their employees they keep their spouses they keep their friends stuck in these emotions because they indulge in them with them they reinforce the emotion by behaving in a way that the person wants them to and doesn't have to use their verbal ability to ask for I remember when I was a kid I actually did this myself when I was 14 an incident happened with my mom and she attempted suicide and so

then I had to move in with my dad and when I moved in with my dad I for years had essentially raised myself but during that entire time all I really wanted was attention from somebody I loved when I moved in with my dad there would be days where he would come to my room and I'd be crying and he would sit there with me for hours hours and he would be like what's wrong do you want to talk to me about it and I wouldn't tell him what was wrong it would delay it for

at least 90 minutes or two hours I was delaying it because I wanted to spend time with him and I didn't know how to ask for one-on-one of individual attention without crying because what I knew was that if I cried my dad would spend time with me and he would pay attention to me and I wouldn't have to be downstairs with my step siblings and my stepmom I could actually just get oneon-one time with my dad it wasn't until I remember there was a day when he said listen I'm not going to sit here and

try to figure out why you're crying anymore and he stopped sitting with me when I was crying and I remember I had this moment of realization that I felt sad that he wasn't going to sit with me and then I thought to myself why do I feel sad and I was like because I just want time with my dad what I learned to do was tell my dad I just want to spend time with you like there's been so much that happened there's all these new people in my life they're really great but I just

want to spend time with you you're my dad you're who I've known I would say by the age of you know when I was a a more mature teenager I was able to actually articulate that I would ask my dad to go on walks I would ask if I can go to the store with him I would find ways to get what I wanted without acting out and crying and asking him to sit with me for 3 hours I learned that when I was a teenager a lot of people have never learned that and they're

30 they're 35 they're 40 they're 45 and they're still that kid crying in their room hoping that you'll pay attention to them because they're upset what is the hardest thing to do because if you're like me and you really care about the people on your team but indulging in somebody's negativity it teaches them that in order to get attention they need to display a negative emotion and so you'll get more of those and they'll do it for longer and it'll continue to do it more and more until eventually you do something the second thing is

that that negative emotions are very important and require more attention than positive ones and so what I learned when I understood that my dad stopped indulging in my crying was that he taught me that it's okay ha to cry that negative emotions are not bad and that they're not things that need to be solved and that you need help with I'm not saying that you shouldn't talk to people and you shouldn't seek you know skills and tools to help yourself when you're feeling bad but I'm saying that if you allow them to stop your entire

life to make you less productive to distract you from your goals because you're using them in a way that gets you something you want that ultimately isn't going to lead to the life you want and so what I've had to learn is that a lot of times when somebody's acting incredibly anxious angry or sad sometimes the best thing I can do is just spend the exact same amount of time with them that I would otherwise because what I've learned is that unless that person is asking for help then me indulging in that emotion often doesn't

actually help it actually enables them it enables them to continue using their emotions as a tool to get what they want rather than their words and so the next time that you have somebody whether it's a spouse or whether it's a friend or whether whether it's your employee who is using negative emotions like sadness to get attention remember that you're allowing them to remain with that skill deficit and so the best thing that you can actually do as a leader is teach people how to articulate what they want and need prompt them until they eventually

prompt themselves what I realize that when teammates are inexperienced at asking for help and asking for what they need to get their job done I have to pull from them I have to keep pulling what's keeping you up at night what's preventing you from doing your job where are the constraints I'm pulling pulling pulling pulling because what I know is that less experienced leaders they don't have the skill of pushing things to me and pulling it from me instead I have to pull it from them which is why when you have people who are less

experienced reporting to you it's usually a lot more work and then eventually what happens is if you pull from your team enough eventually they will learn how to push it to you or to pull from you back an example of this is when I have a teammate who's on a meeting and they are not good articulating themselves in a meeting setting what I have to do is in the zoom chat I will private message them and prompt them to speak up I will even say hey I know you mentioned X Y and Z to me

the other day why don't you speak up right now and say that I'm teaching them how to do the push and how to pull from others themselves and then eventually once I've pulled enough they will start to do it without my prompting and so for people that lack the skill of using their words to get what they want this is a great tool to use so the last very common instance of when people use emotions at work is acting angry this is super common actually not amongst people that are like your direct reports but a

lot of bosses use anger to get what they want so an example of this I had a teammate and that teammate lacked the ability to influence others so she was not able to influence her peers with what she was saying and so what would happen is we would have these meetings and she would go on the meetings and say a bunch of words but one it wasn't how she would talk to me in private and it wasn't how she would talk to even other of them in private but in a group setting I'm not sure

if she was nervous or she just lacked the experience and so she would just honestly spew out gibberish and so what would happen is that people would respond to her with like I don't understand why you would say that I don't really understand what you mean can you explain that doesn't really make any sense and then what would happen is she didn't know what to say next and so instead of using her words and formulating an argument or formulating her hypothesis to share with the team she would escalate she would get angry because what did

she want people to do she wanted them to comply and agree with her and so what I watched happen on some of these meetings is that she would escalate and everybody else would fold and even though they didn't understand why she what she said made any sense they would fold because they were scared of her anger and they wanted the anger to stop and so she used anger as a tool to get her subordinates to agree with her and to do their jobs because she lacked the skill of actually persuading people I had another leader

in my my company every time she was stressed she would be stressed about the amount of work that she had because she had this tendency to take on a lot of work uh and overpromise and to do a lot of other people's jobs because maybe she didn't trust them quite a bit and so what would happen is eventually we'd be on a call and someone would ask her for something she was so stressed that instead she would be very short she would distance herself she would basically mentally check out and shut down on the call

and what would happen is that all of a sudden people would not give her work and instead they would say is there anything that we can do is everything okay and so instead of using her words to say hey I have too much on my plate and I just need help she instead would go from stressed to acting cold and distant and then shut down and then it changed the entire tone of the call everyone felt very awkward and then guess what happened though nobody gave her work nobody checked up on the things that she

had that she was working on and nobody was asking her to do more work and so what the anger does is it's a tool to basically scare other people out of doing something that you want them to stop doing so people who lack the skill of persuading or asking people simply to stop or making people aware of how much is on their plate a lot of times they default to anger now here's the thing about all of these three instances they're all coming from the same source which is somebody lacks a communication skill and so

they replace it with an emotion and they use that emotion to manipulate people to do what they want because they've seen it work in the past the only way to break that cycle is to not respond when somebody uses an emotion and only respond when they use their words and to bridge the gap to train them to use their words by asking them questions that prompt them what you'll see with a lot of inexperienced leaders specifically is you're going to have to ask a lot of questions to get to the root of the skill deficit

because they themselves don't even know they just get emotional and they don't know why I wanted to share this video because this is something that I experience on a weekly basis I constantly see it happening I constantly am working on it for myself so that I don't want to use emotions to get people to do things because I want to make sure I have the ability to articulate myself and represent myself well with words and because a lot of people experience it not just in the workplace but outside of work in many ways and it

affects their life not for the better I hope this was useful for you guys it's just something that is very top of mind for me I think about quite often I observe on many meetings and I think is a very useful tool if you're a leader or an aspiring leader or just trying to make your life better