Be passionate, not emotional

I spoke yesterday with a rather aggressive attorney about a fairly routine matter. During the course of the conversation he became heated as he struggled to make his point, got flustered and ended in slamming down the phone on me. Thankfully this behavior is rare, but it got me thinking about the role of emotion in business. We hear a lot about following your passion, and certainly that is intimately linked to emotion. No-one wants to work with a Borg-like automaton, so some emotion in our work is important. Enthusiasm and joy are infectious.

Some might say that business should be dispassionate and purely objective. Just focus on the destination, not the journey. And of course, there are times when we need to be analytical and left-brained. But we are emotional by our nature, and we spend much of our lives working. The challenge for us as professionals is to select which emotion is the most appropriate for each situation. We have to learn to separate stimulus from response.

Positive emotions are very welcome in a work environment. It's when you detect negative emotions - anger, frustration, annoyance - in yourself that you need a mental 'red flag' to pop up. When I'm annoyed, I can make poor decisions or do things I later may regret. It's at that point we need to change emotional gear to select the one most appropriate, and to avoid making a mistake or compounding a difficult situation. Just like my 'friend' the attorney did yesterday.