Understanding Emotions

Every emotion is information. Anger, fear, joy, sadness, and the rest each carry a signal worth reading about what matters in the moment, and each carries energy that moves you toward action. A moment can leave you steadier than you started or leave you wondering what just happened. What separates the two is whether you can read the signal and direct the energy, rather than letting the energy direct you.

Understanding Emotions builds that skill in the situations you actually live in: the meeting after lunch, the conversation you have been putting off, the message that tightens your shoulders. It covers eleven emotions in turn, showing what each one signals and where its energy can take you, then gives you a set of worksheets for turning that understanding into a practice. A four-step process and a simple feedback loop sit at the center, helping you slow the jump from trigger to reaction down into something you can see and change.

Grounded in research on emotional intelligence and the neuroscience of emotion, and shaped by years of work with leaders and teams, this book treats emotional skill as something you develop, not something you are born with. Emotional skill grows in four areas:

• Put it to work right away, in the heated moment, the hard conversation, the meeting that did not go as planned.
• Build a reliable practice you can return to, one steady habit at a time.
• Understand what is actually happening when an emotion moves you, and why.
• Strengthen how you connect with the people who matter, at work and at home.

We either learn to make emotions useful companions or they simply unconsciously control all we do. There is no "taking emotions out of" situations or interactions; the opportunity is to identify, know, and leverage the energy emotions give us for individual effectiveness and well-being.