Rise Above the Issues so that you can see the entire horizon and the issues will seem smaller and easier to resolve.

To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it. — Michael Korda

How many times has someone or something made you so angry that you feel like you are going to explode? It happens to me on a regular basis, sometimes it makes me so angry that I cannot stop thinking about it. I remember one incident that made me so angry that I fumed about it repeatedly over an entire week-long vacation with my family. Clearly, I let this get the best of me and needed to follow my own advice, “Rise above the issue”. In the end it was easily resolved, but I put way too much energy into being angry about the the issue compared to what it took to resolve it.

That was just one example for me. How about you? How many times has something at work or at home (or a combination) made you so angry you just start thinking of all of the ways to respond or get back at someone and just kept thinking about it over and over again? It happens to all of us and it drains our energy as we pour emotion into the issue.

The good news and bad news is that we respond by getting angry when things don’t go our way because we care about the topic, issue or outcome. If we didn’t care we wouldn’t think twice about it. When our emotions kick in to this level it is usually because it either impacts us directly, or is something we care deeply about, even if we didn’t realize we cared that much. Even if it doesn’t directly impact us even the idea that the outcome didn’t go the way we wanted and may require additional energy to get it back on track may set off this reaction.

The good news is if we care enough to have this reaction, we are most likely going to resolve the issue. The challenge is that it causes us to wear ourselves out burning emotional energy on something that we’ll resolve anyway. What’s worse is when we get that upset we have allowed the issue to engage our emotions over our logic, making it more difficult to find the solution. It often keeps us from providing a rational response and tends to bring us down to a one-on-one battle with the issue.

We are not at our best when we allow our emotions to rule our logic. Emotions tend to narrow our perceptions of options and solutions. Our emotions have the ability to limit our sense of control causing the cycle to become our main focus rather than passing along as just another thing to resolve.

I have found that when I encounter these situations, the best advice I can offer is to “Rise above the issue”. Rising above the issue helps us gain perspective on the issue or event that is troubling us. Just like being in an airplane at altitude, when we look down on the things below us the cars and buildings look much smaller. It’s the same with our challenges. I’ve seen executives throughout my career use this technique and when I am rational enough to use the technique it works for me as well.

Here is the technique:

1) Relax – This too will pass – Let it go, it is what it is. You cannot change what has already happened. Take a deep breath, go for a walk, workout, tell a joke, do what ever you need to do to let it go.

2) Simplify the problem to a single sentence – Instead of the emotional reaction of “I can’t believe the dog did that again. I keep working with him, he gives me those puppy eyes and then as soon as I am not looking he shreds every piece of paper around. I have to turn my homework in tomorrow”. State the problem as “The dog ate my homework”

3) Using the single sentence as a problem statement, engage your usual problem solving skills. The immediate problem is that you need to redo your homework, you can work with dog another time. Now you can focus on the issue and the solution(s).

By rising above the issue we remove the emotion from the equation allowing us to see the issue more clearly. Once we are able to state the problem as a simple statement we’re able to apply our logic and reasoning and chart a course forward.

Reducing the problem to a simple statement is easy to say and at times, hard to do. I hope this helps you along your journey, it continues to help me.

A great resource for more about controlling our emotions is the book by Joyce Meyer, Living Beyond Your Feelings: Controlling Emotions So They Don’t Control you.

Thanks,

Skip Gilbert