Techniques to Maintain Control Of Your Emotions with Joan Kling, MSEL, PCC

Hello, my friend, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for joining us today. With over 10 million downloads and listeners from more than 180 different countries, it's dedicated listeners just like you who have made Negotiate Anything the number one negotiation podcast in the world. I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator, author, and the proud CEO of of the American Negotiation Institute. Now, before we get into today's insightful conversation, I have a golden opportunity for those of you who recognize the power of negotiation in your professional lives. Have you ever found yourself wishing that you could navigate those high stakes conversations with more confidence? Or perhaps you're looking to empower your team with the art of persuasion and conflict resolution? At the American Negotiation Institute, we've crafted specialized keynotes and workshops tailored for those very needs. We've transformed the negotiation skills of professionals worldwide, and we're eager to do the same for you. We believe the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And our goal is to help you improve your lives and the lives of those around you, one difficult conversation at a time. Don't let another challenging conversation leave you second guessing. Click the link in the description to discover how we can help you find confidence in conflict, negotiate better deals, and have stronger relationships. Because in the world of business, every conversation counts. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Joan, thanks for joining us today.

So excited to be here, honest to God, so excited.

Thank you. We are excited to have you. So how would you get us started? By telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Okay. I'm a. What I call myself is a self leadership coach, which means that I believe all leadership starts with self. If I don't know who I am, how can I relate to other people? And that kind of rolls over into my core values, which are grace, generosity, and gratitude. And grace that I'm imperfect to cut myself a break. To cut you a break because you're imperfect. Generosity to give back what has been so freely given me in life. And gratitude to be thankful for the good and bad in life. Because even the bad has gotten me to be sitting here with you right now.

Definitely. Yes. And this is great, everybody. So quick thing before we get into, like, the real meat of the podcast, Joan's link will be in the description to her, to her coaching, but also to her LinkedIn. Make sure you follow her on LinkedIn because that's how we got connected. Seeing all the awesome content, I was like, okay, we need Some of this, some of these value bombs here. And so we're excited to get this conversation started and we're talking about emotion management. That's something that's come up a lot from the people who connect with me on LinkedIn. People are wanting to know how to manage emotions during difficult conversations. And we've already started to sample this, Joan, because you said it's self leadership. We have to learn how to lead ourselves before trying to lead other people. So I think, think emotion management falls really nicely into this. And so let's paint a picture here as you share like your coaching philosophy and how you work with first time people, managers tell us about that philosophy and what your work looks like before we actually jump into how to actually manage our emotions.

Oh my gosh, I would love that. So here's my coaching philosophy. I turned it into an acronym for pies P I E S. And the P stands for permission to be great is granted. I think in so many areas of our life, Kwame, people just haven't. It sounds like, why should I have to give you permission? But people haven't been given permission to be great to do what they want to do. And it goes back to the voices inside our head that are saying, not you and family and friends and, and the environment and media, whatever is saying, oh, you couldn't do that. How could somebody like you do this? You know, so that's P. The I is imperfection is encouraged. E is for eyes on self. And eyes on self is really important because we're constantly worrying about what other people are doing and we just need to focus on ourselves. How do I want to, how do I want to live my life? Am I the person that I want to be regardless of what other people are going to be? Now listen, I'm going to tell you this is. It's simple, not easy, right? Because we have been living our lives like that. We've been living our lives looking at other people. And because of my age, I've been around for a long time, we didn't have the Internet, now we have the Internet and it's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and the world's getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And so we have so many more people to compare ourselves to ourselves to. And the last one is S for support system. You said you belong to a mastermind. Well, people need support systems, so. And there's so many out there and they have to be honest and closed mouth. You want that to be someone who probably is not in your family and maybe not even in your friend group because sometimes those people will what I say cosign your right. They're either going to say, oh sure you could like I would love to be an astronaut. I would love to go walk on the moon. I can't for the life of me do math or science. So the likelihood of me ever being an astronaut is it's not going to happen. So that's my coaching life philosophy. Pies. Permission to be great is granted. Imperfection is encouraged. Eyes on self and support system creation.

So first of all, I know you know this, but I'll say it out loud, this is great. This is exceptional. First of all, I love pies and now I have another pie that I like. So this is great. And the second thing is I can see how all of these tie in well with just improving in general but also when it comes to emotion management. Right. Because we, we have to kind of give ourselves permission sometimes to do what it takes in terms of empathizing and slowing down. We might say, no, I need to move fast. Move fast. No, I give you the permission to slow down and have this conversation the right way. Right. Imperfection is encouraged. There's no perfect way to have these difficult conversations and there's no perfect way to manage your emotions. If you are, if you're trying to shoot at 100% on this, you will for sure fail. And now you have two emotional challenges. The emotional challenge of the situation and now the emotional challenge of unnecessary judgment that comes from yourself. Eyes on yourself. A lot of times we focus on managing other people's emotions but we don't take the time to think about what it takes to manage our own. So that's perfect too. And then support system. Sometimes I'm so mad I need to talk to somebody else first who is actually going to be a real guide. Like you said, not just co signing on what we're thinking, but also challenging us too so we can approach it in a better place. So this, this ties in really, really nicely with what we're going to talk about today, which is emotion management. So thank you for that. Yeah, this is good. So let's just talk about the need of leaders to manage their emotions. When we think about what it takes to manage emotions, but also the consequences of failing to manage our emotions. Let's just make the case really briefly before we jump into it. Why is it so important for us to understand emotion management?

I would just say teamwork. If you want your team to function and if you don't want to have an ULCER or a heart attack. You have to find a way to make it so that you can not take things so personally and to survive and thrive in the workplace. And when you control your emotions, that includes being vulnerable. Renee Brown talks a lot about vulnerability. So when I'm vulnerable, when I trust someone enough to be vulnerable, those of you that are listening, you're going with your vulnerability. You want it to be with people that you can trust. Your level of trust is the level of my vulnerability. So they see you when you come across as imperfect, imperfect as a boss. That's so reassuring to your people because they say, oh, she or he is not perfect either. So then it loosens up. This maybe it takes a knock off the pedestal. How we, we, we just have been trained that the boss is like up here and we're down here. Then there's a whole other school of thought where, where we're equal. There's nobody that's the same as me that does to. In my opinion, that doesn't really work either because no one is the leader. We need someone to steer the ship. We need someone who's going to step up and take responsibility for what happens or what decisions are made. So I think in another thing in regards to what you said was to stand up for my people.

Absolutely. No, this is great. And one of the things that you talked about was trust. I want to go into this too because trust is such a powerful tool and it's not something that you can just get automatically. In most cases, trust is earned and I would like to tie emotional intelligence and emotion management to trust. How can we use our ability to manage our own emotions as a trust building tool with others? Hello my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better difficult conversations. At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills. Whether it's a keynote for your next event or hands on training for your team, we've got you covered. Don't just negotiate. Master the arts with with the American Negotiation Institute. Click the link in the description to find out more. Elevate, negotiate and succeed.

You know what's interesting? The thing that comes to mind? Back to my eyes on self. You have to first learn to trust your own instincts and your own thoughts, feelings. And again, it goes back to that reptilian brain.

What do You.

What do you call it? You call it the lizard brain that fight, flight or freeze. So sometimes I. You might let someone get away with being 10 minutes late. It's not a big deal. And then all of a sudden, it's a habit. That's a completely different thing. You know, I'm late because I had to take my son to the doctor or the dog got sick, whatever, but now it's a habit. Then I have to trust that feeling in myself that I'm going, wait a second. Now it seems different. And I have to be able to have that conversation with them.

This is great. This is so helpful. I'm taking a ton of notes here, and I think what we have to do is when we're trusting our instinct, we have to get a better understanding of what these emotions mean. Because when we get these emotions, they are signals. They're signals of something that's important to us. For whatever reason, whatever is happening is triggering something. And we know for sure that there's some level of import to that thing. And so, for instance, I might. The emotion might say, kwame, this is bad. Really bad. You should be really upset and be mad, and you should yell at them. It's like, wow, that emotion just told me a lot of stuff there. But the message that I'll get is, I am going to trust that it is important. But then, like the rest of it, we'll leave the rest of those cascading thoughts aside, but just trust, like, hey, there is something there, something that needs to be explored definitely within yourself. Because like you said, we're leading ourselves first. And then once we get clarity within ourselves, then we could approach it with the other people. And I love this framework that you gave, too, because you said, when is a good time to talk? And don't keep secrets. Because a lot of times we inadvertently create more panic and anxiety. That's necessary because we just say, hey, I need to talk to you later today at 4pm and then the whole day, they're dreading. My boss wants to talk to me. Like, about what? Am I getting fired? Like, that's what they always, always go to.

Always. Yeah.

And then I pop into the meeting. I'm like, hey, Joan, just want to say you're doing a great job. And they're like, I was polishing my resume, Kwame.

Exactly.

You know, and the framework is so great because when we're having the conversation, first of all, we're not ambushing them. We're giving them a chance. We're saying, hey, this conversation needs to Be needs to happen. This is what we're going to talk about. When is a good time for you to do it? Today we're giving them the choice, but we're constraining the possibilities to let them know that, yes, a conversation needs to happen, and it needs to happen in short order. And then when you're actually in the conversation, they're going to be a little bit less triggered because they know what the conversation is about and they didn't feel like they were ambushed. They had a choice as to when it was scheduled. Then in the meeting, what we say is action, followed by the way it made you feel, and then a request. So, for example, in the example that you gave, if the person's starting to get late, come in late. Just a very quick setup. Hey, Joan, you're a valued member of the team, and we really value your input during these conversations. So framing this. Well, I've noticed that there's been a pattern of you coming into late, into meetings after they've begun. That makes me feel a little bit concerned about your level of engagement on the team, and it makes me feel bad that we're missing out on some of your insight. So what would it take to get you here on time with more consistency? Boom, Done. And now we chat.

Wow. Spoken like an expert. That was amazing.

It's so great. And like you said, it's simple but hard to execute. And in your experience, I'm assuming most people, when you describe what they need to do, they would cognitively understand what is required of them. But that doesn't mean it's easy. So what is it that makes it difficult for people to do what we just described?

You know, I think at the bottom line, I just want you to like me. I think everyone wants to be liked. Every. No one wants to be the bad guy, so to speak, the bad girl. And then what's going to happen to me if I really speak my truth? That's scary. Change is scary. You know, so much. So much of this stuff has been developed in our childhood. We didn't have a voice in our childhood, and so now we don't know how to have a voice. We don't know how to speak up for ourselves. I tell my clients to get a picture of themselves as a child and put it on their desk, put it near them. And so sometimes I can't stick up for myself, but I can stick up for that little girl in the picture. So you take that picture of the child, have it near you, and say, I'm going to do this for you. Most research shows that I won't do things for myself, but I'll do them for you. So this is just a simple act. It's baby steps. You're not going to change it overnight. You're not going to change how you have been, how you've thought, how you've acted overnight. But you can learn to slowly start to focus, feel that intuition, that instinct talking to you.

So much good stuff in this. I want to go back to what you talked about with the fear of being disliked. That's one of the things that holds us back when we think about emotion management. We have to understand that you're probably going to be feeling different things in different ways all at the same time. And that's one of the things that makes it so tough, because you're going to have fear going into the conversation in a lot of cases, but then you're also going to have the frustration of what's actually happening, the frustration of what the other person says or does and all of those things. And so you're going to feel the weight of emotionality. But we often don't do the work, the inner work, to figure out what we're feeling and why we're feeling that thing. And so one of the things I talk about is that with fear and how fear holds us back, I think it's okay to feel afraid, but we have to be afraid of the right thing. And I like to shift it from the fear of failure to the fear of regret. So I'm that people pleaser. I still have that in me. And so I'll be afraid of having the conversation because I'm like, oh, man, I don't want this person to dislike me, which is not a good mentality to have as a leader who has to hold people accountable for their actions. Right. But then I think about the old version of myself, the person who was a people pleaser, and I think about how he wishes that he could stand up for himself. And so every time I do it, it's a vote of confidence for who I want to be. Every time I do it, I'm the man that I want to be. And I think about the future version of myself. So I think it's really helpful to have an avatar. Could be the past version or it could be the future version. So the way I think about it is I want to try to make the future version of myself proud. And usually sitting back and not doing anything doesn't make him very proud. So we have to get that avatar for some People, it's their kids. It's like they might not be able to advocate well for a salary increase on their own behalf, but when they say, listen, no, this changes the life for my kids, now they can step up and do it. And I think that's really important.

Absolutely.

Yeah. And the other thing that you mentioned was. You mentioned this a couple of times, and I want to go back to it. You talked about not taking what somebody says personally. That is another thing that is much easier said than done. So how do we do that? How do we take somebody's. What they've said that we might find offensive, and how do we not take it personally?

Again, it's simple, not easy to say, just do this. It has to do with, why am I taking it personally? But I've. I just want to kind of blow some people's minds that taking offense is an action. So I tell people, keep their mitt down. Like I use a baseball analogy, keep your mitt down. When this stuff is coming at you, just let it pass. Now that takes finding your center, finding something that keeps both of your feet on the ground. There's a book called the Four Agreements. Have you heard of the Four Agreements? Well, the first agreement, I think is don't take anything personally. Like someone told me years ago, they're not out there doing it to you, they're just out there doing it. That's how that person is. And then I'm going to give them. You know what people say rent in my. My head when they're just going on with their life. They don't even remember really talking to me again. It's to embrace imperfection, is that I'm not perfect, but I know what I know. I am who I am. That takes a while. It takes. It just takes trial and error and trial and error and not giving up.

Yeah, 100%. And it goes back to what you said about grace. Right. Because you're giving yourself the grace to grow and learn and fail and do better. And then also giving other people the grace, giving them the benefit of the doubt as well when it serves you. I think that's really important. It reminded me of this story. I think it's either Confucianism or Taoism. There's this story where the main takeaway is that the boat is always empty. So imagine you're in a boat and you have this nice setup. Maybe you're drinking tea or something, you know, some nice little boat ride, and then somebody else's boat runs into your boat and knocks you over and Then you look and the people are laughing. You'd probably feel really bad. But then imagine another situation, same thing, you're in your same boat, but then another boat runs into you and you get all mad and then you look and you see the boat is empty, like nobody did anything to you. With intentionality, same outcome, you're in the same position, but you feel completely differently. And so the takeaway is the boat is always empty. If you just take away the assumption of intentionality from somebody's actions, you really diffuse a lot of the power of the offense.

That also reminds me of a story that they tell in, in and I again think it's a Zenism Buddhism about the stallion. The horse. I don't know if you've heard this story, but it's called the Stallion. And so this father and son live together and the son goes to town and he gets this horse, he brings it home. You have heard it, I'll just briefly say it for your listeners. So he comes home, he brings this horse and the town finds out, oh my God, it's this really a stallion that is really worth a lot of money. So they say, oh my gosh, that's really good. And the farmer, the father is going, who knows if it's good or bad? So then the stallion breaks away, breaks out one day and people are like, oh, that's so bad. And the farmer's like, who knows if it's good or bad. This is like finding your center and just saying we'll see. You know, life is still unfolding. I haven't had all the information. So the stallion comes back with like 30 wild horses and all the townspeople are like, oh my God, this is so good. And the farmer's like, we'll see. We don't know if it's good or bad. And then war, the, the, the son is riding one of the horses, one of the wild horses trying to break it in. He falls off, breaks his leg. And the townspeople say, oh, that's so bad. And then war breaks out and they come around, they take every able bodied man. Well his, he can't go because his leg is broken. Oh that's so good. We don't know if it's good or bad.

It's so telling. Just we never know. And, but we get, we cling so tightly to our assumptions, we cling so tightly to our beliefs and we say, oh this is horrible, this is going to be. And it becomes like a self fulfilling prophecy where we spin ourselves into this state of emotional distress that doesn't Serve us a lot of times. And letting go is really challenging. But I think in this episode we have some really helpful tips for how we can manage those emotions and perform at a higher level. Because the thing is, when we think about negotiation tactics, negotiation strategies, and all of those types of things, everybody's trying to hunt for these tactics, but they don't realize oftentimes that it doesn't really matter how good your tactics are if you cannot keep it together during these difficult conversations, because then you're not going to be in the appropriate mental state to actually have the conversations at a high level and utilize the tactics that you work so hard to learn. So I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing this. And before you go, though, can you give the listeners one little parting piece of advice and remind them how to get in touch with you?

My parting piece of advice is just be curious. That curiosity is the area of creativity, that most people are not there out there trying to mess you up. Most people. And then to get a hold of me, I'm always on LinkedIn. So find me on LinkedIn and my website is Joan Kling.com and I have group coaching and one on one coaching about a lot of these situations. I have a class called emerging leaders success academy. I have one that's for new leaders and for seasoned leaders. I have a group class called writing your leadership legacy story. And that's like writing all about who you are as a leader and then telling your people that. Because one of the things that leaders don't say is what you can expect of me and what I expect of you, we just don't have that conversation. So this is what you can. These are my values. It includes your values. It includes who helped you, who hurt you. And then you write out a story and. And share it with them.

I love that. Oh, that's so cool. That's so cool. Joan, really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us.

All right. Okay, talk soon.

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