Beyond Planning and Acting – the Emotional Game of Success

Sometimes success is easy. You set a goal, make a plan, take action, adjust as you go, and ultimately get to where you want to be. Then you choose a new goal and start all over again. Even in this crazy world when the more realistic scenario involves many goals, complicated webs of people, competition for resources, and constant change, it’s possible to set your mind to just about anything, and achieve it with a clear vision, good interpersonal skills, and consistent, focused action.

But sometimes the success formula doesn’t work. You may blame yourself for not managing your time well, or not having enough willpower, or not getting your priorities straight, but at some level it feels like you are banging your head against an impenetrable wall. I believe that this is because thinking and acting are just part of the success equation.

You see the emotional component of success all the time in sports. The underdog gets a burst of positive energy and performs beyond all expectations. Or an athlete falls into a “slump” and can’t do anything right. It’s alive in business as well. Sales teams purposely generate fun to keep the emotional energy as positive as possible. Leadership teams work on creating emotional environments (corporate cultures) that support what they want to achieve. Marketing teams use branding to create an emotional connection between products and customers. While the emotional game can seem vague and hard to define, we intuitively know it plays a big part in getting solid results.

When I coach clients, I often notice that the “emotional” game they are immersed in has more impact on their ultimate success than their goals, their plan, or any techniques or strategies they can learn. Unfortunately it’s hard to see, it’s not tangible or easily measurable, and controlling it is like herding cats. So what most people do is resign themselves to focusing on the things they can see and control – the mental game and the action game, and they ride the emotional waves the best they can.

But the emotional game is not as hard to manage as it looks – it just follows different rules and requires a different kind of awareness. Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Notice when someone is pushing your buttons. We tend to assume that the other person “pushed” and that causes our reaction. But if you take a deeper look, you may notice a pattern of your own reactions that spans different people and situations. Understanding this pattern is the first step to learning what you need to succeed.

2. Notice what drains you and what energizes you. There is a pattern here too, and once you see it, you can begin to manage your environment, your activities, and your interactions in ways that preserve your emotional energy.

3. Notice the story you tell yourself about a situation when you are immersed in a negative emotion about something. If you look deeper than the actual situation, you will notice that you have a pattern of “explaining things” to yourself that may be habitual. Just realizing that you made up the explanation and there may be other more positive explanations is incredibly empowering.

4. Notice when you are feeling your best- confident, in your element, joyful, on top of the world. What exists that does not typically exist when you are stressed or down?

Some people think that the purpose of emotional awareness is to force a positive attitude all the time, or to always have positive energy. This line of thinking not only misses the point; it doesn’t work. A positive attitude and positive emotional energy are often helpful in the short term, but especially when they are forced, they can be even more draining than feeling authentically negative.

The purpose of increasing your awareness around your emotional game is to help you manage it so you can play your full game more effectively. In your physical game, you do better when you take good care of your body, and take time off to heal when you are injured or ill. In your mental game, you do better when you are periodically engaged in something that interests or challenges you, and when you regularly get a good night’s sleep. In your emotional game, as you spend more time doing what brings you joy and confidence, your level of personal power gets stronger and stronger. And when you find yourself stressed or angry or frustrated, you know what you need to get back on track.

Imagine what it would be like to feel energetic, confident, and content most of the time. Would you be more productive? Would you be on top of your mental game? If you have a goal and a plan, and you are not moving forward consistently, there is a good chance that the barrier you are facing is hiding in your emotional game. Discover it, and you have the key to breaking through to your next level.