Self-Regulation

Self-regulation is a most difficult discipline to establish because it requires an inordinate amount of motivation and cognitive energy. Focused attention, deliberate action and resisting automatic responses is draining. And yet your ability to self-regulate is a necessity in your leader development.

Automatic Reaction

You have years of behaving in certain ways. Your well-worn neural pathways are firmly established to produce certain feelings and behaviors automatically—you don’t even have to think about them. Under certain circumstances, you just react.

Unfortunately, the ways you learned to react may be insufficient for your professional stature now or going forward. The title of Marshall Goldsmith‘s book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, couldn’t say it more clearly.

Triggers

Because so many of your reactions are automatic, they are activated under specific conditions, called triggers. When you are triggered, what do you do? Do you react based on the emotions of the moment? That is self-dysregulation, or the inability to react to situations with an appropriate emotional and behavioral response.

Too many people, when triggered, react like they did when they were adolescents. Whether you become an aggressive bully or passive pouter, people don’t like it when you act like a thirteen-year-old. It degrades you and diminishes them.

But when you are triggered, if you have not developed the discipline of self-regulation, you will succumb to it EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Not good. You can do better. For the sake of your people and your own development, you must do better.

Executive coaches often face this situation with their clients. Unless the person is in a growth mindset, they will resist, defend and excuse themselves from developing their need to self-regulate. But self-regulation is paramount to moving forward and becoming a better version of yourself.

So, what triggers you? Fear of being imperfect? Intolerant of another’s imperfection? Feeling insecure in unfamiliar situations? Angry you are found to be wrong? Anxious about your ability to come through? We all have our triggers. Do you know yours? Whatever they are, your ability to self-regulate with focused attention and deliberate action will take you to a new dimension of effectiveness.