Occasionally while typing an instagram story, I realize midway through: oh, this is a post. Sometimes, I realize midway though writing the post: oh, this is a blog post. Sometimes still, I finish the blog post and realize: oh, I have more to say on this subject. Today is one of these days, as we are talking about the art of responding to someone else’s panic, as inspired by this post shared by Women of PM:
I re-shared this this morning and instantly my inbox lit up. People really resonated with this. So let’s talk about it!
What this original post is talking about is internally-generated emotional equilibrium. The peace in your head and heart aren’t tied to your external environment: not to the people that make it up, not to the status of the projects in front of you. The peace in your head and heart comes from your head and heart. No one gave it to you by smiling at you, telling you that you did a good job on that project, or giving you a good performance review or a shoutout in a meeting. You created it, totally independently of what’s happening around you. That is internally-generated emotional equilibrium and it is the only way I know in this world to prevent other people from panicking you, and to walk that fine line between urgency and panic well. It’s also extremely difficult to cultivate and it takes a very long time.
Which is why (and I say this to you with all the earnestness in the world and not a single trace of irony): one of the kindest things you can possibly do for yourself, with respect to your career, your relationships, your parenting (if you’re a parent), your hobbies… anything you love, is to start working today on emotional regulation (the skill that leads to the state of internally-generated emotional equilibrium). If you’ve only got space for one thing on your developmental plate (and no shame, that’s a lot of us!)… forget PM. Work on this: internally-generated emotional equilibrium.
Challenges to equilibrium
Everything else I’m about to say goes out to a very specific type of higher-ed professional. (You’ll know very quickly whether I’m talking to you.) If you’re anything like me, you’ve heard the party line “your poor planning does not constitute my emergency” for years as ~a way to set boundaries~. This goes out to the type of professional who knows that this party line is true, and who has also spent an entire career knowing that there is no way they could ever say that to someone in real life.
The first time I heard that, I thought some combination of the following thoughts:
- Wow, what a great thing for someone else to be able to say.
- Are there people who can actually imagine themselves saying anything like that?
- How much easier would my life be if I could imagine myself saying anything like that?
- I guess we’ll never know.
It is really easy for people like us to chalk this resistance up to “being an empath” (not a label I love for many reasons, some of which we’ll break down in a moment). Bad news, though: this lets us off the hook. There are so many people in this world who are deeply empathetic and who have also developed an emotional equilibrium that doesn’t depend on what the people around them are feeling.
This was really driven home for me when I became the parent of a toddler: someone who has extremely big feelings all the time about everything, always. Wind blowing? I love it!!!!! Until five seconds later when I hate it and I will prove it by throwing myself onto the ground. Blueberries? FRIG!!! YES!!!!!!! Except wait, is this one smaller than the others? Why would you do this to me? You get it. Parenting a toddler is just… that, all day, every day. Apparently forever.
I love my kid more than anything in the world. When he’s crying because he hates wind now or because the blueberries I gave him had a smaller one included, those feelings are real for him. And I want to sit with him, and be in it together with him: I want to be the most empathetic presence I can possibly be for him.
Yet in order to be this “most empathetic presence” (which, to be crystal clear, I do not always achieve), I also have to sit with him bolstered by my own sense of internal peace. I cannot let his emotions inform mine. I have to sit with him, observe his emotions as he feels them (often incredibly deeply), help him label them, help him move through them, and then help him act to do whatever’s helpful in the moment: process learning, practice a new skill, share a fear, make a plan for next time…. whatever it is. My job is to be a solid, reliable leader, to let him borrow that reliability for a bit, and then to make and work the plan together.
This is the goal. This is also very difficult for me. For the first fifteen years of my career, I took on other peoples’ feelings like a second skin. Moreover, I was proud of my ability to do that! This is what “being an empath” meant to me at that time in my career. I hadn’t yet learned: being empathetic has to do with seeing other people and sitting with them. It doesn’t have anything to do with letting them shape you. Empathy is not the opposite of equilibrium.
Applying empathy at work without resorting to panic
If this is all making sense so far: beautiful! There’s one more layer, though: what does this sense of empathy look like at work? Example: a client calls asking for some rush work at 4pm that you know will take at least three hours. You’re supposed to leave at 5pm, and it’s not like you have a conflict, but you’ve been thinking all day about… you know, not being at work. So you’re not super jazzed to take this on, but your manager is panicking (to borrow the framing of the original post linked above). How on earth to respond?
At work, we can’t just say: I know. You’re feeling a lot of feelings about this client calling and asking for a rush. I’m here.
The last layer here is that I had to really come to terms with the fact that I am someone who really, really likes to be liked. It bothers me very, very much when I know, think, or even imagine that someone doesn’t like me. This is the trait of mine at the root of my inability to deliver the “poor planning/not my emergency” line. For years, I thought it was that I was empathetic. It’s actually a deep fear of being disliked.
Here’s how this breaks down. When you care a lot about being liked in the moment, you pretty much have only one option that feels tolerable: you can accommodate. That’s it. I know because I spent fifteen years accommodating.
When you’re able to set aside being liked in the moment, your “feels-tolerable” options start to open up. That’s when you get to start combining scripts: you get to take what you like about the “not my emergency” script (aka that it honors your own time and peace) and what you like about the “working with a toddler” script (aka that it honors the other person’s feelings) and get to work like a mad scientist in a lab making things your own. You get to start saying things like: “Oh, man, that’s a huge bummer! I know you really want to keep that client happy. Same here. I definitely do need to leave at 5pm today, so let’s talk about how we can meet their needs by getting what we can done today and then coming back to it first thing tomorrow?”
We’re combining two things here: we’re using the empathy and the sitting-with that I do with my toddler when he decides he hates wind, and we’re combining it with the internally-generated emotional equilibrium that lets us take a step back from the manager’s panic. Ultimately, this results in everyone in the room feeling a little more space, and a little more ability to collectively problem-solve — and isn’t that problem-solving the goal whenever the temptation is to move into panic mode?
One of the many things you might find here is that when you clear space for collective problem-solving, you and your manager realize together that what the client thinks is an emergency actually isn’t one, and that it’s totally fine to put the work off until tomorrow morning. One of the other things you might realize is that your manager realizes that they need to go to their boss and have a conversation about firing (or at least ~realigning expectations with~) a client. A key insight here: one team member’s internally-generated emotional equilibrium helped make space for clearer thinking and problem-solving for someone else on the team — even if that someone else is a manager. (I promise there is nothing special about managers that means they’ve inherently done this emotional equilibrium work.)
This is a long post, and I think it’s one of those posts that perfectly illustrates how things can be “not really about project management” at the exact same time that they are precisely about project management.
It’s not really about project management in that you don’t learn emotional regulation and equilibrium by practicing project management without it — in fact, this just entrenches bad habits! I have worked incredibly hard on emotional regulation over the past five years (I’m still not always great at it), and here’s where I’ve done that work: therapy, meditation/mindfulness practice, journaling. Not my job.
It is about project management because this is the most important “soft skill” there is, and it’s the soft skill that a career in project management will test the most deeply. People will come to you in panic often. I genuinely can’t think of a more valuable skill than the ability not to take their panic on.
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