Letting emotions in your personal life dictate your mood at work

We all know that there should be basic boundaries between our work and our personal lives but sometimes we find it difficult to park our more troubling emotions at the office door.

Nick Seneca Jankel, coach and author of Switch On (Watkins, £9.99), believes that if we constantly snap at people in the office or get angry as a deadline approaches, we have formed a bad habit to compensate for something we feel we are lacking, whether that be power, safety or status.

Overcoming such behaviour is, he admits, ‘really challenging as we have to repeatedly generate in ourselves the feeling we are looking for externally [through the bad habit repetition].’

Jankel recommends finding two to three times a week to capture the moment in which you have lost your temper, and visualise a situation in the days ahead in which you act differently.

Jankel says that by practising flooding yourself with positive emotions – he simply calls it ‘love’: ‘You positively derail yourself and take yourself in a different direction.’

Sports researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation found that if you visualise something your brain can be tricked into essentially thinking it has experienced it. The beneficial emotions you connect to the new ‘experience’ feel rewarding and that in turn helps support your new habit.

Photograph: iStock