You will be able to name your common triggers and the story you tell yourself when each one goes off.
Write down one situation at work that gets to you every time. Most people can name one quickly: a colleague replying "noted" to a long, careful message, a manager correcting your figures in front of the whole team, or a group chat ignoring your suggestion and then giving someone else's identical idea five thumbs up an hour later. If you know which situations do this to you, you are rarely surprised by your own reactions. You can also prepare for the testing ones instead of meeting each one cold.
A trigger is a situation that reliably produces a strong reaction in you. Not every bad moment is a trigger, and a single rough day tells you little about yourself. The kind to watch is the situation that gets the same reaction from you the third, fourth and fifth time it happens.
Some triggers come up at work again and again: being interrupted, being ignored or left out, being corrected in public, having your work changed without anyone asking you, last-minute changes, and being blamed for something that was not your fault. Hybrid work adds its own. You might be talked over on a call because of a delay, see a manager reply to everyone in the chat except you, or find out about a meeting from someone else's calendar.
After Lesson 2.1, "Your body notices the feeling before you do", Arif started noticing his own triggers. The obvious one was being talked over on calls. When he paid closer attention, he found a second: his manager, Grace, changing the week's priorities late on a Friday. The third was being left off email threads with the client, even when the thread was about his part of the project.
Triggers are rarely random. They usually press on something you value. Four values come up again and again at work: fairness, competence, respect and being included.
The value explains the size of the reaction. Being corrected in public hurts most if you care about being seen as competent. A colleague getting credit for your idea stings most if fairness matters a lot to you. Being left out of a meeting bites if you care about belonging to the team.
Arif mapped each of his three triggers to a value. Being talked over touched respect. The Friday changes touched fairness, because he felt his weekend was being spent on someone else's poor planning. Being left off the client emails touched being included, and beneath that, competence: if he was not trusted with the client, he wondered what that said about his work.
Knowing your values is no reason to apologise for them, and caring about fairness is a good thing. Caring strongly about a value does mean you react more strongly when you think it has been broken, and you need to know that about yourself.
Between what happens and how you feel, there is usually a quick story you tell yourself about what the event means. It happens so fast that it feels like part of the event, and most people miss it. The feeling comes as much from the story as from the event itself, so the same event with a different story produces a different feeling.
When Jason talks over Arif on a call, Arif's story forms in about a half-second: "he thinks my updates are a waste of time." The feeling that follows is anger with a bit of humiliation. If Arif's story had been "Jason's had another call from the client and he's panicking", he might have felt irritation, or even sympathy. The interruption would have been identical, and the different story would have produced a different feeling.
Stories at work tend to follow a few patterns. If you hear one of these in your head, you have probably found the story:
Mind reading, such as "she thinks I'm useless". Generalising from one event to all of them, such as "he always does this". Predicting disaster, such as "I'm going to be blamed for this". Personalising, making something general about you, such as "they did it to me".
You often cannot control the event. Jason will interrupt sometimes, and Grace will occasionally change the week's priorities late on a Friday. You also cannot simply switch off a feeling once it arrives. The story can be examined, questioned and sometimes changed, so it is where you have the most room to work. Module 3 builds directly on this. Lesson 3.2, "Change the story you tell yourself about what happened", teaches you to come up with other believable explanations for what someone did and to notice how the feeling shifts. Module 6 returns to the story, because the story you bring into a difficult conversation shapes how that conversation goes.
For now, your only job is to catch the story. Don't argue with it yet. Writing it down word for word is enough, and seeing it on paper is often the first time you notice how much it assumes.
The process has four parts. First, notice the situations that reliably get a strong reaction from you, the ones that repeat rather than one bad day. Second, name the value each one presses on, whether that is fairness, competence, respect, being included or something else. Third, catch the story you tell yourself between the event and the feeling, and check it against the four patterns above. Fourth, write that story down exactly as it runs in your head.
In the activity below, list three situations that reliably get to you at work. For each one, write down the value it touches and the story you usually tell yourself, the way Arif did with his three.
Write down three situations at work that reliably frustrate or upset you. For each one, note the value it touches and the story you usually tell yourself.
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