You will be able to name your common triggers and the story you tell yourself when each one fires.
Most people can name a situation that gets to them every time. For one person it's a colleague who answers a long, careful message with "noted". For another it's a manager who corrects their figures in front of the whole team, or the group chat that ignores a suggestion and then gives someone else's identical idea five thumbs up an hour later.
These are triggers. Knowing yours means you are rarely surprised by your own reactions, and you can prepare for the situations that will test you 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. A single rough day tells you little. A situation that gets the same rise out of you the third, fourth and fifth time is the kind to watch.
Common ones at work include being interrupted, being ignored or left out, being corrected in public, having your work changed without being asked, being given last-minute changes, and being blamed for something that was not your fault. Hybrid work adds a few of its own: being talked over on a call because of a delay, a manager who replies to everyone in the chat except you, a meeting you find out about from someone else's calendar.
After lesson 2.1, Your body notices the feeling before you do, Arif started noticing his. Being talked over on calls was the obvious one. But two more showed up once he paid attention. One was when his manager, Grace, changed the week's priorities late on a Friday. The other 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.
Being corrected in public hurts most if you care about being seen as competent. Watching a colleague get 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.
The value explains the size of the reaction. Once Arif looked, each of his three triggers sat on top of one. 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 client emails touched being included, and under that, competence. If he was not trusted with the client, what did that say about his work?
Knowing your values is not a reason to apologise for them. Caring about fairness is a good thing. It also means you will react more strongly when you think fairness has been broken, and you need to know that about yourself.
Here is the part most people miss. Between what happens and how you feel, there is usually a quick story you tell yourself about what it means. It happens so fast that it feels like part of the event.
Jason talks over Arif. That is the event. Arif's story, in the half-second that follows, is "he thinks my updates are a waste of time." The feeling that follows, anger with a bit of humiliation, comes as much from that story as from Jason's voice cutting in.
Run the same event with a different story and you get a different feeling. 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 was identical. The story changed the feeling.
Stories at work tend to follow a few patterns. Some read minds (she thinks I'm useless) and some generalise from one event to all of them (he always does this). Others predict disaster, such as "I'm going to be blamed for this", or take something general and make it about you: they did it to me. When you hear one of those patterns in your head, you have probably found the story.
You often cannot control the event. Jason will interrupt sometimes, and Grace will occasionally change priorities on a Friday. You cannot simply switch off a feeling either. But the story is something you can examine, question and sometimes change.
That makes the story the place where you have the most room to work. Module 3 builds on this directly. 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 when you do. Module 6 comes back to it again, because the story you bring into a difficult conversation shapes how that conversation goes.
For now, the job is just to catch the story. You do not need to argue with it yet. Writing it down word for word is enough, because seeing it on paper is often the first time you notice how much it assumes.
In the activity below you list three situations that reliably get to you at work, and for each one you write down the value it touches and the story you usually tell yourself, the way Arif did with his three.
List three situations that reliably frustrate or upset you at work and, for each, write the value it touches and the story you usually tell yourself.
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