Managing your emotional state is fundamental to great design

"Human beings are good at turning whatever they’re dealing with at the moment into the Most Important Thing of All time. When dealing with a relatively minor client problem, our bodies can experience the same symptoms of stress as, say, a refugee trying to escape from a war-torn country"

and

"After all, your immediate emotion isn’t always the same as how you’ll feel after you have some time to think about it. However, it certainly has the potential to mess things up before you come around to that longer-term perspective."

I have felt this countless time, both as a client and a designer. As a client, I often didn't give enough time for a designer to iterate (which designers naturally do) and complained immediately, thus ruining the guy's peace of mind. As a designer, my first impulse is to take criticism personally and to get defensive. After I've let some time pass, I can usually understand where the client is coming from, and then see the shortcomings of the earlier design.

The author also made an interesting observation about how venting your frustration might make you more frustrated. This somehow seems related to the finding of psychologists that "you can't punch your way out of anger"[1]

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/200909...

But, like all critical skills, it will vary from person to person and everyone is at a different point along the path to mastering it -- some of us with inherent personality/biochemical/social/physical differences or challenging circumstances that make it harder to modulate emotional reactions.

If a person is good enough at lots of other areas, they can often compensate for a lack of skill in modulating emotional state. Not always and not in every circumstances, but yes, in lots of ways they can, just as those who are really good at managing emotional state, but who perhaps lack another skill, like technical competence, might be able to compensate for that particular lack of skill too.

In this sense, I am not sure what good it does to draw attention specifically to emotional state as a skill in question. I worry that doing so might create further cases where people who face challenges with mental health or well-being have that fact unfairly used against them.

I can only imagine if a bureaucracy began to codify "modulating emotional state" as a "skill" and made you evaluate how your peers handle emotions in a 360 review or something. It's particularly troubling that the post decries negative emotions, and uses charged language like "wallowing in negative emotions" to depict what is presumably someone who is "not managing" their emotional state well. This screams unfair negative stigma to those who happen to struggle with, say, depression, or have marginalized disorders like, say, misophonia.

We shouldn't forget that complaining about unsatisfactory circumstances is one of the best and healthiest things a human can do in order to get help they might need to have their circumstances changed. We have to be careful that this stuff is not codified into business double-speak for "shut up and stop whining about things you don't like."

This whole post seems like a very dangerous road to go down to me.

At it's core he correctly identifies being "too involved" as part of the issue because this makes you emotionally attached to a project and clouds your judgement.

But thats not really the core of the problem – at least not in my experience having run agency myself and I don't think the essay have any useful conclusions. Saying we should not be emotional is easy to say when it's your company.

The real issue is if designers (novice or experienced) feel like their design abilities are being questioned (and so their position threatened). And so the real trick is to make sure there is a clear understanding of what direction the critique is aimed.

If there is any confusion you ned up with designers who take critique of the discussed solution with a critique of them as designers. And so I have always tried to make two things clear to the designers I had.

1) They are there because they are good enough. And so whatever discussion we are having is not about them but about what they produced.

2) The point of critique is always to improve the result never to discuss any individuals design abilities.

Chances are if you survived the first 3 month of your employment you are there because you are good enough.

Getting people to a position where they feel they can trust their own intuition without judgement of them as people is what removes adrenaline. Sure you might get into a heated debate about something (and thus adrenaline will flow) but you aren't debating each other you are debating the project at hand.

Of course this require quite a lot of work up front and a level of honesty in an organization that sometimes simply arent possible.

But if you want to make your designers think more like astronauts you better make sure that you built a proper spaceship for them to travel in.

Friends took me to the hospital and watching doctors not emotionally care about me was a tremendous relief.

I expected doctors's face to show how serious the injury was. Luckily I was wrong. These people are trained like astronauts and everyday they see young people die from car or motorcycle accidents. I went near death but completely recovered.

I found this reference quoted in the OA interesting, but the Harvard Business Review Web page certainly is noisy especially in contrast to the OA's relatively calm presentation.

Quote from OA

"Having been in an executive role for nearly 13 years now, I’ve learned the hard way (many times…) how dangerous it can be to “leak” your immediate emotions."

I think this is fairly standard practice for most senior managers. I'm actually impressed with the ability some of the managers I work with/to can actually 'frame shift' into the concerns of others without appearing dismissive.

I've also been called unemotional in the past but that's because I keep my work face on and if I'm really stressed/angry go for a bike ride when I get in on a night until I'm not.

I am for one not even sure what emotions actually are, more than something that forces my brain to think down a certain path.

*(myself included)