Emotional Maturity: Responding to Challenges
with Objectivity and Surprising Agility

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #548: Emotional Maturity: Responding to Challenges with Objectivity and Surprising Agility

Jeff Sanders
When was the last time you sent an angry email?

Or encountered a new challenge at work that quickly escalated into a meltdown?

Or found yourself in a season of uncertainty, fear, or anxiety about the future?

I have lived in all of these worlds at various times and have discovered that I frequently don't have the emotional skill set that I know I need.

Let's dig into these scenarios and others like them so that we can become the better versions of ourselves we know are possible, and then tap into our new polished skill sets in those moments when we need to be at our best.

This is the 5am Miracle, episode #548, Emotional Maturity, Responding to Challenges with Objectivity and Surprising Agility.

Good morning and welcome to the 5am Miracle.

I am Jeff Sanders and this is the podcast dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast.

My goal is to help you bounce out of bed with enthusiasm, create powerful lifelong habits, and tackle your grandest goals with extraordinary energy.

I am a keynote speaker and corporate trainer specializing in delivering high-energy, interactive, and action-oriented presentations and workshops focused on productivity, wellness, and personal and professional growth.

If you want to learn more, head over to jeffsanders.com/speaking.

Now in the episode this week, I'll break down what it looks like to respond to challenges with maturity and objectivity.

I'll also highlight the opposite, what an emotional outburst really looks like.

And we'll wrap up with a game plan for you to move forward and tackle challenges in a new, healthy, and sustainable way.

Let's get to it.

I have sent many more angry emails in my life than I would care to admit.

They're optional, I don't have to do it, but I do it, or have done it a lot and probably will do it again in the future.

The real question is what's going on here?

What's the true story, the underlying current of what's happening?

And there's a lot of ways to rationalize this or explain it away.

But the brutal answer is that I am a bit extreme in some scenarios.

Yes, I'm a high achiever.

Yes, I love to drink caffeine, accomplish big goals.

Actually push myself.

I have a high quality bar for the work that I produce.

And my tendency is to then transfer that same quality bar onto others, sometimes appropriately and sometimes not.

Sometimes I expect more from others than they expect from themselves.

There's a lot of ways to look at this.

But at the end of the day, I have a choice.

I have a choice on how to respond to others because I cannot control them.

I don't intend to control them.

I have some influence over them, maybe, but really I have full control and influence over myself.

That's the story here.

That's what this entire conversation is about.

It's about the choice.

Will you choose to do the more mature thing, the more objective thing, the more rational thing, or will you get caught up in the moment?

Will you let your emotions run rampant?

You know, I'm the kind of guy who, when I see something that's wrong, I want to write it.

When I see someone making a mistake, I want to call them out on it.

I want to hold them accountable.

I want to get the right solution.

Now I don't do this for everyone.

I do this, generally speaking, for those who in some way, shape, or form have a negative impact on me based upon their decisions.

And then I want to be able to correct that issue.

So there's no negative impact on me.

It's personal, right?

I want to make sure that I get the best end result for me, my business, my family.

I want to guarantee that everything works smoothly on my end.

And if someone else is going to hold me up on that and be an obstacle, sometimes I tend to react, sometimes very strongly, sometimes an overreaction.

And that's really where this episode came from, from years of me making mistakes and then wanting to somehow figure out what am I going to do about this?

And then once I kind of figure it out, sort of, how can I share that with you?

And so I think that I'm there, at least on the sense that I have a game plan.

I have an idea of how to move forward.

Whether or not I execute that in real life, that is yet to be seen in many cases.

But there's a lot of chances here to do things right going forward.

So we're going to use that as kind of the core example this week.

But of course, there's more to this conversation than just an angry email.

Another side of this coin is fear.

I've experienced a lot of fear in my life for all kinds of reasons.

I'm sure you have as well.

But the one component of fear that I want to dial in on this week is about uncertainty.

In other words, we don't know how things are going to play out.

And so you may have fears for the future because you just don't know, will this plan work?

Will my ideas actually come to fruition?

Will my goals be achieved?

Will I be able to solve this problem that I have right in front of me?

Or will everything just go crazy and it will all fall apart?

Uncertainty is unnerving, especially if you're someone like me, who's a control freak at the highest level.

Let's not get ourselves.

The reason why I send those angry emails is about control.

I want to control other people and I can't.

And so one of my ways of dealing with my fears and uncertainties of the future is to kind of throw my energy in every direction.

And sometimes that works.

It's a very ambitious and aggressive approach to goal achievement.

And for a long time, that was a very successful strategy for me and maybe for you as well.

Right?

There was those days that you wake up early, you get all your ducks in a row and you just really do everything you'd plan to do in a really effective way.

You work faster and harder and better, and the results are impressive because of it.

I'm never going to downplay the ambitious side of this.

However, if that is part of your story, that you have this high quality bar and you are ambitious, you also don't technically know if this ambition will play out.

It's the work harder model all the time, as opposed to being more strategic, as opposed to being a little more patient, as opposed to exuding a sense of maturity, objectivity, and really looking at life the way that it is, as opposed to the way that you want it to be.

And I feel like that sense of a misplaced expectation, both for yourself and for others, it plays into this conversation in such a powerful way.

And so we're going to break down a few key ideas around this concept of emotional maturity and your ability to respond to challenges with objectivity and possibly some surprising agility.

We'll see how it plays out for you.

But let's begin this conversation with looking at what it looks like to respond poorly.

I just highlighted at least one version of that with these angry emails, but let's really break down what I mean by responding in a way that is not the way that you want.

So a simple example of an emotional outburst would be to quickly fire off an angry email without any kind of a pause to reflect.

You might actually yell at someone.

You might make decisions in the moment without a game plan.

And so you're relying on your ability to think on your feet and make a decision right now.

And when you do so, and there is no pause, there is no reflection, you might tend to lean towards this emotional outburst arena, this high energy, high octane, I want it now, make it happen, here we go philosophy.

I am an aggressive guy in a lot of ways, but not everything for me results in an emotional outburst.

It's really only a few key areas of my life.

And for you, it may be the same thing.

There are certain things you care about and certain things you don't.

Certain things you're fine to ignore.

And other things you are going to just dial in 100% and guarantee the outcome you want, and you might cause a bit of a disruption in the process.

The question about emotional outburst is, does that describe you in any context?

Do you see yourself in that moment?

Maybe you're frustrated with your kids.

Maybe it's an employee at work or a coworker or a neighbor.

There are times in life where people get on our nerves.

We're not asking ourselves to be inhuman or be robotic here.

It's more about the reflection aspect.

Do you see yourself in these moments?

Does this happen to you?

Does this describe you?

It does me in a number of ways, and I know that.

And so my question just simply becomes, can I identify that?

There's no solution yet, but just identify this is true in certain places and contexts for your life.

And we'll start with that.

The second area that I might call a poor response would be to hide or avoid the issue completely.

This is probably a lot more common.

What you find yourself doing is distracting yourself with anything except the issue at hand.

You procrastinate, you postpone, you delay, you avoid, you hide.

This is the norm.

This is the thing that most of us do.

You may not be a hothead.

You may not be the kind of person who yells at people or sends angry emails, but you might be the kind of person who, when you see conflict, you run.

You just do whatever you can to never actually have to engage in the potential difficult conversation because you just don't want to face the music.

I get that too.

I'm a runner.

I'll use a really ridiculous example from my past, one that I, this is an embarrassing story that I don't like telling, but I'm going to tell it anyway.

I had my license to sell real estate in my twenties for one whole year and I sold a total of zero houses.

Awesome career path for me.

But what ended up happening was at the end of that year, I was very aware that it wasn't my future.

It wasn't for me.

And so my question was, well, what do I do with this?

Do I continue to pay these annual dues and attempt to sell houses that I don't really care about?

I know it's not my future.

How do I get out of this?

And at the time I was really bad at dealing with conflict and I viewed the conversation I would have to have with my broker at the time to tell him, Hey, I don't want to do this anymore.

I need to quit.

I didn't want to say those words.

I didn't want to confront him face to face.

And so I did this really silly thing where I basically quit without him knowing and told the state of Tennessee that I wanted to get out and he didn't know about it.

In the world of real estate, that's not how the process is done.

I basically subverted his power and authority and he found out about it, of course, and he was very unhappy with me and the whole thing became way more awkward.

And then I had to talk to him face to face and it was just, I mean, the most goofy thing.

This is like the quintessential immaturity of my twenties playing out in a really awkward way.

It's a story that I have never forgotten and can't forget because it's just burned into my psyche.

And so I have tended to avoid hiding because of this story, because of this example, I know the better path forward is to confront things and a very methodical and objective way to acknowledge reality and move forward.

Knowing that this is the smoother path to just do the right thing in the moment is the smoothest path forward, hiding, avoiding, running from problems.

They don't make the problems go away.

They make them worse.

And so we're not trying to become the kinds of people who respond inappropriately to what's going on, whether that is the angry, aggressive, emotional outburst side of the coin or the opposite, the running and hiding and avoiding side.

Both of these results in a bad outcome.

Now, there's another component of this that's similar to what we just discussed, which I'm calling rumination, constantly thinking about fear, future, bad outcomes, possible worst case scenarios, or how someone else has made a mistake that negatively impacts you.

And so what you find yourself doing is instead of acting out and yelling at someone, instead of avoiding the problem, you just basically yell in your own brain.

You find yourself rethinking about a certain problem over and over again.

It just cycles back to the front of your psyche over and over and you can't let it go.

You can't let it go.

It's just always there, just making you angry, making you upset, frustrating you, and ultimately you get nowhere.

This type of rumination is extremely destructive because it just makes you mad and doesn't solve any problems.

Emotional maturity has to do with facing the music, right?

We just discussed not hiding from problems.

Well, part of that means also acknowledging when the problem is just in your head and you've got to get it out.

And one of the best ways to get it out is to just go do the thing you know that has to get done.

And then the problem gets resolved.

Maybe you don't like the solution, but you get to a solution and that you can work with.

That's more tangible.

It's very intangible to have a problem in your brain, bouncing back and forth, ping-ponging in your head all day, every day, making you upset.

It's not beneficial.

Now, yes, you could start with journaling.

You could start with writing the idea down, telling a friend who's not involved.

All of these great things can help to resolve the issue, at least mentally at first, and then practically by taking the next action that you know will allow you to confront the issue.

But I view all three of these areas as being related, whether it's an emotional outburst, hiding from the problem, or rumination.

All of these reflect emotional immaturity or being unable to handle what's going on and making poor choices because of it.

All of these are problems.

The good news is we have solutions.

So here's what it looks like to respond to challenges and difficult scenarios with emotional maturity and objectivity.

First strategy, pause.

Take a breath.

Our goal here is to not allow an outburst of negative emotion that will impact you in a negative way because let's not kid ourselves, generally speaking, emotional outbursts are ineffective.

And your best bet is to do your very best to not react in the moment.

Allow yourself time to process emotionally what's happening.

Pausing is one of my biggest weaknesses.

I don't like to pause, right?

I'm an aggressive high achiever.

I want results now.

I want to act in the moment.

The problem is the best action here is inaction.

The best case scenario is to wait 24, 48 hours, maybe longer before you reply or act on this triggering scenario.

And the word trigger is actually very effective here because that's what's taking place.

You're being triggered or I have been triggered by something that has made me angry or upset in some way.

And so the question is, will I respond to that trigger by having a quick emotional response and take action on that lack of objectivity, that lack of a plan?

Or will I take a breath?

Will I pause, reflect a little bit, find a better path forward?

While pausing, you could also ask other people for their advice.

You could take a walk to clear your head.

You could meditate just to calm your mind and then approach this scenario from a new, different emotional state.

Now what I've seen for me in the past is that I tend to ruminate in this pause.

This is kind of the catch 22 here.

This is the issue where I'm personally still trying to figure out my best approach here.

You may have a better one, but what I've seen is, is that if I choose to pause for 24 hours before I act in that 24 hours, there's a very good chance I'm going to keep thinking about that problem over and over and over again, wanting to take action on it, but holding myself back from doing so.

And so the real question here is, can you let something go?

Can you, in this case, maybe meditate or journal or take a walk or take a break or distract yourself on purpose with another problem to solve, another issue to deal with?

In other words, you're finding a way to reorient and pivot your mind and then return back to this scenario after a certain time period and readdress it with a different frame of mind.

Hopefully you've slept, hopefully you've relaxed, and then you can approach this from a new, refreshing perspective.

That's what an active and rejuvenating pause can bring about, is that healthy response, that normal, intelligent, mature, objective response.

The goal here is very obvious, no outbursts, no angry emails, no aggressive intensity.

This might sound odd coming from me.

I know this podcast for the last 11 years has been a very positive version of me, but like I've said before, the kinds of people who are high achievers, who really have a bar set high for themselves, tend to then apply that bar to others.

So yes, this is true about me.

Yes, there is an aggressive side to me.

You do not see on this podcast on purpose, but that's why we all need this, right?

We all have our own flaws.

We all have our own issues to deal with.

And me, the issue for me, in almost every scenario, is figuring out how to calm down.

That's it.

If I could figure out how to calm down, I'm such a better person in so many ways.

And speaking of that, the second strategy is the calm acceptance of facts.

In other words, we are not avoiding the truth or looking for a distraction.

We want to calmly and rationally accept reality.

We want to be objective about the truth.

Forward progress is only possible through self-awareness and acknowledging reality as it stands, not the reality you hope would exist or the one you want to exist, but the one that actually does.

If you ask direct questions about what is true and what can be done, it will put you in the driver's seat for true progress, real forward movement, because it's based in reality, not based in a fantasy.

Calmly accepting facts is a difficult thing to do when the facts are not fun.

When it's bad news, when it's negative in nature, accepting that takes time, right?

That whole idea of a pause from before is important because accepting bad news does not happen instantaneously.

We can accept good news really fast, no problem.

That's awesome.

Here we go.

But bad news, there's an emotional human response that has to take place.

There has to be a process we go through inside our heads, inside of our bodies to literally, physically, mentally accept what's going on and then rationally and objectively and calmly make a decision going forward.

And so if you find yourself, once again, as the kind of person who's going to run from the truth or aggressively address it, neither one of those is calmly accepting the facts and that also includes your response.

If you were to be the kind of person who hides and runs from problems, accepting the facts is to accept the fact that you have to address the problem.

You have to accept the fact that running isn't the solution, that hiding and postponing and procrastinating is making it worse.

And so accepting what's true about the problem is the first step.

And then to calmly accept the solution that you know is true is the second part.

Both are necessary and both can be done in a calm and objective way.

It's just a challenge for you to accept that and actually move forward in it.

Now to circle back to rumination for a second.

Let's imagine that that tends to be what you do.

The problem just ping pongs back in your brain a thousand times.

What do you do with that?

I think the best possible way to approach it is to first of all, accept the fact that emoting is part of the process, right?

The human emotion side of giving yourself a short time to experience that reaction.

Reactions are okay as long as we don't take action on them yet, right?

So accept the emotional response as part of that human experience, right?

Bad news is bad news.

We're going to feel it, right?

Right in our gut.

It's going to happen.

Then the question is, what do we do with that?

I think the best possible next thing to do is to form a plan of action that you can work with fairly soon to directly solve the problem if that's possible.

And then you calmly and objectively take that action and then you pivot to something else to act on.

This works both as a distraction and as forward motion.

What I have seen for myself is when I have the rumination tendency, which does happen to me a number of occasions, I want to figure out how to get all of that noise out of my brain.

And one of the best ways to do that besides solving the problem is to intentionally just go solve a different problem.

Just redirect, right?

That's all this is.

I'll use a great example of this for my kids.

Look at my two year old who constantly finds herself very frustrated with very simple things.

And when I just redirect her to something else to focus on, here's a new toy to play with, a new food to eat, whatever the case is, her brain then refocuses on the new objective and off she goes and that old problem is now gone.

For her, literally immediately, she pivots very quickly.

I don't tend to pivot that fast, but that's the goal.

Give myself another problem to solve and then all of a sudden that's my new issue to deal with.

Just yet another thing to go and tackle.

But that's kind of the point, right?

Whatever we have in front of us is what we give our focus and our attention and our energy to.

So just give yourself something else to work with.

Solve a new problem in a new way.

That's going to help more than most things.

It's amazing how simple and effective this is.

So if you're trapped in this constant cycle, you just can't seem to let something go, the best way to let it go is just to literally do anything else in the world because then you're basically forced to let it go at least for a short time.

And yes, you can revisit that issue later on after you've slept, you've calmed down, you've had a new game plan, a smart plan of action, and then you can act on it in a way that is healthy and progressive and will truly solve your issue.

So now we've discussed what it looks like to respond poorly to challenges and some action steps you can take to actually respond in a more objective way.

I want to go back to that concept I discussed earlier about fear and especially how to deal with uncertainty or just not simply knowing how the future will play out.

And I have three possible strategies for you to help with that arena.

The first is to take the edge off.

When you are dealing with uncertainty, you might be dealing with a lot of fear, possible anxiety, emotional response is not healthy.

If you can get a quick win, if you can find something you can do now to make even a little bit of progress, you can feel a lot better.

You will feel like something is happening.

Something is moving forward.

Even if that something is totally unrelated to the issue at hand.

It's amazing how we can get a sense of progress and power from doing anything that is successful.

We feel good about that.

We get endorphins from that.

We are able to then say, okay, I got a win in some area.

Let's go now apply that to the thing I am concerned about.

Let's go directly address it.

Which brings us to the second strategy.

In order to take the edge off in the best possible way, you want to take action that is focused on the things you control.

And once again, I'm a control freak.

I want to do things that I can guarantee a result in.

So your goal is to focus on your controllables as opposed to the things that just you have no power over.

If you don't control something, giving your energy to it is objectively a waste of time.

The better use of your time is to give all of your energy and focus to the core components that you fully control.

Anything that is within your power to act on, influence, or directly guarantee the results on.

You take everything one step at a time here, but it is based on the steps that you control.

And when that happens, you get power.

You get possibility.

You get creative.

You can see solutions.

You can then move forward and pivot in better ways.

All of this happens because you're taking direct action on things you control.

And then you get those quick wins.

And then you feel better about what's going on.

And then the uncertainty begins to fade because you're doing something.

You're in the game.

You're playing the game now.

It is so easy to feel all this fear about things you're doing nothing about.

Fear is strongest when you do nothing.

Fear is weakest when you are directly doing anything of value to move forward in a positive direction.

You can quiet that voice very quickly by just taking a single step forward.

And that's where you begin.

Now let's imagine that you've done this.

You've got a quick win.

You have focused on your controllables, but you want to up the game.

You want to really tackle this issue with fear and uncertainty in a very powerful way.

Well, then we go back to episode number 539 of this podcast that I titled "Full Immersion."

In other words, we're drowning the problem.

We're going to tackle this from every possible direction and overwhelm these obstacles with abundant solutions.

This is the most effective strategy.

It's the one that guarantees the result.

It's also the most difficult, takes the most time, requires the most energy, money, creativity, everything.

It's the full Monty, right?

An absolute objective full force solution.

But it works.

And so if you are really struggling with uncertainty, really struggling with fear, it's now possibly debilitating for you, right?

Once again, take the edge off, get a quick win, focus on your controllables, do things that are within your power, and then as you up the ante, as the snowball begins to grow, then you introduce more solutions, more controllables, more creative outlets, and you just push this forward more and more and more.

And over time, that fear gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

And your emotional maturity in this whole conversation plays out because you don't have to be emotionally insecure or emotionally immature because you're going to be doing the action that makes you objectively better at all of this.

You gain the skillset you need to then tackle not only this problem, but future problems as well.

This is all a skillset based on experience.

Let's go back to that example that I handled so poorly with my real estate deal.

Well, now, because of that bad experience and I learned how to do things more intelligently, I have not repeated that same error and judgment ever again.

And I'm never going to, because that thing is once again burned into my psyche of what not to do, which is so powerful to tell you what to do and how to do this well.

You still have to do it.

There's still an execution requirement, but you know what the path is.

You know what it is.

So you take a single step forward in that direction and that's where you get the results.

That's how this all works.

So let's wrap this conversation up with a little bit of a game plan for you.

And the game plan is based on you answering a series of simple questions that are going to point you in the right direction.

So our goal here is to make a plan to prevent future emotional hiccups so you can respond the way you intend to going forward.

First question, what are your biggest weaknesses regarding emotional maturity?

I gave a lot of examples this week.

There's a lot here to pull from.

So just figure out which area you want to focus on first, whether it is emotional outbursts, whether you hide from problems, maybe you ruminate too much.

Where is your issue that you want to focus on most?

Not all at once.

Let's do one thing at a time here.

But the best way to begin once again is the truth, self-awareness, reality.

We start there and acknowledge the areas of growth, the areas where you want to see improvement in the near future.

Second question, what can you do today to address these issues?

One of the best ways to begin anything is to take some kind of action right now, in the moment, today.

When you do that, that kind of forward motion begins.

It won't happen with a plan on paper as fast as it will doing something physically.

Like literally go do something.

That's going to kickstart this faster than just about anything.

So start there.

What can you do now to address the issue at hand?

And finally, what can you do long-term to prevent future emotional outbursts or poor responses to challenges and be more emotionally mature?

To respond with objectivity and agility, to respond better in the moment when these things happen in the future because they're going to.

One thing is guaranteed in life are future challenges.

We are not immune from them.

So what are you going to do then?

When it happens, what's your plan?

And the answer is to a certain degree what I discussed this week, but also your own custom solution here, your own variation on this.

How do you want to live?

How do you want to emote?

How do you want to relate to other people?

These are important questions.

Like, do you want to be the nice guy in the room who never says anything or the angry guy in the corner who's always yelling?

For me, it's kind of a mixture of the two of them in some weird way.

But like we're looking for that specific clarity on who do you want to be and go become that person and map out a plan and see it through.

This is all very actionable.

It's all very doable, but it starts with intentionality.

Make the choice today to know who you're trying to become.

Map that out.

Make it happen.

Hey, for the action step this week, let's go make that plan that outlines how you're going to respond to all of those future challenges and potential emotional outbursts or other issues.

The best way to prevent a problem is to assume it's happening now and put a smart plan on paper today.

How would a more mature version of you respond to a future issue?

What characteristics of your personality do you want to amplify and which ones do you want to extinguish?

We all have room to grow here.

So be intentional.

Put a plan in action and then reference it as soon as you need it.

Now of course, subscribe to this podcast and your favorite podcast app or become a VIP member of the 5am Miracle community by getting the premium ad free version with exclusive bonus episodes at 5ammiraclepremium.com.

That's all I've got for you here on the 5am Miracle podcast this week.

Until next time, you have the power to change your life and all that fun begins bright and early.

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