How to Help Someone in a Bad Mood

Negative emotions are swirling around the workplace these days: overwhelm at the endless workload (and thoughtload), friction among coworkers, and stress from financial pressures. When negative emotions start swirling, it’s easy to get caught up in the emotional storm. I’ve shared the techniques you can use to prevent, limit, and recover from emotional contagion, but how can you help your colleagues work through their bad moods?

How NOT to Help Someone Who’s in a Bad Mood

Let’s start with what not to do because I see plenty of unhelpful help. Rather than improving your teammate’s spirits, these faux pas are more likely to intensify and lengthen a bad mood. Also, when you make these mistakes, you risk eroding your connection and trust.

Trying to Downplay the Negative Feelings

If you try to minimize the person’s negative feelings, you inadvertently tell them they’re overreacting. Even if you’re trying to be nice by saying something like, “It’ll be okay,” you’re shutting down the conversation and signaling that you’re not safe to talk to when they aren’t feeling their best. Don’t downplay it.

Rushing the Person Through Their Feelings

I know you’ve got a lot going on, and who has time to listen to a teammate complaining or fretting, right? But I promise you that rushing someone or pushing them to feel better quickly will only prolong the agony. If they don’t have time to unpack their feelings with you, they’ll find another outlet that might be more passive-aggressive and ultimately more destructive. Don’t rush it.

Attempting to Solve Their Problems

Nice people (and also pragmatic people) often try to remove people’s discomfort by solving the underlying problem for them. While that sounds helpful, your teammate might interpret it as your lack of confidence in them. It might feel condescending or like you’ve overstepped. Unless they ask for your assistance, stay passive. Don’t fix it.

Giving Advice

You might not try to fix the underlying cause of your teammate’s bad mood, but giving advice can be just as problematic. Often, advice misses the mark because you’re not an expert in their area, you lack context about the situation and the stakeholders, or your solutions work for you but not necessarily for someone else. Don’t own it.

How to Help Someone Cure Their Bad Mood

While many things you do (with the best of intentions) will exacerbate your colleague’s bad mood, there are ways to assist them as they work their way through their funk.

Each of these ideas follows this set of guiding principles:

Emotions contain valuable information, and as Nick Wignall suggests, it helps to address them as a puzzle rather than a problem.Suppressing emotions leads to more issues, whereas reappraising or reframing them creates positive outcomes.The thoughts and stories people wrap around their emotions matter most. Change the story, but don’t invalidate the emotion itself.It is overstepping to try to fix or solve someone else’s problems.

With that said, let’s jump into what you can do to assist.

Make the Space

If your colleague appears to be in a bad mood, carve out the time and find a safe space to help them reflect on what’s happening. Stick to describing what you see rather than making assumptions about their thoughts or feelings. For example, you might say, “I noticed you looked down a lot during that meeting. How were you processing the conversation?”

Question the Story

As I’ve discussed in previous posts, emotions themselves aren’t usually problematic; it’s the stories we attach to them that can cause a concern to escalate. You can help a colleague disentangle the emotion from their feelings by asking questions to get to the root of the issue and then encouraging them to try other interpretations.

For example, if they tell you they felt belittled in the meeting because the boss shut down their idea, you might say, “You’re concluding that Stewart doesn’t think you’re smart. What other explanations exist for why he didn’t take your idea?”

Alternatively, you can share your interpretation. “I sense that Stewart didn’t pick up on your idea because he was surprised by it. How could you revisit it with him once he’s had a chance to think about it more?”

Move them Forward

When your colleague is experiencing negative emotions, they might need a little help getting unstuck. My favorite questions provide gentle guidance forward. When the person is focused on what’s wrong, ask them to consider what might make things better. “What do you need?”

If they are circling the problem without lifting their eyes to the horizon, ask them what might be a first step in the right direction. “Where from here?” Using questions rather than offering up your answers or advice is a way of helping them process their emotional reaction without invalidating how they feel or taking ownership of their issue.

Model more Optimism

Once you have met your colleague where they’re at, you can lead them away from their negative feelings toward more constructive, positive, and even optimistic emotions. That’s because emotional contagion can reverse direction and you can begin to influence your teammate.

As your conversation progresses, shift your facial expressions and body language to be more positive. Sit up a little bit straighter, raise your brow, and smile. This pivot will be particularly effective if you pair the subtle changes in your body language with more positive, forward-looking things they say. You can reverse the polarity of the emotional contagion and share your good mood with them.

Conclusion

Sometimes, you might wish you had a magic wand to transform someone’s negative mood into a positive one immediately. Sadly, no such tool exists. But what you do have at your disposal is a magic mirror—a way to change a person’s mood by projecting a face you want them to reflect.

Additional Resources

10 Helpful Things To Do When You’re Overwhelmed

Getting Emotional in a Difficult Conversation

How to work with emotional data

 

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Published on May 19, 2024 04:54
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