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In Shift: Managing Your EmotionsSo They Dont Manage You, Ethan Kross shares a comeback story about tennis champion Novak Djokovic. It was the Wimbledon quarterfinal and Djokovic, who was the No. 1 seed, was down two sets (5-7, 2-6) against 20-year-old Jannik Sinner. After the second set, he requested a break. Then he awed the crowd by triumphantly winning the next three sets (6-3, 6-2, 6-2). What shifted? Djokovic shared that he gave himself a pep talk in the locker room. He looked himself in the eyes and said: You can do it. Believe in yourself. Now is the time, forget everything that has happened. New match starts now. Lets go, champ. Djokovic utilized distanced self-talk, an emotion regulation tool that Kross writes about, to recalibrate himself. A week later, he won Wimbledon for the eighth time. Djokovics story illustrates the central theme of Shift: You dont have to live at the mercy of your emotions. With the right tools, you can learn to master them. Kross is one of the worlds foremost experts on emotion regulation. As an award-winning professor at the University of Michigan, he leads its Emotion and Self-Control Lab and shares his work as a bestselling author. In our conversation, he illuminates how to cultivate emotional resilience, stop an anxiety spiral, and reframe stress to elevate performance. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You describe that our perception of self-efficacy is a master belief. When it comes to our emotions, learning what we can and can’t control is critical to building it. Can you explain? Several years ago, I came across a study that was as close as you can get to shivers running down your spine when reading scientific literature: 40% of respondents say that they can’t control their emotions. When I first encountered this finding, it was a mind blower. I run the Emotion and Self Control Lab. My whole life is dedicated to this concept. Yet, close to half of a sample doesn’t think that it’s even possible to manage your emotions. [Image: Courtesy of Ethan Kross] If you don’t believe that something is possible, why would you make any efforts to try to achieve that impossible goal? You wouldn’t. Decades of research demonstrate that compellingly. The 40% of people who said that you can’t control your emotions, it’s not that they were wrong. There are facets of our emotional lives and experiences that are out of our control. I share an anecdote about how when I’m in the gym, I’ll often have this very dark, maniacal thought about carrying a dumbbell and dropping it on someone’s face. What’s wrong with me that I’m thinking about that? That’s probably my brain preparing me for a worst-case scenario. So it motivates me to squeeze the dumbbell tighter or put it in the opposite hand so I don’t drop it. I never have, but I experience those dark thoughts sometimes. There’s this whole dimension of our lives that is characterized by these automatic emotional responses. We don’t have control over that. But what we do have control over is what happens once those thoughts and feelings are activated. You highlight the reframing paradox and explain that when it comes to reframing, one of the big challenges is that people don’t know how to reframe their experiences adaptively and fall into the trap of reframing negatively. What are the hidden traps of the reframing paradox and how can we avoid them? The way to avoid them is to first understand that this trap exists. Knowledge is power. We often think about reframing as a universal good. But reframing can be a force of good or bad. You can make the argument, as I have, that a lot of what happens when we’re anxious or depressed is that we’re reframing things. When I’m getting myself anxious, Im thinking about all of the what ifs. Im thinking differently about this, but in a negative direction. Then, the question is: If reframing is taking me in the wrong direction, how can I right the ship and have it take me in the right direction? There are a couple of tactics that are often useful. Distanced self talk: Try to give yourself advice like you would a friend. When friends are struggling with things, you don’t give them advice to make them feel worse. So, what would you say to a friend? We don’t always say those things to ourselves. Another reframing tool can be mental time travel: How am I going to feel about this next month, next week, or next year? The fires [in Los Angeles] are a great example of that. How are the fires going to feel next year? Five years from now? They are awful right now, but things are going to get better. Has there ever been a natural disaster that we haven’t recovered from in this country? For those who have survived thus far, you could also go back in time and think about other kinds of adversity to put this in perspective. There are a lot of people who are dealing with tragic circumstances who don’t have the resources, either personally or countrywide, that you have to deal with this. You share a study that found that our interpretation of our physiological stress response influences our levels of anxiety. Illustrate that process for us and how we can leverage it to not only regulate our emotions, but elevate our performance. This is one of my go to tactics. Experiencing physiological symptoms of stress or anxiety is a common part of that experience. Good luck trying to not have that reaction. Its probably not desirable either, because we know that a moderate level of stress can be good for performance. It energizes you and mobilizes your resources. Research indicates that how you interpret what you’re experiencing physiologically can push you in different directions. If I’m getting butterflies in my stomach or I have to go to the bathroom, its notOh crap, I’m not preparedwhich is one way of interpreting it. Instead, its saying: Lucky me. My body is like a Lamborghini. Im getting ready to perform. It is a game changer to reframe what you’re experiencing, not as a threat and that there’s something wrong with you, but rather: This is how you’re supposed to be feeling. Use it to your benefit. Research shows that distanced self-talk promotes wise reasoning and intellectual humility. Why is it so effective? What tactics, such as using you, can help us apply it? Distancing as a tool is useful because it allows us to look at our experiences from a broader point of view, rather than getting trapped in a more narrow take on the situation, which can feel restrictive and fuel our emotional experiences. What are we taught to do from when we’re kids when it comes to a difficult problem? Roll up your sleeves and work through it. Zoom in really carefully. But, what we’ve learned is that sometimes doing the oppositezooming out and looking at that bigger pictureis helpful for navigating these circumstances. What’s interesting about language is that it seems to allow us to relatively automatically shift our perspective. Take the word you. You is a word that we virtually use exclusively when we think about referring to other people. We know that it’s much easier for us to give advice to other people than it is for ourselves. So, when you use the word you to think about your own experience, it’s as though it’s automatically putting you into this advice giving mode. Now, I’m thinking about it like I’m talking to someone else. I’m pretty good with other people; Someone else goes through my problems and I can give you the solution for what they should do easily. But, I can’t do that for myself. You is applying that lens to my own life. We can also use the word you generically. What it involves is using the word you to refer to people in general; You don’t give a great talk. What are you going to do? It happens to everyone. There, I’m not using the word you to refer to myself. I’m using it to refer to the universal. We find that when people are trying to make meaning, being able to do this helps them, because it’s not just me. Im talking about a personal experience in these universal terms. I’m taking it away from me and making it about anyone and everyone. You say that avoidance is a key part of flexibility and flexibility is a key indicator of resilience. Can you explain why avoidance can be a superpower? We like simple solutions for good reason. Its easier to follow simple prescriptions. But, we know that research doesn’t support this idea that avoidance is always harmful. Yes, chronic avoidance can get us into trouble. But, being flexible can be effective. Importantly, what I’m talking about is being able to be flexible with how you deploy your attention. There’s a great study where after 9/11 researchers wanted to know which people were going to fair best over time. These were students who were living in New York City when the attacks occurred. The researchers were interested in how the ability to either expressapproach and get your emotions outor suppressbottle up and avoid your emotionsmight factor into this equation. What they did at the beginning of the study was measure the ability of people to express or suppress their emotions when told to do so. Then, they tracked them over time. What they found is that the people who fared the best were those who scored highest on their ability to both express and suppress their emotions. My grandmother grew up in Eastern Poland and was a young adult when the Nazis came. She saw most of her family being slaughtered and narrowly escaped. She lived through all of that and managed to survive. She would never tell me those stories. She wasn’t interested in getting into it, except one day a year when there was a Remembrance Day event that she and her fellow survivors organized where they let their emotions spill out. Over time, what I learned was that it wasn’t that she was chronically avoiding thinking about what happened to her. She was skilled at being flexible in how she deployed her attention. She’s a testament to this idea that its not about being dogmatic in how we apply these principles. Being flexible can make a difference. Lets dive deeper into the psychological immune system. You share that time is one of the most important components of it. Still, there are non-traumatic circumstances that you may keep thinking about for yearssay the loss of a job or friendshipdespite them no longer impacting you. What can we do to clear these from our psychological immune system? Some experiences are harder to let go of. Particularly, the more intense they are, the more time it takes for them to dissipate. One thing I like to remind people of is that theres this natural curve that goes up. Then, as time goes on, our emotional reactions tend to wane in intensity. That’s true of most of our experiences, but not all of them. With experiences that have happened, what you want to be able to do is to make meaning out of them. The fact that you’re still thinking about this suggests that you don’t have closure yet. The question is: What have you tried to do to get closure around this experience? What is standing in the way of you achieving that closure? Is there some cognitive work that you need to do to reframe it more effectively? Is it a conversation you need to have with this person to put it all out there? Thats what you would want to target to understand why you still think about it. Attention is an important aspect of our emotional life, particularly because we often focus on what’s going wrong rather than what’s going right. What are the most effective beliefs or practices to shift from having a scarcity mindset to an abundant mindset? It’s about being aware of that distinction and trying to find evidence that contradicts it. This is where the power to reframe can be so effective. We always have the ability to reframe our circumstances. A good example of this might be the work on social comparisons that I talk about. We tend to think about social comparisons as toxic, in particular, when we’re comparing ourselves against people who are doing better than us. It elicits envy. Yes, that is a pervasive phenomenon. But, what we lose sight of when we cling to that narrative is that we can also benefit from those social comparisons when we flip them. If I see someone who is outperforming me across the board and it elicits that initial sting, I can dwell on how much better their life is than mine or I can think about them as a beacon that I can try to navigate towards, like: Hey, if they can do it, so can I. Why don’t I try to achieve this? Im flipping from what I don’t have to what I can attain. You can also do it in the opposite direction for people who are doing a lot worse than you. One of the ways that people often think about them is: Oh man, it happened to them. It can happen to me. That doesn’t feel good. Or, I can think: Wow, I’m really grateful that didn’t happen to me. Look at how much worse circumstances could be. Reflecting on our conversation and the book, a thread that stands out is that the quality of our thoughts determines the quality of our life experience. I’d love to close with a few questions that we can ask ourselves to continuously elevate that equation. I would say the nature of our thoughts, more than the quality. Our thoughts allow us to interpret the inputs that come in and that is one of our greatest superpowers. It means that we arent reacting in a default way to the situations that we encounter in the world. We can make sense of them in different ways, and how we make sense of them can put us on a completely different emotional trajectory. Simply recognizing that is number one. But, then committing ourselves to identifying the most profitable ways of making sense of our experiences. What I man by profitable is, not in the monetary sense, but in the sense of: What are the interpretations of this world that allow you to live the life that you want to live? Its an unbelievably powerful tool that we want to hone.
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Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Companys work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: How do I get a hiring manager to respond to me?A: Ive been on both sides of this scenario. I know how frustrating it can be to send your résumé and cover letter out into the void and wait for weeks without hearing anything. I also know how overwhelming it can be as a hiring manager to shift through hundreds of applications while meeting all of the normal demands of your job. So its a delicate balance. As a candidate you just want to know, but you also dont want to annoy the person who you are hoping to impress.Heres how to approach it:Follow the rulesThe first and most important step is to follow the instructions for applying. If the job posting requires you to upload your résumé to the corporate site, do it. Read the listing carefully to make sure you apply in exactly the format they ask for with exactly the materials they ask for. If the listing asks for a cover letter, write oneand not a generic one, one thats tailored to the position and company. If the listing asks candidates to include work samples or references, include those. This may sound basic, but many candidates just fire off résumés to hundreds of open positions. Not following basic instructions is an easy way to knock yourself out of the running.Give it a little time, then find a real personEven if the company needs to fill the role urgently, hiring takes time. Wait at least a week after applying to send out your first outreach. Do the leg work to find who is likely the hiring manageror at least someone who works in the department. Do not blast ten people at the company with a to whom it may concern message. The same advice for getting people to respond to any email applies here, too. You have a much better chance of getting a response if you can find a common connection and have that person recommend you. Be clear and conciseIf you cant find a connection, and you’re sending a cold email, be as clear and concise as possible. Make your subject line the title of the role you are applying for. Let the hiring manager know that you have applied according to the listing instructions and then in one or two sentences explain why you are excited about the role and how you are a good fit. If you have non-traditional experience, you can briefly explain your transferable skills so they will hopefully take a closer look at your application.If you do land an interview, you can end up with another bout of waiting after the interview. Your first step after an interview is to send a thank you note, which can help solidify a good impression and follow up on things you talked about in the interview. After that, the same rules apply as far as giving it at least a week before following up again and keeping your message short and sweet. Best of luck!Want some more advice on following up on a job? Here you go: How do I get people to respond to my emails? A recruiter shares the best way to follow up on a job application This is how to write a follow-up email thats not annoying 12 effective strategies for messaging recruiters on LinkedIn that will get noticed Can I ask a hiring manager to reconsider if I dont get the job?
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Earlier this week, a doctor friend told me about a frustrating new obstacle hes facing at work. In normal times, hes relied on websites operated by the U.S. federal government for practical information on everything from vaccine side effects to advice for families traveling to exotic areas. But the Trump administrations move to strip sites of material relating to gender ideology and other topics the new president and his allies find objectionable has resulted in many pages disappearing from the web. My friend has been making do by consulting versions of the pages stored at the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. But thats hardly a long-term solution. For one thing, those cached copies may be out of date. For another, its not a given that the Internet Archive will always be available when we need it. A New York Times article by Ethan Singer details the scale of the purge. More than 8,000 pages have been wiped away on subjects ranging from the Department of Health and Human Services Head Start program to avoidance of IRS penalties to telltale signs of dementia. Just the deletions relating to census dataone of the federal governments most vital resourceshave affected 3,000 pages. As pages have continued to vanish, others have returned, and the only explanation has come in the form of vague sitewide banners such as CDCs website is being modified to comply with President Trumps Executive Orders. As with other elements of the administrations rush to reshape how the federal government worksor doesnt workthe chaos may be the point. All of this is alarming even before you consider what a government online presence rewritten to Donald Trumps specifications might look like. Reportedly, it involves excising not just references to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also a bevy of other terms, including apparently controversial concepts such as belonging, empathy, and fairness. For more than a quarter century, the web has been a primary interface between citizens and their government. It may be more critical than its physical counterpartor at least I cant remember the last time I had to visit a federal office in person. By taking its language policing more seriously than the duty to provide information to the public, the new administration is failing at one of its most basic responsibilities. That raises a new specter that hadnt been on my list of things to worry about: tactical removal of pages from government sites as a tool for impeding knowledge. For example, I hate to think about a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccination website full of information created under the imprimatur of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But simply eliminating the current sites information and replacing it with . . . nothingness might do nearly as much damage as spreading RFK Jr.s cherished misinformation on the subject. It could be done with a few clicksa much simpler task than shutting down entire government departments, which is also part of Trumps plan for the nation. Im not saying that an even more sprawling, permanent site-scrubbing is definitely going to happen. As with many things about current events, Trumps own comments on the edits (“I don’t know. That doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.”) dont make clear hes paying attention, and leave him infinite wriggle room if he is. All we can do is keep paying attention, maybe with a newfound appreciation for a government benefit that has been quietly essential and easy to take for granteduntil now. Yes, you can have too much storage Recently, I bought a 16 TB hard drive. It cost about $270, whichunadjusted for inflationis a little over half what I paid for a drive I remember buying in the 1990s. That one had 500 MB of space, or 1/32,000th the capacity of the drive I just got. 1990s me, who was thrilled to add an entire half-gigabyte (!!!) of space to my PC would have been ecstatic to know that storage would continue to get ever vaster and cheaper. Oddly enough, though, my new 16 TB drive, which I added to a server that sits on my home network, has not brought me unalloyed pleasure. Instead, maxing out the space I already had made me question whether I should concentrate on deleting files rather than making room for more. Not that digital hoarding isnt tempting. Unlike its physical counterpart, its unlikely to result in the new stuff overwhelming the old: I do a fairly respectable job of organizing it all into folders, part of a broader storage strategy that also involves several cloud services. Im grateful to have enough room for a precious archive of family photos and letters, as well as ancient Word documents I still reference (for articles such as this one) and email that dates to 1994. I even ditched almost all the printed copies of magazines Ive written forhundreds of issuesand replaced them with PDFs. Still, like Scrooge McDuck filling his money bin with 3 cubic acres of cash and then burrowing through it like a gopher, I may have gone overboard. I use a wonderful piece of software called Channels to record streaming TV and over-the-air stations directly to my home network. These videos are mine, all minea comfort in an era when Netflix has only five movies made before 1980and tough to part with. Yet they represent the single most voracious disk-space gobbler in my life. And even if I had infinite time on my hands, I wouldnt use it to binge all the TV and movies Ive preserved. Another thing that haunts me: An unknown but significant percentage of my disk space is devoted to files that are duplicates, triplicates, or beyond. How I ended up with so many redundant ones, Im not sure. But they multiply like Tribbles, and eliminating all the redundant ones might feel like getting a new hard disk for free. After mulling all this over, doing some housecleaning, and finding I was still low on available space, I took the easy route by purchasing that new drive. Itll surely get me well into 2027, and maybe way beyond. By the time its full, even more mammoth disks should be available for even less money. It would be nice, however, to think Ill be more disciplined by thena little less Uncle Scrooge, a little more Marie Kondo. If you have any tips on digital self-restraint, Im dying to hear them. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if youre readin it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. Im also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. More top tech stories from Fast Company OpenAI reveals new AI tool that can do online research for youDeep Research can gather information from across the web and summarize it in easy-to-read reports. Read More Will a return to OG Facebook appeal to Gen Z?Mark Zuckerberg certainly seems to think so. Read More Google teams up with Samsung to take on Dolby AtmosThe two companies are betting on the power of branding to turn their new immersive audio format into a success story. Read More 3 quick ways to free up iPhone storage spaceSave space, save time, save yourself from the Storage Almost Full pop-up. Read More I tried a mindfulness browser to make work less stressful. Maybe you should, tooOpen Air from the Norwegian company Opera is billed as the first-ever mindful browser. Its intended to combat the chaotic nature of the web. Read More This scrappy search upstart is getting thousands of people to give up GoogleAs Google results grow cluttered and AI runs rampant on the web, Kagi is winning over disillusioned searchers with an engine that puts them first. Read More
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