One day we were informed that our boss was resigning. His successor was to be a salesman from the USA. You have to know that my old boss sat in the office next door and I really enjoyed working with him. So if I had a question, I simply went one door further.

I imagined a horror scenario with the new boss without ever having met him. Thoughts about future scenarios of working together emerged. How would that work if he was in a different time zone? He doesn't know me or my work and also comes from sales. Numbers and KPIs are certainly more important to him than the employees. He certainly won't approve my upcoming training...

How can this behavior be explained?

Well, my emotions got the better of me and I felt threatened and helpless as an employee. On a physical level, the feeling of fear ultimately leads to an increased heartbeat, adrenaline and cortisol levels. One consequence of this is instinctive behavior and I was no longer able to act consciously. Because I had no access to my prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for rational thinking.

What did I do? I ran around like a startled chicken and said to myself, there's no way I'm staying here. I activated my entire network. After all, why had I been at the company for 20 years? I asked everywhere whether they needed someone with my qualifications. Everywhere I went I got the message: headcount freeze, i.e. we are not allowed to hire anyone at the moment.

That was actually my good fortune: it turned out that my initial fears were completely unfounded. The new guy was a great boss and I had the same freedom as before. After working with him for a while, I realized that he was one of the best bosses I had ever had.

Keep calm - but how?

In hindsight, I was completely overreacting. From today's perspective, it would have been more helpful to keep calm first. However, we humans generally find it very difficult to relax these days, which is why we have a permanently high stress level. If I had taken three deep breaths first, I could have consciously realized that I was letting my emotions get the better of me. This would have allowed me to act consciously again.

Noticing and naming emotions - get out of the thinking trap!

I should then have noticed and named my emotion and eventually my intensity of reaction would have flattened out.

Instead, I fell into my own thinking traps. I "catastrophized" and turned a change of boss into a crisis. I also generalized and thought that sales people only looked at figures and results and didn't care about the well-being of their employees.

It's now been 10 years since this happened. Thanks to working on myself and regular training in the form of meditation, such situations and mental traps happen to me much less often. I learned to recognize the traps and regulate my emotional impulses. As a result, I am no longer helplessly at the mercy of such situations, but can shape them myself.

Tips from the coach

• Keep calm!
• Breathe slowly and consciously
• Recognize and name emotions
• Recognize thought patterns and consciously counteract them
• Regular training such as meditation

The author

Susanne Schlenker, Leadership Choices

© Susanne Schlenker

Susanne Schlenker is a long-standing coach at Leadership Choices, a resilience and mindfulness trainer and a bereavement and grief counselor. As an American by birth and with 26 years of international corporate experience, she supports managers in developing their self-awareness and self-leadership skills.

Her own program "Corporate Human Growth with Mindfulness" to strengthen resilience is based on her experience in introducing mindfulness in companies. She is also certified by Leadership Choices in their FiRE model of resilience and acts as co-lead of the resilience community there.