Anger Management For Software Engineers - Managing Frustration

today I wanted to talk about managing frustration so I actually had this come up from someone that I mentor and they were asking for some input and some feedback on trying to get better at informally leading projects so in their position they're not like a manager but they're trying to do some more technical leadership and and project management in their role and they were curious about managing frustration and just to kind of drop an example here say that you're working with some people and you are trying to navigate how to make progress on a project and you have certain individuals on the project that don't seem to either be aligning they're having they could be having challenges with some of the goal States and the dates that you're trying to meet or the expectations of the project and this individual was asking like how do I try to get better at managing frustration when I'm working through projects like this and I thought this was a really good Reflection from this individual because in my opinion it's it's a normal thing that you'll find either at work or just in life where you get frustrated with things and I think that being able to identify that you are getting frustrated is like is a really good thing um because if you're not aware of it then being able to manage it is basically impossible so first of all I wanted to share with this individual that I thought that it was good that they could identify that and then from that point you know how do you start to make improvements and work on managing them so the first thing I told them as I said was good that you can identify it and the other part that I wanted to mention to them as someone who's a little bit newer to some formal sorry informal leadership opportunities is that you're going to find that as you have more and more of these experiences that it's essentially impossible to please everyone all the time so that does not mean that because you can't please everyone all the time that you should ignore people but what I tried to share with this person is that you could be doing your best effort you could be trying to improve and you could legitimately be improving on your leadership capabilities but you will always find that there's going to be someone who's not totally on board not pleased not happy with the situation and I wanted to let this person know that you should not take that personally so don't let one person kind of hold you back from feeling like you're making progress or or doing a good job instead when you have situations like this in my opinion it's a good opportunity to kind of stand back from the situation right look at what's going on try to understand why this person's getting frustrated or not totally on board and then try to see if you're able to make you know micro optimizations and I say that because in this particular situation this person was already doing what I would consider is um you know a good deal of effort to try and make sure that everyone's on on the same page everyone's kind of got the latest status updates you know doing a good job communicating but um but what else right what else could they be doing how much more can they be over communicating and I just said to them I think it's an opportunity for you to kind of reflect understand why this other individual is frustrated and try to see if there's little things you can do but that does not mean that because one person is getting you know they're having challenges they're frustrated anything like that that all of your work is not you know not warranted not valued and that you're doing a bad job because say one person is kind of having some challenges so this feedback I think for that person was really helpful that you know it's helping them understand that they are on the right track of trying to make progress but uh something else that I wanted to kind of touch on is like in the moment uh frustration right so it's one thing if you're finding over time that you're kind of maybe building up a little bit of frustration with getting folks on board um but I said that in the moment uh can be a bit of a dangerous thing right so if you're having conversations with people if we're working remotely you know if you say it's a video call voice call whatever but you know in person too this can absolutely happen you want to be able to make sure that you can manage your emotions and I feel like I'm hopeful that for most people especially watching this video if you're say you're younger earlier in career I'm very hopeful that you've uh not experienced or you've had very limited experiences with people in meetings um you know kind of losing their temper and stuff like that um you know it's it's one thing to have um heated discussions you know uh you know being passionate about your perspective and and disagreeing like I think that's all very good you should be doing that but it's different when people start to lose their temper and then from that point on essentially the conversation's not productive so hopefully people have limited experience with that because uh quite frankly even in my career it's been quite limited where I've seen that but the the best way I can describe it is that it feels embarrassing to watch um it feels really bad to see people lose their temper um you know even I've seen or heard of people in you know positions of uh that I would have a lot of respect for them and to sort of in my opinion you kind of lose it all when you start to uh to lose your temper so my my feedback to this individual was like when you're in a position say you're on a call or whatever and you find that you're getting a little bit frustrated like try as best as possible to um I I guess the phrase is like be the bigger person like you want to kind of um pause make sure you're taking a deep breath you don't want to be acting out of emotion and try to seek to understand right so if you notice that you're getting frustrated and someone else is getting frustrated instead of having this escalation process where you know you keep getting louder talking at each other and they said add each other not with each other because you're probably not hearing anything the other person's saying instead of having this escalation process if you're able to try and control your feelings if you want to take this opportunity to actually understand where this other person is coming from make sure that they feel heard right that does not mean that you need to make sure that you are doing everything they say that they're getting their way and you're just kind of giving up on things you might be debating about or discussing it's not what I'm suggesting but I am suggesting that you make an effort to try and make sure that this person's perspective is heard and I think that that can go a really long way with helping de-escalate things because I think sometimes people get very frustrated because they feel like they're not heard and that's why they often end up repeating themselves they get louder right they're just trying to like someone hear me someone acknowledge me so I think that was my number one tip for them in the moment for managing frustration and really it wasn't it wasn't so much of a tip of here's how you get less frustrated but it was more of like here's how you can de-escalate things and stop this feedback loop where you might be getting frustrated from the responses and then the other part that I mentioned at the beginning of this video was was really about this sort of call it like offline like frustration building and they're similar right you want to take an opportunity to step back kind of press pause for yourself and try to understand why other people are having challenges and I think those two things together were my my focus that I wanted to touch on today about managing frustration and you know just a reminder for folks that it's normal um it's you're not going to go through life or your career without getting frustrated by things but it's all about how you deal with it and I think that there's a lot of things that you can do to kind of channel that frustration which involves basically stepping back doing a bit of analysis being honest with yourself and trying to seek to understand where other people are having some challenges so that was just a quick one for today on different ways that you can kind of look at managing frustration so hopefully found that helpful and we'll see you next time foreign