I was unfairly removed from a course leaderboard and badly wanted to say it all in front of everyone. Here's why I didn't, and what the pause gave me.
Every time strong emotions take hold of you, it’s worth stopping and calming down. When we’re angry, we speak very confidently and well — but our emotions are often the ones doing the talking, and we speak harshly.
Today we finished a six-week course on social media that I took part in very actively. Throughout the course we were strongly encouraged to record all our results and send them to a dedicated Telegram bot.
The course demanded a certain amount of commitment and discipline. I filmed and published videos every day and figured out a range of tools that were new to me.
When it came time to sum up the results, I entered all my numbers into the Telegram bot and saw that I was in 1st place among all participants. That felt good, though I understood the ranking wasn’t final yet and was still taking shape.
When today’s final call came, it turned out I had simply been removed from the leaderboard. I wasn’t even among the top 15 participants. The people who took the prize places had far worse results than I did.
The course support team explained it by saying they only counted beginners’ results, and I was already experienced with social media.
They could have said that in advance, and I wouldn’t have spent that much of my time on unnecessary reports and collecting all the analytics.
During the final call today I very much wanted to take the floor and say all of this to the organisers in front of everyone else on the course.
Then emotional intelligence kicked in. I thought about the fact that I would be speaking from a place of anger and irritation — and nothing is ever created in that state. Never. Only destroyed.
So I decided to simply talk to the people who organised this one on one afterwards and point out the terrible logic behind decisions like that. With one strange move they completely destroyed their reputation and all the trust they had earned before.
Even so, I decided not to act in the heat of the moment.
You can be right on substance in a situation and wrong in tone. When we’re emotional, it’s better not to speak — better to calm down first.
And do you manage to rein in your emotions in situations like this?