Develop Emotional Intelligence With the Emotional Postmortem

A few weeks ago, I messed up.

We were on a family vacation, and the day went well: good food, played ball with the kids, even a little hide-and-seek.

But it was getting late. I was tired. My wife was tired. The kids were tired.

As the kids complaints started adding up, so did our stress level. So when I saw my 10-year-old drinking a soda just before bedtime, it got to me. I overreacted.

Afterwards, I felt horrible. There were tons of lessons to this experience, things I could have done differently…But how could I learn from it all?

Enter the emotional postmortem.

What’s an emotional postmortem?

Similar to a medical postmortem, the purpose of an emotional postmortem is to determine the cause of “death,” or failure. In this case, it’s the failure to control emotions—what we often refer to as the emotional hijack, because the amygdala, the brain’s emotional processor, “hijacks” your brain and causes you to react without thinking.

As you might remember from other lessons, emotional hijacks aren’t always bad…but they are when they cause you to speak or act in a way that you later regret.

There are tons of factors that lead up to an emotional hijack. For example, if you’re having a bad day, each thing that goes wrong can build upon the next, until the final one pushes you over the edge.

Of course, it would be great if you could always identify the circumstances that lead up to an emotional hijack, so you could prevent them when needed. But you won’t always succeed. And that’s why there’s great value in analyzing an emotional hijack after it happens.

When you conduct an “emotional postmortem,” you identify what caused the hijack, so you can make adjustments in the future. That helps you to avoid repeating the same bad habits over and over. For example, after my outburst on my vacation, I went for a drive to give me time to think. As I did, I tried to figure out exactly what led up to my hijack.

My postmortem revealed a number of factors that led to me losing my cool:

• my tired state
• my kids’ repeatedly not listening towards the end of the day
• my not addressing these mistakes earlier, allowing each to build on the other

To address these factors, I did the following:

1. First, I took some time to cool down. Then, I apologized to my son for overreacting.

2. Over the next day, I had a talk with:

• my kids: about their need to pay better attention to their mother and me
• my wife: about our need to develop a plan of action when the kids don’t listen
• myself (mentally): about my need to be more aware of all these things as they happen, and to follow through on our new plans

Whether or not you have kids, you can use the postmortem to help you after an emotional hijack.

How do you do an emotional postmortem?

Here’s the process for conducting an emotional postmortem:

1. Walk away and analyze.

After you’ve experienced an emotional hijack, walk away. Get a change of scenery.

Once you calm down, try to determine what led up to the hijack…and what you can do to prevent a similar one in the future.

2. Make adjustments.

Once you’ve figured out what led to the hijack, you need to make changes—or else you run the risk of repeating the same thing again. After all, your emotional triggers are unlikely to change.

That means you either need to:

• Lessen the chances you encounter a similar situation
• Adjust how you react to those situations

Remember, no matter how much you work on building self-control, you’re not going to be perfect. Your emotions will still get the best of you at times.

But a postmortem can help you learn from any emotional hijacks you do experience.

It can help you to reduce the number of those hijacks…

And it can give you the chance to make amends with any who suffered harm in the process.

So, the next time you experience an emotional hijack, follow it with a postmortem.

It won’t make you perfect, but it can make you better.

Want a series of frameworks and tools—including the Emotional Postmortem—to help you better understand and manage your emotions? Check out The Rules of Emotional Intelligence.