It’s easy to be frustrated at work. Everyone’s familiar with the feeling, be it from the work you put in not achieving the desired result, or someone else taking credit for your work, or your needs not being met by your employer. Working with this feeling of frustration means finding the source, being aware of the potential triggers, and utilising the correct methods to institute the appropriate emotional response.

1. Be aware of what your trigger is

What is a trigger? A trigger is something around your environment that elicits an emotional response that is far greater than necessary. There are some known triggers in some industries (in technology it would be bugs in code for instance or unfinished or incorrect reports in finance), but everyone has unique circumstances that bring about these feelings of frustration. Some examples include: If you are forced to wait for something, when people exert less effort than you at work, when someone interrupts your work or even someone sending you a curt text or email that throws off your day.

2. Check yourself before you wreck yourself

Like the Ice Cube classic goes, observe your emotional response when a trigger does arise, to ensure you’re not going to react in a way that may be detrimental to your working life. When these events do happen, what do you do? If you are aware of your response, you can start to make adjustments when they do occur to ensure an outburst does not occur.

Examples may include going for a walk to get some fresh air, getting a coffee, going to the gym, or even should the issue be so great, calling it a day and working from home. Once you are able to check up on your response, you will no longer have the emotional outbursts frustrations can cause.

3. Reframe frustration as a different version of success.

Lastly, the most important way to deal with frustration at work is to reframe your expectations of the situation to shed a positive light on things. This can be not easy to do, as most frustrations come from unmet expectations. This will often manifest in your internal dialogue saying things like “this is not the way this is meant to happen”, and subsequently “therefore, this person/company is an idiot”.

If you find yourself saying this sort of thing to yourself when meeting setbacks, try and reframe the event to recognise the opportunity that may be presenting itself because of this setback. There was a company that we recently worked with, who had hired a developer for a project, and ended up having to throw out most of the code that this developer had written. Their brief to us stated that they had been presented with a unique opportunity to optimise their code structure for futureproofing.

Ultimately, it’s important to say to yourself “where I am is exactly where I need to be” no matter what happens. Being frustrated at work can be hard, but knowing what to do about it can make it a lot easier.

David Thorburn - Talent Manager, Social and Analytics, S2M

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David Thorburn works for a leading Digital recruitment firm S2M with offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Singapore .

If you are a Digital Marketer interested in a confidential chat, then get in touch on david.thorburn (at) s2m.com.au