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At its best, work can be energizing, creative, and meaningful. It can also be emotionally exhausting and stressful. Even in healthy organizations, we all deal with interpersonal tension, stinging feedback, impossible deadlines, and the constant pressure to perform. Add in the rapid pace of change and a steady diet of uncertainty, and its no wonder many of us feel perpetually on edge. Stress isnt just a sign that somethings wrongits a signal that something matters. Emotions like frustration, anxiety, and excitement all contain useful data about whats important to us, what we value, and what we need. Yet in most workplaces, were trained to treat emotions as distractions from rational thought rather than as essential information that guides it. When we ignore or misread that emotional data, we lose access to one of our most valuable internal resources. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), originally developed by psychologist Marsha Linehan to help individuals struggling with chronic emotion dysregulation, offers a powerful framework for understanding and responding to emotions effectively. DBT isnt about suppressing or indulging emotionsits about interpreting them accurately and acting wisely in response. The same skills that help people navigate crises and build healthier relationships can help you stay centered in a difficult meeting, receive feedback without spiraling, and recover from professional setbacks with greater resilience. Heres how DBTs core principles can help you use your emotions as dataand manage stress and intensity at work more effectively. 1. Recognize When Youre in Emotion Mind and Do Something Different DBT starts with the idea that many of our problems arise from emotion dysregulationfeeling hijacked by strong emotions and acting in ways that make things worse. At work, that might look like firing off a reactive email, shutting down in a tense discussion, or replaying a negative interaction long after its over. These reactions come from what DBT calls Emotion Minda state in which feelings drive thoughts and behavior, often overriding reason and long-term goals. The antidote is Wise Mind, the integration of emotion and reason. Wise Mind is the space where you can both acknowledge how you feel and still act in ways that serve your goals. When you notice your pulse racing before a presentation or frustration mounting in a team meeting, take a breath. Ask yourself: What is this emotion trying to tell me? Maybe its signaling that you care about doing well, that you value fairness, or that you need more clarity. Once youve decoded that data, you can decide how to respond skillfully rather than react impulsively. 2. Check the Facts Emotions provide information, but not all that information is accurate. Sometimes theyre based on assumptions or incomplete data. You might feel angry when a manager doesnt include you on an email chain and interpret it as rejection, or anxious when a colleagues brief message reads as criticism. DBTs Check the Facts skill helps you distinguish between what your emotions are telling you and whats actually happening. Ask yourself: What exactly happened? What are other possible explanations? Am I assuming intent I cant verify? This isnt about invalidating your feelingstheyre real, even if the story attached to them isnt. Its about ensuring your next action fits the facts, not your assumptions. When you treat emotions as data, checking the facts becomes the emotional equivalent of verifying a source before acting on it. 3. Practice Opposite Action to Change Your Emotion Once youve checked the facts, you can choose whether to act on an emotion or shift it. DBTs Opposite Action skill is a behavioral way to update your emotional data. If your emotion doesnt fit the facts, you do the opposite of what it urges you to do. If youre angry and want to withdraw or lash out, the opposite action might be to approach calmly and with curiosity. If youre anxious before a presentation and want to avoid, the opposite action might be to step forwardto practice, to engage, and to risk. Opposite Action doesnt mean pretending to feel great when you dont. Its about behaving in line with your goals rather than your impulsesand, over time, reshaping the emotion itself. 4. Use Interpersonal Effectiveness Skills to Navigate Difficult Conversations Emotional data doesnt just live inside usit shows up between us. Interpersonal friction is inevitable, especially in environments with high stakes and constant feedback. DBT offers practical tools for these moments. The skill of DEAR MAN provides a clear structure for asserting needs or saying no effectively: Describe the situation objectively. Express how you feel or what you think. Assert what you want or dont want. Reinforce why collaboration helps everyone. Stay Mindful of your goal. Appear confident, even if you dont feel it. Negotiate when needed. You might say: The last few deadlines have been difficult to meet because the workload has increased significantly. Im feeling stretched thin. Id like to discuss redistributing tasks or adjusting the timeline so the work remains high-quality. By integrating emotion and reason, you turn emotional informationIm overwhelmedinto effective communication. Thats what Wise Mind looks like in real time. 5. Cultivate Mindfulness of Current Emotions Mindfulness, the foundation of DBT, helps us observe emotional data without reacting to it. When youre flooded with stressheart pounding, shoulders tense, thoughts racingpause for a moment and name whats happening. Tension in my chest. Tightness in my jaw. Thoughts saying, I cant handle this. Labeling activates the brains prefrontal cortex, shifting you from reaction to reflection. You move from being in the emotion to observing it. That small shiftrecognizing emotion as data rather than as dangercan completely change how you respond. 6. Practice Radical Acceptance Sometimes the data your emotions deliver points to something you cant change: a difficult colleague, a lost opportunity, or an organizational decision you dont agree with. Fighting that reality adds suffering to pain. Radical Acceptance means acknowledging reality fully so you can decide what to do next from clarity rather than denial. You can say: I dont like this, and its happening. This situation is painful, and resisting it isnt helping. Acceptance doesnt mean resignationit means seeing the full picture so you can use your emotional data wisely rather than fighting it blindly. 7. Build Resilience Proactively Most of us think of reslience as bouncing back after stress, but DBT teaches that resilience starts before the stress hits. Skills like PLEASE (taking care of physical health) and ABC (accumulating positive emotions, building mastery, and coping ahead) help maintain emotional stability so your system processes stress more accurately. When your body and mind are well cared for, youre less likely to misread emotional signals as threats. Daily habitssleep, nutrition, movement, connectionarent just wellness clichés. Theyre how you keep your internal data system online and responsive. A New Model of Effectiveness at Work DBTs philosophy is dialectical: balancing acceptance and change. In the workplace, that means recognizing that emotion and reason arent opposites to be managedtheyre partners to be integrated. Emotions are data. They tell us what matters, guide our attention, and strengthen connection. But like any data, they require interpretation and skill to use well. The most effective people and teams arent the ones who avoid emotional intensity; theyre the ones who train for itwho can read emotional cues accurately and respond with balance and wisdom. Thats the heart of DBT: learning to stay grounded, curious, and fully human in the middle of lifesand workschaos. Adapted from Real Skills for Real Life: A DBT Guide to Navigating Stress, Emotions, and Relationships (Guilford Press, 2026).
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E-Commerce
President Barack Obama famously chided Donald Trump in April 2011 during the annual White House correspondents dinner. The reality show star had repeatedly and falsely claimed that Obama had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president. Trumps demands that Obama release his birth certificate had, in part, made Trump a front-runner among Republican hopefuls for their partys nomination in the following years presidential election. Obama referred to Trumps presidential ambitions by joking that, if elected, Trump would bring some changes to the White House. Obama then called attention to a satirical photo the guests could see of a remodeled White House with the words Trump and The White House in large purple letters, followed by the words hotel, casino, and golf course. A projected image is shown on a large screen during President Barack Obama’s speech at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Gala at the Washington Hilton hotel, Washington, D.C., on April 30, 2011. The president showed his humorous side to show what a “Trump” White House might look like. [Photo: Martin H Simon/UPI/Shutterstock] Obamas ridicule of Trump that evening has been credited with inspiring Trump to run for president in 2016. My book, The Art of the Political Putdown, includes Obamas chiding of Trump at the correspondents dinner to demonstrate how politicians use humor to establish superiority over a rival. Obamas ridicule humiliated Trump, who temporarily dropped the birther conspiracy before reviving it. But Trump may have gotten the last laugh by using the humiliation of that night, as some think, as motivation in his run for the presidency in 2016. Demolition of the East Wing of the White House continues for the construction on U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed new ballroom, on October 26, 2025, in Washington, D.C. [Photo: Al Drago/Getty Images] There is a further twist to Obama joking about Trumps renovations to the White House if Trump became president. Trump has fulfilled Obamas prediction, kind of. The Trump administration has razed the East Wing, which sits adjacent to the White House, and will replace it with a 90,000-square-foot, gold-encrusted ballroom that appears to reflect the ostentatious tastes of the president. The US$300 million ballroom will be twice the size of the White House. President Donald Trump speaks holding a photos of the new ballroom during a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on October 22, 2025. [Photo: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post/Getty Images] Its expected to be big enough to accommodate nearly a thousand people. Design renderings suggest that the ballroom will resemble the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, the presidents private estate in Palm Beach, Florida. I dont have any plan to call it after myself, Trump said recently. That was fake news. Probably going to call it the presidential ballroom or something like that. We havent really thought about a name yet. But senior administration officials told ABC News that they were already referring to the structure as The President Donald J. Trump Ballroom. The renovation will have neither a hotel, casino, nor golf course, as Obama mentioned in his lighthearted speech at the 2011 correspondents dinner. Obama pokes fun at Trump In the months before the 2011 correspondents dinner, Trump had repeatedly claimed that Obama had not been born in Hawaii but had instead been born outside the United States, perhaps in his fathers home country of Kenya. The baseless conspiracy theory became such a distraction that Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011. Three days later, Obama delivered his speech at the correspondents dinner with Trump in the audience, where he said that Trump, having put the birther conspiracy behind him, could move to other conspiracy theories like claims the moon landing was staged, aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico, or the unsolved murders of rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. Did we fake the moon landing? Obama said. What really happened at Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac? Obama then poked fun at Trumps reality show, The Apprentice, and referred to how Trump, who owned hotels, casinos, and golf courses, might renovate the White House. When Obama was finished, Seth Meyers, the host of the dinner, made additional jokes at Trumps expense. Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republicanwhich is surprising, since I just assumed that he was running as a joke, Meyers said. Trump gets the last laugh The New Yorker magazine writer Adam Gopnik remembered watching Trump as the jokes kept coming at his expense. Trumps humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man on a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him, Gopnik wrote. There was not a trace of feigning good humor about him. Roger Stone, one of Trumps top advisers, said Trump decided to run for president after he felt he had been publicly humiliated. I think that is the night he resolves to run for president, Stone said in an interview with the PBS program Frontline. I think that he is kind of motivated by it. Maybe Ill just run. Maybe Ill show them all. Trump, if Stone and other political observers are correct, sought the presidency to avenge that humiliation. I thought, Oh, Barack Obama is starting something that I dont know if hell be able to finish, said Omarosa Manigault, a former Apprentice contestant who became Trumps director of African American outreach during his first term. Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump, she said. It is everyone whos ever doubted Donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged himit is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe. The notoriously thin-skinned Trump did not attend the White House correspondents dinner during his first presidency. He also did not attend the dinner during the first year of his second presidency. Although Trump has never publicly acknowledged the importance of that event in 2011, a number of people have noted how pivotal it was, demonstrating how the putdown can be a powerful weapon in politicseven, perhaps, extending to tearing down the White Houses East Wing. Chris Lamb is a professor of journalism at Indiana University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Company culture doesnt affect performance. Thats not a hot take, thats what a 2022 meta analysis from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found when they compared more than 500 research papers on the topic. From the report: The findings are very clear: there is little evidence consistently linking organizational culture to performance, but if such a link should exist, it is very weak and too small to be practically meaningful. As such, organizations and practitioners should be careful spending time and money on company-wide culture change programs as they are not likely to increase performance. And yet, when asked, 92% of executives believe that improving their firms culture would increase the value of their company. So are 92% of executives wrong? And are millions, if not billions, of dollars wasted each year on culture efforts? The short answer? Yes and yes. The full answer is a bit more complicated. Why the myth persists Leaders cling to the idea that culture drives results because it feels controllable. You can write new values, host an off-site, or hire a chief culture officer. Its far easier to reprint the employee handbook than to rewire incentives, decision-making, or priorities. Culture talk offers the illusion of progresssomething visible, moral, and manageablewhile the real performance drivers remain untouched. Company culture is still deeply misunderstood Many leaders talk about culture as something you havea vibe, a set of values, a moodrather than something you do. But culture is not a static asset; its the emergent result of how decisions are made, what gets rewarded or punished, and which behaviors the system makes easy or hard. When executives say we need a culture of innovation, but still require six layers of approval for new ideas, theyre confusing aspiration for infrastructure. Leaders arent being honest about their culture, or with themselves Research from MIT Sloan Management Review (2020) found no correlation between a companys stated values and the lived experience of its employees. In other words, what leaders say their culture is and what people actually feel day-to-day are worlds apart. Firms with large culture gaps see lower productivity and impaired alignment. The misalignment fuels cynicism and distrust, undermining managerial credibility and depleting morale. Employees in these organizations report reduced commitment and higher turnover. Instead of confronting that gap, many double down on optics: slogans, all-hands pep talks, or off-sites meant to rebuild trust. But culture isnt changed through words or ritualsits changed through systems. Decision rights, information flow, meeting cadence, and incentives form the real architecture of behavior. Until leaders are honest enough to align those structures with their rhetoric, culture initiatives will keep delivering the same result: symbolic satisfaction with no measurable performance gains. Leaders arent being strategic about their culture Every era has its cultural role modelthe company everyone else is told to emulate. In the 90s it was Jack Welchs GE. Then it was Apple, then Amazon. Now its Jensen Huangs Nvidia. Each time, executives rush to borrow their rituals and slogans, hoping to import a little of their magic. But lets be honest: your company isnt that companyand it shouldnt be. Culture is simply how strategy gets lived. Which means a best culture doesnt exist, only a fit cultureone that reinforces your distinct strategy and constraints. Copying someone elses culture while pursuing a different strategy isnt just naive, its counter-strategic. The culture obsession is a distraction The corporate world is hooked on culture because its comforting and it makes leadership feel human and moral. But culture talk often becomes a way to avoid harder truths: bad strategy, misaligned incentives, broken systems, and unclear ownership. In our experience as a consulting partner to some of the worlds largest and most complex companies, a culture problem is usually a smokescreen for problems that leaders have long known about and shirked responsibility for: a nice way to avoid assigning blame or deflecting responsibility. And when we analyzed 1,700 public companies and their Glassdoor ratings, we found that the No. 1 topic among negative reviews were complaints about leaders and management. So, poor leadership produces poor cultures. What to do instead Before rushing to rewrite values, produce swag, or drag people to town halls, leaders first need to hold themselves accountable. Do they actually behave in the way they hope others will? Do they collaborate with their peers as one company or is that really just a slogan? Does the way they allocate resources match what they claim to prioritize? Are the people theyre promoting really the best culture bearers or merely squeaky wheels or political players? Then, leaders should consider culture as the shadow cast by the operating model they design and manage. If you want to change the shadow, you have to move the object casting it. That means redesigning how decisions get made, how information travels, and what gets measured and rewarded. Culture is not a lever to pull; its a reflection of the choices leadership makes every day about how work actually happens. So yes, culture matters, just not in the way most executives think. You dont fix performance by fixing culture; you fix culture by fixing performance. Because in the end, culture lives in the rules you enforce, not the words you endorse.
Category:
E-Commerce
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