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Hi, everyone here. Hi, everyone. Here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes podcast. Today I like to talk about emotions in project management. As you have seen in the past weeks, I'm talking a lot about AI recognizing emotions and how AI is leveraging emotions and making you more aware of the emotions when you are, for example, in a Zoom call, etc., but today I want to go one step back, and I want to discuss one of the tools I'm using recently that had helped me a lot to understand a little bit better emotions. And one of the biggest challenges we all face is that we were all educated as project management as project managers to give a massive priority to schedule, to build, a schedule, to build, I would say, a Kanban board or to do a daily scrum, but most of the time when things go wrong in our projects, it's very much related to the human side, to human, for example, how we manage stakeholders, how we manage emotions. And this is why I want to share with you a simple tool that I'm using. And I'm very happy recently with that, it's the plutchik. Plutchik, I would say, in a better way. Well, Wheel of Emotions, and this is attributed to Robert Plutchik, a psychologist who developed a wheel of emotions. So imagine a color wheel, okay, with different colors, but now try to replace these colors with emotions. And when you have a color wheel on the opposite side, you have, I would say, the opposite color here is the same. We structure eight primary emotions, joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation, into four different pairs of opposite emotions.
And we try to put them in this, in this wheel, on the opposite sides. So let me explain a little bit better. So joy is the opposite of sadness. Joy, as we all know it, is a feeling of happiness and pleasure, and sadness is a feeling of sorrow and loss, and they are opposite. The other pair is trust and disgust. Trust is a sense of safety and confidence, and disgust is aversion and repulsion. Fear is the opposite of anger. It's an emotion of fear, anxiety, and concern because I don't know what will happen. So I have a fear. Anger. It's when something has already happened, and I feel the hostility and frustration of that event. The fourth pair is surprise and anticipation. So, surprise is when something unexpected happens, and anticipation is when I know something will happen. So they are. These are the opposites. When we combine these eight basic, which are primary ones, with secondary and tertiary ones, we create a different set of emotions. For example, when you combine anticipation with joy, you have optimism. When you combine joy with trust, you have love. When you combine trust with fear, submission because you trust but you fear, so you follow instructions based on your ability to to have fear. Okay, in a more extreme way, a terror of not trusting. And then it generates a submission.
And why this is so important to us. Because if we recognize these emotions in ourselves, for example, we are doing a meeting. Maybe with this will in our hands, we can quickly think about how I am feeling today before doing, for example, this daily Scrum or this project status meeting. And then, I can recognize this in several of our team members. With that, I can tailor my communication to enhance team cohesion and the team working as a team. So it's for example if you notice that fear is playing a key role, people are feeling overwhelmed. So you need to understand how you can balance that to bring down the fear, for example, by bringing up, for example, a joy or by bringing up trust or other positive feelings. So when you use that, you can channel the emotional atmosphere to improve communication. And look, we already see that many times you are doing a status meeting. You see people, for example, feeling bored, feeling why I'm doing this. And when you see boredom, what is it? It's the feeling that is underlining. That is disgust. It's why I'm here, why I'm doing this. What is the reason for me to be here spending one hour of that? It's an aversion to that. You already saw people with an aversion to meetings. So how you can tailor that, how you can tailor your communication to transform this disgust into, for example, trust. What kind of feeling can you stimulate on that? And this is extremely powerful.
Look, one more note on that I know that psychologists and other, I would say people that are very much related to human science, they may feel that this is a simplification and okay, probably it is a simplification, but this helps people like me, for example, with a full engineering background, to manage and to understand emotions in a language that I know in a language. Because when you create this concept when you divide this into eight when you divide in primary, secondary, and tertiary, you make it easier for people that are not. I would say psychologists to understand and manage human behavior because I would love that we all become experts in psychology and everything else to become a project manager. But each of us has strengths and weaknesses, and by using this, you are reducing your weakness in one of the most relevant topics of project management, which is managing people, managing communications, and managing the human aspects of your project. So take a look at that. If you go on Google and do a search, you will find this easily. And it's a one-page visual that is very powerful. I'm using this on the side of my screen today because I'm now trying to learn, and every time I start a meeting, I take a look and say where I am now. Then, I will start to increase my self-awareness. Think about that, and I hope you enjoy this podcast. I will see you next week with another 5 Minutes podcast.