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By definition being “hooked” is when your thoughts, emotions, and stories are driving your action rather than what is truly of value to you. There are some telltale signs of being hooked at work. The first is when you are so focused on being right that you have lost the perspective of how you can do what’s right. You are so focused on this one thing, this one idea, this one project, this one concept going forward in a particular way that you have shut yourself off to any other prospective that might come from the world or the team around you.
A second telltale sign of being hooked at work is when you as an individual are not taking agency over your own career, over your own development, over your own goals. Effectively you are falling victim to the situation and letting the situation drive what you do rather than what your heartbeat tells you you should be doing.
A third sign that you are hooked at work is when you find yourself driven by trying to get back at people or make points. It might be a snarky comment that slips out during a meeting where, again, your thought or emotion is what is dictating what it is that you say rather than what is important to you. And what is really interesting with this third sign is we know that individuals who bottle their emotions and thoughts – individuals who say something like, “I’m really upset with Jack but I’m just not going to say anything” – there is a process in psychology that we call amplification. And amplification is this: When you try to push a thought or emotion aside it actually takes up cognitive resources. What this leads to is you being depleted in a meeting where you are using so much energy not to say or feel or think a particular thing. And amplification is the rule by which the very thing that you did not want to say comes out of your mouth. It has very wonderfully been termed “the imp in your brain that gets out.” That experience that we’ve all had in a meeting, in a conversation over Thanksgiving, where we decide we are not going to say or feel or think a particular thing. We are angry or upset with somebody and we are going to push it aside. And then what happens? You say the very thing that you promised you would not to say and now you’ve got a real drama on your hands.