By Karen Porter

You might give people unnecessary power over you at work through your emotional reactions to what they’re saying, yet you don’t realize it. When this happens it can impact your workplace productivity negatively. How does this all come about? Well, as an administrative professional you associate and communicate with multiple people daily: Coworkers, managers, executives, clients, potential customers and vendors. And let’s not forget everyone who does not fall into a neat category; they include mail carriers, couriers, supply delivery personnel, cafeteria cashiers and cooks, office cleaning staff, admin personnel you interact with on behalf of your boss at other companies, and many more people.

Let’s face it: Administrative professionals come in contact with a lot of people daily while doing their various tasks—probably more so than some staff senior to you (because senior staff funnel their requests to these individuals through you). Yet no two people you interact with (whether in-person or by telephone or email) are usually alike in personality, or temperament.

And while their work styles might impact your productivity at times, their personalities and temperaments can do so also. To thrive at work and have more stress-free, satisfying work days, be conscious about retaining and managing your emotional power or energy. That way you’ll retain your focus on the job and your work assignments. You won’t get emotionally distracted. That’ll help increase your workplace productivity, creativity and the quality of your product or service. Here are two ways to NOT give your power away:

Subscribe here to continue reading this article that appeared in The Effective Admin newsletter. By doing so, you’ll also gain access to more than 40 back issues of The Effective Admin newsletter.