Annual Report 2003
Foundation for the Future
The Isenberg School Chronicle
The Year in Review
Professor Manz on Emotional Discipline and Self-Leadership
With the February publication of Emotional Discipline: The Power to Choose How You Feel (Berrett-Koehler), Nirenberg Professor of Business Leadership Charles Manz has completed his 10th book since joining the Isenberg School in the late 1990s.
Professor Manz defines emotional discipline broadly, viewing the subject as an individual’s application of personal freedom and specific strategies to choose how one feels.
“Overall I view discipline as both self-training and as a path to personal growth,” observes Manz. That dovetails with his extensive work on self-leadership, which empowers workers to improve their performance and job satisfaction by taking greater control over their own decision making, learning, and motivational processes. Manz’s books include Mastering Self-Leadership (Prentice-Hall), Company of Heroes (John Wiley & Sons), and The Power of Failure (Berrett-Koehler).
Whatever emotional discipline strategies you choose, your practice, adds Manz, must embrace four commitments: taking responsibility for how you feel; doing things in the present to prepare for the future; cultivating balanced, healthy reactions to emotional situations; and making specific strategic choices. With that foundation in place, you’re ready to pursue emotional discipline—first by identifying the immediate cause of your emotional state, and then by evaluating your accompanying physical, mental, and spiritual reactions before making a strategic choice to improve your emotional situation. Manz devotes two-thirds of his book to a “tool kit” of two dozen strategies and techniques, all of which he has personally tested. “My writing is something of a self-development project,” Manz confesses. “I try new things that can help make me and others, including my students, more fulfilled and successful.”