There are plenty of times in life when I have found myself in a bad mood.

If you’re anything like me, the stress of work, poor health, unwanted experiences, reporting unfortunate outcomes, and the ebb and flow of family life can impact your emotional wellness.

In 2020, the American Psychological Association conducted a survey analyzing the presence of stress in the United States. It found that half of adults reported their behavior as negatively affected by an increase in emotional and physical stress.

In these moments, how you handle the inevitability of these negative life experiences matters.

It’s not the most pleasant experience to let some emotions come to the surface, but it is wholly necessary to get back to center. I find myself taking time to process and feel. Getting support from others usually helps, too.

Many of our most poetic texts, some of history’s greatest speeches, and written in our most sacred religious verses are repeated themes that weakness and vulnerability can be transformed into our greatest strengths.

This is not limited to our individual experiences. In the public sector, every day brings a new problem to solve. Regularly, there are strong emotions attached to finding the answers. In government, there are varied perspectives to consider, and there are few moments where the solution is perfect for all involved.

But there is also room in the public sector for immense support, cooperation, leading by example and providing resources to better manage the ill effects of our negative emotions.

It’s easy to get defensive when someone disagrees with us. It’s normal to feel guilt and shame when we fall short of perfection in our responses to negative moments. What’s important is our own awareness.

Experiencing negative emotions without finding productive ways to do so often prevents solutions and inhibits our growth as an individual. It also negatively impacts the performance of our organizations.

Recently, Eagle Mountain City has been working to resolve the cause of a slew of power outages. Negative emotions are expected when performance of the community’s power grid is lacking.

These outages have impacted our residents, our businesses and have required immense informational support from Eagle Mountain City while the local energy provider has been working to make fixes.

One of Eagle Mountain’s subdivisions, The Ranches, has reported four power outages in the past month. Some of these outages have taken hours to repair and impacted thousands of customers. The power outages are exposing residents with age and health vulnerabilities to the summer heat.

Eagle Mountain City does not provide power to its residents. This is a contracted service.

Recent problems, however, have led to the interruption of life for thousands of our residents on a repeated basis this summer.

While we have been conversing regularly with the power provider — even meeting with their representatives this week — Eagle Mountain City has been receiving feedback from residents while outages are ongoing. There are plenty of negative emotions within that feedback.

It appears major upgrades are needed to a substation servicing the community to avoid future outages.

Those upgrades are slated to take place in the fall, which will require a bit of a wait.

How every individual addresses their emotions while the solution to this problem is implemented will matter greatly to our overall success. It’s going to impact individual performance, it’s going to change the outcome for our respective households, our organizations and, in this case, our community.

While finding solutions is an ongoing process, what I can say is that emotions are a passing phenomenon. Just like power to our grid in the current moment, emotions are going to come and go.

We must confront the issue and find better solutions so that greater stability is in place and interruptions to our life are minimized.

Emotional health, just like high-quality utility infrastructure, requires us to rely on each other to find solutions, maintain balance and support stability. It requires communication, better needs identification and a plan to confront the things that make us uncomfortable in moments of heat.

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