Emotions at work: Using our emotions to do better work
When it comes to emotions at work things have improved in most workplaces since I was told by a boss that I should avoid crying in front of my colleagues. At a minimum many companies have at least started talking about wellbeing, others have gone further and perhaps trained mental health first aiders or actively encouraged vulnerability in their leaders. But beyond simply acknowledging that emotions exist within the workplace how can we actually harness our emotions to help us do better work?
At a basic level emotions are in built responses that help us navigate our day to day without having to consciously process every element of information our brain receives. Fear & disgust protect us from potentially harmful situations or people. Anger releases adrenaline to help us to stand our ground in situations. And joy gives us a buzz that encourages us to repeat behaviours that release that feeling again.
Our bodies, and the signals they send to us, can be invaluable when it comes to making the right decisions quickly. However all too often we place all of our efforts into gathering data from outside of us in order to base our work and decisions on. Whether that’s explicit quantitative data such as staff or customer surveys, or feedback from our managers and peers to tell us if we are doing the right thing. By exercising our intuition and more deeply understanding our emotions we will not only respond more effectively but we will create a more enjoyable workplace for everyone. Here’s 5 ways you can start doing this now.
Spot your defences
In my last blog post I recommended reading “It’s Not Always Depression” by Hilary Jacobs-Hendel. In the book she introduces the change triangle as a tool for identifying core emotions, inhibitory emotions and defences. In the workplace we put up a huge amount of defences. Whether it’s deflecting conversations or using humour if something makes us feel uncomfortable, or perhaps procrastinating over something that is worrying us. All of these defences add up, either by delaying us from recognising how we are feeling and thus slowing conversations and decisions down, or by never allowing us to feel the emotions we desperately need to acknowledge in order to reach the best outcomes for ourselves.
One way of unpacking and tackling your defences at work is to invite a trusted colleague to observe you in your day-to-day in meetings and ask them to provide you with feedback on your interactions. It might be that they pick up on things you wouldn’t usually notice about yourself which you can then reflect on together and consider how you might alter your behaviour.
Tune into the sensations you are feeling
Hilary Jacobs-Hendel also talks about how we use defences to avoid having to actually feel our emotions. She talks extensively about the need to put actual words to the sensations you are feeling in order to gain clarity and give your emotions time to be felt and heard.
By taking time to acknowledge emotions as they arise in the workplace you will be able to ask yourself “Is my body and mind in the right place right now to be making a decision or taking action?”. It may mean simply waiting 5 minutes for your emotion to settle before responding to a colleague, or you may decide that if you can’t decipher your emotions you need to sleep on the situation before acting.
Understand your triggers
Once you start noticing your defences and understanding the emotions behind those defences you will quite quickly be able to identify your triggers. It might be that you feel nervous when your boss doesn’t send you an agenda for a meeting and perhaps by simply acknowledging this you will start to overcome that nervousness, or you could talk to your boss to ask for what you need to be able to have a better conversation. Or alternatively you might find your excitement in team workshops can cause you to talk over others thus stifling their ideas. Again if you know this you can either start to alter your behaviour or highlight it to others in the team or a facilitator and they can help make sure you give everyone time to speak.
Maximise your energy at work by paying attention to the small things that bring you joy
Maximise the energy that emotions bring
We often think of emotions as something to be contained, especially in the workplace, but sometimes emotions can bring with them energy that empowers us and propels us forward. Many of us are actually much better at identifying the things at work that make us angry or nervous than the things that bring us joy for example. Joy brings a unique energy that makes us feel lighter, which in turn helps us to see things more clearly and we become more able to make progress. By taking time to notice the small things that bring us joy or satisfaction in our work we can start to more explicitly follow decisions that make sense for us. For example all too often people end up chasing status in the workplace because that is what society has told us is desirable. But if we stopped and acknowledged what actually brings us joy in our work not only would we be more contented and productive in the present, but we would also make better decisions about our future.
Fact-check your feelings
As I said at the start: our bodies and the signals they send to us are hugely powerful and listening to those emotions can often help us make better decisions. But sometimes our bodies can send the wrong signals or be wired to believe something about a situation that is simply not true. For example the emotions that many people feel when they experience prejudice against a certain group of people might be fear. Paloma Medina has talked in the past about how our brains are wired to treat outsiders as a threat since hunter-gatherer days. This is something that affects most people and it will take centuries of conscious effort to rewire our brains for the modern world.
In addition we also have emotional responses that are personal to us and become deeply engrained because we never stop to explore where that response originated from. I listen frequently to the Motherkind podcast which has been known to explore how the fear or shame we felt in situations as a child can come up for us as adults in scenarios where that emotional response is completely unfounded. An example of this in the workplace might be that your boss reminds you of your dad. Perhaps your dad often scolded you as a child and so you were fearful of upsetting him. And now 30 years on your carry that same fear of even slightly upsetting your boss.
By raising our awareness of when we are feeling emotions at work, what those emotions are and what triggers them, we can then start to question what evidence we have for feeling that way and alter our reactions in order to build more productive and rewarding relationships with our colleagues.
Further reading & support
When writing this article I stumbled across an entire book written on the topic of how emotions can help us succeed in the workplace. I’d like to be able to discuss the book with others and am considering starting a Collaborative Future bookclub. Register interest here.
And if you think you or your team might benefit from more ongoing support to build self-awareness and emotional intelligence get in touch with me today to find out about our work.