DO YOU HAVE EMOTIONAL AGENCY?
USING OUR EMOTIONS FOR GOOD
I was often teased in school for crying. I was emotionally sensitive, and I would cry when I felt misunderstood. I learned that crying is bad, and later on at work I’d be mortified when I felt the tears welling in my eyes. It's such a mix of emotions for me when my intentions are mistaken and I'm being wronged for my actions. I feel disappointment, sadness, and anger. I would speak up to defend myself, but often in tears, which would make me feel embarrassed and even more stressed about making a good impression. And I would spend hours and days thinking about it.
We tend to think emotions are bad. We see angry outbursts, and especially for women, that's deemed being emotional. However, what we tend to call anger is often the behavior that results from rejecting, suppressing and ignoring our emotions for too long rather than the actual emotion that we feel inside, which could have started out as sadness or fear.
I have learned to use my emotions as information and instead of ignoring them, being aware of them and learning how to communicate how I feel and what I need to solve the issue. And with that, I am able to move from feeling powerless to reclaiming agency over my emotional and mental health.
WORK WITH, NOT AGAINST OUR EMOTIONS
If you are like most people you might think you need to be more emotionally resilient by learning to avoid reacting to your emotions. And yes, we do need to learn to be less reactive, because that's more of an automatic behavior. But strengthening our emotional agility starts with awareness, so if we think of emotions as a problem we don't use them to their full potential.
Instead, if we think of our emotions as information we can choose how to respond because of how we feel.
I learned from my mom that mental health is about listening to the heart. That means we need to get close to our emotions and befriend them. We need to learn more about them by being more aware and curious instead of suppressing and ignoring them, only to find ourselves being on edge instead of being steadfast in how we respond.
EMOTIONS ARE GOOD
We need emotions. It’s part of how we navigate any relationship and make better decisions. Thinking that we don’t have emotions at work is a misunderstanding of how emotions work.
Emotions are what make us human. Suppressing emotions is unfair to our emotional intelligence, and having to hide how we feel instead of having a conversation that could further the understanding and bridge the divide, keeps us stuck in emotional insecurity.
What I see changing at work is the need for and the power of emotional integration at work and the impact that has on our mental health. Not only does it make us happier when we are inclusive of our emotional selves, but using our emotions as information is also how we increase innovation, productivity, and effective communication. And it’s essential to creating a healthy culture.
EMOTIONS AT WORK
Emotions are tied to how we think and what we do, and as whole humans, we integrate our emotions so that we can think, engage, and act with more care and on purpose. I know you might be thinking emotions cloud our judgment and we have to leave our emotions behind when we start the workday to perform at our best. But what if that’s all wrong?
Let’s make something a little more clear about the difference between having emotions and being emotional. Being emotional is a behavior that comes from suppressing, ignoring, and hiding from our emotions and eventually they come out, often in anger or distress. We reach a boiling-over point where we simply cannot hold it in any longer. By learning the tools to listen better, we can understand our emotions and use them to communicate how we feel and what we need so that we can be more constructive, creative, and collaborative, which essentially is how we access our emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is an essential factor in our work environment today and in the future of work. However, it can easily be misunderstood as managing emotions, getting them under control, taming them, and even “man-handling” them. Sure, sometimes we need to get back to our emotions later or suspend worry until we know more, but that’s not the same as ignoring them and telling them that they are not welcome as emotions are essential to our well-being.
Emotions, like stress, are contagious and so are joy, happiness, and well-being. The point is that we don’t have to be one thing or the other, the point is to communicate what we are going through so those around us don’t have to guess.
When listening to our emotions and being self-aware, we can start to learn how to recognize what we need. When we worry about something we can wonder what we need to feel more secure, not by rejecting our worry but by listening to the worry and recognizing that our self-awareness can be used to know more about ourselves.
EMOTIONAL AGENCY
When people say we cannot have emotions at work, we need to understand what we are referring to. Yelling at someone is not an emotion; it’s a behavior that comes from suppressing our emotions until we cannot hold them in any longer. Listening to our emotions and communicating what’s going on AND asking ourselves what we need so that we can feel okay right now is being transparent and authentic. That is how we reclaim emotional agency because we cannot hide from our emotions.
By embracing Power-Pausing, we can observe our emotions and allow them to inform our behavior, which may be to do nothing and simply let our emotions be our emotions. The point is to learn to pause before we react so we choose how to respond and act. Acknowledging how we feel and choosing to shift the focus to be curious about what we need to feel better is how we can use our emotions in a more immediate way to inform us in connecting, communicating, and collaborating better.
