Emotions are part of who we are. And every emotion has a story to tell. Emotions come and go. The main reason is why we afraid of emotions, especially at the workplace, because they are far more ambiguous, difficult to decode, and to understand. But we must face the fact that we are emotional beings.
Brené Brown said it once that we cannot selectively numb emotions. You cannot say here is vulnerability, fear, sadness, grief, disappointment etc.,’ I don’t want to feel these!’ You cannot numb these hard feelings without numbing the other side of the range. Because we cannot selectively numb! When we numb these we numb, joy, happiness, enthusiasm, curiosity, gratitude, we numb everything!
Aboodi Shabi, the presenter of CHN event in March, advised us to look at emotions in a way what value they can bring to the team, what story these emotions can tell us. For example the cynic can help us to look at the risks of our projects, helps us to come up with the Plan B, in case we fail, or test our ideas. Or another example: boredom tells us we are still missing something, we are not there yet, we need to look into new dimensions. And fear is often about survival, which has its place at work and in our life.
What we tend to do is to control our emotions, which in fact means we push them down. However, we should rather contain our emotions: to notice them, hold them and have productive conversation about them.
Leaders should expand their own and their team’s capacity by benefiting from building on the emotions, instead of numbing them, disguising them. Leadership is about having the capacity to contain rather than to control.
It is important to stop and reflect regularly:
- What your emotions are telling you?
- What are the reactions of your people?
- What emotions are driving those reactions?
- And what are they trying to tell you about the subject?
In most of the cases what determines our actions and emotions is how we see and interpret the world. That is called the observer in us.
As humans, we usually take our interpretations and ways of being for granted. For example, if an individual sees the world as dangerous, he is likely to be risk averse and say no to opportunities. Similarly if someone sees life as an adventure, she is more likely to say yes to opportunities and to take risks and act courageously. Our ways of seeing, and of interpreting, the world will have been shaped by the narratives in which we have been engaged.
Aboodi Shabi says we have grown up in dialogues that have shaped us all our lives, even before we were aware of ourselves or of the world. Therefore, we don’t say, for example, “I have learned to see the world as dangerous, and that makes me risk averse” instead we might say, “the world is dangerous, and I have to be careful.” In other words, it appears obvious to us that the world is dangerous and that we have to be careful, rather than something to investigate further.
So we don’t see our ‘being’ very clearly. In other words, we are blind to our blindness. From time to time, we need someone “outside ourselves” to help us see what we cannot see – to reveal our cognitive blindness which influencing our attitude and our emotions.
And that someone is a coach!
You can read my original article on the topic in Hungarian at Forbes.hu: https://forbes.hu/uzlet/erezni-nem-veszelyes-munkahelyen-sem/