As a leader, you may not be aware of it but the impact of your emotional state has a great impact on others around you. They can be acutely aware of your mood, even if you are not or indeed you think you have managed to mask it.
Although our emotional state profoundly influences the quality of our work, many of us aren’t really aware of how we’re feeling at any given moment or what the impact may be. Most employers don’t give emotions much attention either, preferring that we leave them at the door in the morning so they don’t get in the way during the day. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible. We’re neither machines, nor robots.
Best of Times, Worst of Times
Think about how you feel when you’re performing at your best. What adjectives come to mind? As you can imagine, the answers are remarkably consistent.
At our best, we feel:
- Positive
- Happy
- Confident
- Calm
- Focused
- Enthusiastic
- Open and
- Optimistic.
That’s when we’re most productive and get along best with others. At our worst, we’re typically experiencing the opposite feelings:
- Negativity
- Unhappiness
- Self-doubt
- Impatience
- Irritability
- Defensiveness and
- Pessimism.
Our Vision Narrows
When we are experiencing negative feelings, our sense of value feels at risk, our vision narrows, and our energy gets consumed in self-protection. Think of it like this: imagine that you sense a serious threat to your physical well-being from something or someone lurking in the shadows. Then you’re asked to solve a complex problem. How will you perform? In this “fight, flight or freeze” state, you would struggle to think clearly or imaginatively, and it would be difficult to collaborate effectively. It’s the same with an emotional threat such as sadness, worry or anxiety brought on by the ups and downs of everyday events – at home or at work.
Most of us move along the spectrum between our best and our worst all day long, depending on what’s going on around us. Interestingly, the most prevalent unexpressed emotions in the workplace revolve around suffering: the state of undergoing pain, distress or hardship. It might start at home, but it does not stop at the door to work. It’s not that suffering is a modern phenomenon or that it’s the only thing we feel at work. What seems to have changed is the pervasive impact of increased demand in our lives, leading to anxiety, uncertainty and a sense of feeling overwhelmed.
How Are You Feeling?
“How are you feeling?” These are four deceptively simple words with that we regularly ask at meetings or in our case, at the start of workshops and training sessions. We encourage people to ask it of each other. When it is asked, we don’t want it to mean, “How are you?” or even “How are you doing?” because the standard responses to these questions are usually some version of “Fine.” What we mean is, “How are you really feeling?”
Name it or Tame it
So what’s the value of getting people to express what they ’re actually feeling, rather than keeping things relentlessly light and bland? The answer is that naming our emotions tends to diffuse their charge and lessen the burden they create. The psychologist Dan Siegel refers to this practice as “name it to tame it.”
It’s also true that we can’t change what we don’t notice. Denying or avoiding feelings doesn’t make them go away, nor does it lessen their impact on us, even if it’s unconscious. Noticing and naming emotions gives us the chance to take a step back and make choices about what to do with them.
Say it Out Loud
Emotions are just a form of energy, forever seeking expression. Paradoxically, sharing what we’re feeling in simple terms helps us to better contain and manage even the most difficult emotions. By naming them out loud, we are effectively taking responsibility for them, making it less likely that they will spill out at the expense of others over the course of a day.
It was reported by one experienced facilitator who was taking a workshop session with a group of senior leaders that when doing this exercise of asking each other how they were feeling, she could see that they were way outside their comfort zone. As it turned out, the first person who got asked how she was feeling said: “Actually, I’m feeling kind of anxious and distracted. One of the children isn’t well. It’s nothing serious but I am a little worried about her.”
There is no doubt that sharing this news, and her resulting concerns, was healthy and appropriate, not least because it was such an emotional event affecting that leader. The impact on one of her colleagues was transformational. He had been highly sceptical about the value of sharing feelings, which he usually kept close to his chest. “It has just dawned on me,” he told his colleagues, “how much likely goes unsaid between us and what the cost of holding that in must be.” COMMENT
We know from research on emotional intelligence that whatever a leader happens to be feeling at work is disproportionately contagious, for better and for worse. Mostly, we’ve been told to notice emotions without feeling compelled to act on them. That has merit, for sure – stay calm in a crisis and all that.
Permission to Speak Out
Another approach is to invite people, including the leader, to express emotions. You can help yourself as a leader by openly giving permission to others to ask you about how you are feeling? Ask them to do this when they detect that your mood, tone of voice or choice of words is betraying a deeper, negative emotion. It may be one you not have noticed or did not want to express but if it becomes apparent to others you aught to explain.
This act of speaking out will bring it to your attention and by you being aware, you will be able to explain it, manage it more appropriately and most importantly, let others know what it is that is influencing your behaviour in that moment. Otherwise others may misinterpret what is going on and this has consequences.
So, can you ask of your leader, “how are you (really) feeling?