Listen to the wisdom of your emotions

Your emotions can be wise guides to help you prevent burnout.

Emotions are essential biological states. They are healthy and can be wise guides on our life path. But emotions have a bad reputation. Especially at work.

For a long time, emotions were frowned upon as a sign of weakness, fragility or hysteria. They were viewed as embarrassing or shameful — the antithesis of science and reason.

Emotions also used to be viewed as the domain of the feminine, the so-called “weaker sex” (vomit). Men, who formed almost the entirety of the modern-day workforce until relatively recently, were taught to negate or ignore all emotions in order to garner professional respect and get ahead.

Our distaste for emotion has only increased with our highly digitalized lives, obsession with busyness, and our addictive work culture. Emotions are annoying impediments to productivity that need to be quashed!

What happens when you ignore anger, or resentment? It grows. It comes to define you, or a relationship you have, or the expectations you have of others.

This has led to the deeply embedded notion that we should pack away our emotions during work hours, as if emotions were a sparkly outfit that only comes out on weekends.

But this idea — that emotions do not belong in the professional realm — is not only false, it’s damaging.

Here’s why ignoring your emotions is harmful.

When there is dissonance between how you really feel and how you pretend to be, this wears away at your sense of authenticity and becomes an increasingly heavy burden. This a fast track to the exhaustion, cynicism and loss of self-identity that define burnout.

Also, emotions do not just disappear if they go unacknowledged. In fact, when you don’t allow and feel your emotions, you give them power over you.

Think about it — what happens when you ignore anger, or resentment? It grows. It comes to define you, or a relationship you have, or the expectations you have of others.

And this can happen just as easily in our working lives, too.

As the author of Emotional Agility Susan David has established, emotions can be helpful tools. In fact, successful leadership and general personal happiness both hinge on us seeing emotions as normal and helpful, and tapping into them to our advantage.

Emotions in the workplace

Just because we are “at work” does not magically mean our emotions get switched off and we are some kind of intellect-only bot.

There are myriad work situations that trigger our emotions. Here are some examples of situations I’ve had clients mention recently:

• Resentful when someone else was rewarded for a project I drove

• Angry at how my boss disrespects our time by causing meetings to drag on forever

• Disappointed at being undervalued by clients

• Frustrated at always ending up with way too much to do, and too little time to do it in

• Sad at feeling trapped in a job that doesn’t fulfill me

• Envious of colleagues whose Zoom backgrounds are perfect feng shui masterpieces while mine looks like a laundry basket exploded behind me (which it kind of did)

• Antagonistic towards a boss whose attempts to “reach out and connect” during the pandemic feel forced and fake

• Embarrassed at screwing up an invoice to a new client

Getting to the deeper emotions

Many of these emotions, when explored further, turn out to be a “secondary emotion” — they mask a deeper, scarier emotion, most commonly fear or shame.

By way of example, Jessica learns of a colleague’s promotion. The colleague is in a different team, and Jessica wasn’t in the running for the promotion. Still, it triggers something in her.

“She’s only been here a year! This is so unfair. This place sucks.”

Secondary emotion? You guessed it. Jealousy.

When I talk with Jessica, we quickly get to the underlying emotion. You might have guessed this one, too: Fear.

As Jessica puts it, “I’m afraid of falling behind, that I’m not working hard enough or producing enough. I’ve been here almost three years, what does this say about my career and my potential?”

Allowing and gently investigating the jealousy helps Jess realize that she is actually super happy for Erika. She addresses her fears by talking with her manager (who happens to be approachable and supportive) and feels better about where her career is at as a result.

The 3 things to know about emotions at work.

1. Emotions are your friends.

This might seem counterintuitive. But even when your fury makes your blood boil, your emotions are trying to help you.

The original role of emotions was to motivate adaptive behaviors that ensured your survival and the passing of your genes to the next generation. Your emotions want to look after you and your babies!

Your emotions — even the negative ones — are not your nemeses. They are not trying to undermine you. They are signals that you can learn to trust and embrace.

This shift of stance can be enormously powerful. When we acknowledge and allow our emotions, they can be our allies.

2. Emotions are responses, not instructions.

Just because I feel angry, or resentful, or envious, does not mean that this emotion has to dictate my behavior. Instead, by being honest and nonjudgmental about our emotions, we are able to choose our own course of action.

Say, your boss disparages a colleague during a meeting, and this makes you feel frustrated. He does this kind of thing all the time and it’s starting to wear at you.

The frustration is a response to poor behavior — but it doesn’t mean you have to act out the frustration by, say, punching your boss. As tempting as it might be.

“The most powerful way to be with our inner experiences is by welcoming and learning from these, rather than racing for the emotional exits.” — Susan David

Instead, you take some time to feel the emotion, perhaps locate it in your body, and see what its message is. Perhaps it means that a personal edge or boundary of yours has been crossed. You contemplate whether you want to do something, such as speak to your boss, the colleague he disparaged, or HR. You know you don’t have to act on the emotion — sometimes it’s enough to acknowledge it within yourself, thank the emotion, and move on.

Rather than getting caught up in frustration, or allowing it to stew, you use your emotion as a helpful signpost, and let it go.

3. Allowing your emotions makes you a better leader.

As a leader, emotional intelligence is essential. Being in tune with your own emotions, and aware that others are also pretty much constantly experiencing emotions, helps you:

• communicate better

• be more openminded and less judgmental

• inspire others

• reduce anxiety and stress (because when you’ve processed the emotion and allowed it to pass, it doesn’t keep you awake at night)

• create mutually beneficial outcomes

• make better decisions

• improve work relationships

• empathise with others

• effectively overcome life’s challenges

Your emotions are not going anywhere — and they want to help you. Let them!