5 Ways to Manage Your Emotions at Work

Contributed by Leslie Granston, Human Capital Consultant

Last month, America got a peek behind the smooth façade of morning television to witness something raw and real: After months of media speculation, NBC’s Today show co-host Ann Curry was shown the door, and on June 28th, her emotionally naked, on-air goodbye became the story. And she wasn’t alone. Around the same time, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg admitted in a speech at Harvard that she cries at work.  Last year, another high-profile woman revealed her true emotions publicly: Former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, well known for liberally using profanity at work and in the media, made news with her accusation that the board that fired her “…f—— me over.”

In her book, It’s Always Personal: Emotion in the New Workplace, author Anne Kreamer cites a 2009 survey she conducted with colleague Mark Truss of 701 respondents. Their results showed that 41% of the women they polled had cried at work in the preceding year. Are you among the ranks of women who’ve lost their cool at work? I am.

It’s no secret that we can’t turn off our hearts at the office. The challenge is knowing how to manage yourself. Enter emotion management, a branch of emotional intelligence, defined by noted researchers John D. Mayer, Peter Salovey and David R. Caruso as the culmination of a subtle, iterative process that empowers an individual to make a conscious decision about how to act on or express an emotion. Salovey and Caruso wrote a book, The Emotionally Intelligent Manager: How to Develop and Use the Four Key Emotional Skills of Leadership, that interprets their academic work for practitioners.

Emotion management is a critical skill for professional people, particularly women—for whom the display of emotion can mean being perceived as unable to handle stress or just another example of the hysterical/bitch stereotype.

While emotion management sounds great in theory, there are several challenges to practicing it in the real work world, and some obstacles might be surprising: for one, the more successful you are, the harder it may be even to identify your genuine feelings, the first requirement of emotion management. Social scientist Arlie Russell Hochschild wrote about this risk in her landmark book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, a risk that increases as one grows in rank and accrues tenure in a company or organization.

It makes sense—the more integral you are to the power structure of your company, the more likely you are to embrace its implicit values (including how to feel), possibly at the expense of your own. And wherever you sit on the totem pole, in these unstable economic times, it can be more tempting than ever to do what’s necessary to survive. But at what cost?

The good news is that you don’t have to sell out or move to a yurt to manage your emotions and be authentic at the same time. As I do with many complex work questions, I scheduled a telephone chat with my own executive coach-cum-emotion-genius Hemda Mizrahi, to talk about this topic. Hemda’s practice includes a majority of women in financial services. After our conversation and some reflection on my experiences with individuals and organizations as an HR practitioner, here are five suggestions to stay cool and stay real at the office.

1. Know what you’re feeling. How? By checking in with yourself regularly. Journaling, meditating, relaxation techniques, and other forms of mindful daily practice create a framework for your emotions to surface in a safe place. Hemda often recommends Herbert Benson’s Relaxation Response exercise to her clients. You can use this exercise in the heat of an emotionally charged moment.
2. Understand that the expression of emotion affects everyone. It’s one thing to feel emotion and another to express it. How will your tears, your raised voice, or even your smile affect the person on the other end and the overall work environment? There’s not necessarily a right answer to this question; sometimes it’s appropriate go raw. But just taking a moment to ask yourself keeps you in control, and it’s a public service to your colleagues.
3. Find ways to be creative and active outside the office. Whether you enjoy cooking, knitting, painting or singing, or any activity that engages your body from yoga to rock climbing, make time for it. The benefit is a positive form of self-expression. “Here, you’re stepping away from a mind-only approach and getting perspective,” Hemda says.
4. Use your company’s resources to decompress. If you work for a larger organization, chances are you’re not taking full advantage of its wellness programs, which can range from Weight Watchers meetings to foreign language conversation groups. HR and management don’t make these offerings available only for the sake of altruism; they do it to increase productivity and therefore profits—so there’s no stigma attached. With that in mind, consider stepping away from your desk and taking part in an activity that speaks to you.
5. Go deeper. When we have strong emotional reactions to a stimulus, it may have little to do with the actual situation; our reaction may have roots in our past experiences. If you are struggling with managing emotion at work or in your personal life, it may be an invitation from somewhere inside you to explore these feelings with a professional therapist or coach. Here again, your company may be able to provide resources or referrals at little or no cost to you.

What these tips have in common is that they help provide you with the time, space and equanimity to make smart decisions about handling powerful feelings in the workplace. With just a little practice, you’ll be authentically managing emotions like the professional you are.

Leslie Granston enjoys living at the intersection of her two careers: Writing and human capital consulting. Her areas of interest include organizational behavior, emotional intelligence and diversity. She recently launched a blog, to contribute to the conversation about all of the above.