Tag Archive for: emotions

Your Negative Emotions Can Guide You to Value-Based Actions

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negative emotionsWhen we ignore, invalidate or suppress our negative emotions because we don’t want to feel them, or feel they are unacceptable, they do not go away.

“Effective leaders are mindful of their inner experiences but not caught in them. They know how to free up their internal resources and commit to actions that align with their values,” writes Dr. Susan David and Christina Congleton in Harvard Business Review. 

You Can’t Negate Negative Emotions

David, Harvard Medical School psychologist and author of the award-winning book, Emotional Agility, shares in her TED Talk that a third of us either judge ourselves for having “bad emotions” like sadness or anger or grief, or try to push these feelings down.

“Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger,” says David. “Psychologists call this amplification.”

Indeed, research indicates that fighting against thoughts on addiction only magnifies them, restraining thoughts can create more stress and suppressing negative emotions spawns more emotional eating than admitting the emotions are there. 

David and Congleton have found that executives and leaders can get “hooked by” negative emotions— buying into them, avoiding situations that evoke those feelings and limiting themselves. Or, by denying the negative thoughts and rationalizing them away, even pushing themselves into situations that aren’t aligned with their values. 

Ultimately, suppressing or “fixing” negative emotions often ends up in cycling through the same reoccurring trigger areas of challenge for years. 

The Benefits of Feeling What You Don’t Want to Feel

“The conventional view of emotions as good or bad, positive or negative, is rigid. And rigidity in the face of complexity is toxic,” says David. “We need greater levels of emotional agility for true resilience and thriving.“

Positive emotions are simply those we tend to “find pleasurable to experience”—such as joy, satisfaction, love, serenity, interest or amusement. Whereas negative emotions are simply those we don’t find pleasurable to experience—such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, rage, loneliness and annoyance. Neither of these definitions imply the effect of having the emotion is entirely positive or negative within us, just that we judge experiencing it as so.

Apparently, a 3:1 positive/negative emotional experience ratio is necessary for a sense of flourishing, but the balance plays a part.

“One idea in the study of emotion and its impact on psychological health is overdue for retirement: that negative emotions (like sadness or fear) are inherently bad or maladaptive for our psychological well-being, and positive emotions (like happiness or joy) are inherently good or adaptive,” writes June Gruber.

So-called negative emotions have an inherent value. Negative emotions can foster detailed and analytical thinking and less stereotypical thoughts. Feelings like sadness can increase focus and help us to learn from mistakes and assess social situations better.

Negative emotions can facilitate us to go deeper into self-understanding and empathy. Being willing to experience them can build emotional resilience. They help us to evaluate our experience and detect when an area of life feels off and needs our attention.

Experiencing and accepting emotions like anger and sadness are important to our mental health. Mindfulness training has been helpful in overcoming anxiety disorders, not because it eradicated negative feelings but it trained participants to accept them. 

Research has shown the ability to hold mixed emotions together at once precedes improvements in well-being, even if it’s unpleasant or difficult. Across a study of ten years, frequent experiences of mixed emotions were strongly associated with relatively good physical health and that increases in them weakened age-related health declines.

“We find that psychological well-being is not entirely determined by the presence of one type or kind of an emotion,” writes Gerber, “but rather an ability to experience a rich diversity of both positive and negative emotions.”

From Emotional Data to Values-Aligned Action

David urges us to realize that emotions are data that “contain flashing lights to things that we care about”—when we get clear on precisely what we are feeling and can respond by taking steps that are value-aligned.

“Emotions are data, they are not directives,” she caveats. “We can show up to and mine our emotions for their values without needing to listen to them.” Rather, we pay attention to how they point to what we value. 

David and Congleton suggest four practices derived from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), originally created by Dr. Steven C. Hayes.

Recognize You Are Stuck.

Recognize your own patterns. Where are you caught in rigid, repeating mental loops—your thoughts like a broken record inside that is insistent on replaying? Does the loop feel familiar from the past, like situations you’ve felt before that triggered and created similar contraction? These loops only deplete your mental resources. Notice if you often feel undervalued, for example.

Identify Thoughts and Feelings. 

Label your thoughts and emotions distinctively to create emotional distance and clarity of the emotional data. If you feel you have to be available all the time for work, then you can get perspective by stating “I’m having the thought that I have to be available all the time for work.” Then you can look at what you feel and want to do.

Rather than saying “I’m sad” and being drowned by the emotion, you can say “I’m noticing that I’m feeling sad,” and create enough space to look at the data. This is a mindfulness practice that can improve behavior, well-being and promote beneficial changes in the brain. 

Dr. Marsha Linehan, creator of dialectal behavior therapy, emphasizes that validating emotions requires accurate—observing and describing the event, thoughts and emotions, perhaps how it feels in your body—not interpretation or assumptions, which can invalidate and cause distrust in your internal experience.

“When he interrupted me for the second time, I felt anger and felt tightness and heat in my chest” is an observation. “I shouldn’t be so sensitive” is not.

Accept and Observe.

Rather than suppress or try to control your thoughts or emotions, even if you can’t rationally justify them or they don’t match how you think of yourself, allow them to be present. Breath ten deep breaths to check in. Rather than making them feel better, this is about making room for your raw emotions to reveal. What is going on internally and externally, and what is the energetic quality of your feelings? 

If you can get underneath the emotion, are they giving you a clear signal of something that matters, for which you could respond differently? 

Act in Alignment With Values. 

“You don’t get to have a meaningful career or raise a family or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort,” says David. “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.”

When you can treat your emotions as data, you can create choices of how you respond to them to act in a way that aligns with your values. 

Rather than be absorbed by or pulled into reaction by your emotions, you can be guided by your values, which is a primary focus of executive coaching. You can consider what actions will bring you closer to and further from them.

“When you take values-based actions, you will eventually arrive at a choice point,” tweets David. “Will you move toward your values and act like the person you wish to be, or will you move away from your values and act against them?”

By Aimee Hansen

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Empathetic Anger: Is It the Only Acceptable Emotion for Women at Work?

Empathetic anger

Empathetic anger: the emotion felt in response to another person being hurt by someone or something else

Have you ever been told “don’t be so emotional?” at work?

I remember a specific moment in an office I worked in over ten years ago. A male boss was speaking to a female co-worker about something he was unhappy with in her performance, and while conveying his feedback, he told her not to be so emotional.

As he spoke in the fishbowl office, I watched from my cubicle while he paced back and forth, his hands waving emphatically through the air, his face and head getting redder and redder, his voice elevating until it carried right through the glass walls to where our team sat. My co-worker remained relatively calm in a chair in front of him.

When she finally came out with tears held back in her eyes, I considered the irony of what I’d just witnessed – how selective emotions that were more masculine-identified were permissible and somehow not too emotional?

And I wondered too, were the tears that stung in her eyes also anger, albeit withheld?

When Caught in Anger

All emotions are guides and most dangerous if denied, but the way we manage them and channel their outward expression matters. Today children – and girls particularly – are being encouraged to be in more in touch with anger, rather than repress it.

“It is natural and normal to feel anger,” iterates Audrey Nelson, Ph.D., in Psychology Today. “If you never get angry, it means you have no boundaries or you will not acknowledge them.”

When in the moment of anger, it’s important to realize what’s at play.

Research shows that anger impairs your ability to step back and see any matter from multiple perspectives, which can lead to conflict spirals. This holds true even when the residual anger is unrelated to the situation you are presently dealing with.

“What we’re finding is that when people feel angry, they’re collapsing in on themselves,” says Wharton professor Maurice Schweitzer about the studies. “They become far more egocentric.”

The researchers share that any emotion that results in high arousal – including happiness – means a diminished ability for perspective-taking, which requires greater cognitive energy. It’s important that when caught in anger to realize you are more likely to hold an egocentric perspective in this moment.

When Leaders Display Anger

Research has shown that displaying anger in the office has the potential to go several ways when it comes to leadership perception.

Leaders who are perceived to exhibit anger as a personality trait, as opposed to selectively and motivationally, are often seen as less effective. Especially when a leader’s anger is deemed inappropriate, it decreases employee motivation towards voluntary tasks.

Displaying anger has been associated with perceived power more than displaying sadness, however some research shows that showing sadness can actually create more positive outcomes for leaders.

Whereas showing anger is associated with “position (ie. legitimate, reward and coercive) power,” which does indeed have benefits in perceived leader effectiveness and follower loyalty, showing sadness is more associated with greater “personal (ie. referent) power”.

This means that leaders displaying anger are seen to have more coercive power, being solid in their position in the organization and the punishments and rewards they wield, but are less appealing on a personal level than leaders who display sadness. That can have some backfire effects on leadership leverage.

Another study shows that when a leader displays anger in response to a matter of integrity, this increases the perception of his or her leader effectiveness. However, when a leader displays anger in response to a matter of competency, this reduces perception of his or her leader effectiveness.

Also, it’s all in the eye of the beholder’s own feelings. Research that measured performance found that followers who were not very agreeable responded positively to a leader’s exhibition of anger, whereas followers who were highly agreeable responded poorly to the exhibition of anger by a leader.

When Women Exhibit Anger

Due to the glaring gender gap, the research on leadership perception and anger is skewed towards displays of anger by male leaders. Not surprisingly, anger is perceived differently if displayed by a woman than a man, though it’s entirely untrue that men experience anger more often than women.

What research has found is that while men experience decreased effectiveness when they cannot display anger, women are able to hold in the anger, and may even feel bad about experiencing it, but will still be able to act upon their feelings when the situation calls for it.

Beyond feeling it’s counterproductive, women leaders have a social reason to hold back on overt anger expression.

“Women incur social and economic penalties for expressing stereotypical ‘masculine’ emotions because they threaten society’s patriarchal barriers against the ‘dominance of women’,” writes Quintin Fottrell, summing up the researcher’s findings.

When women clearly exhibit the agentic (often masculine-identified) qualities that both sexes associate as primary to effective leadership, they fall into a double bind where they are seen as less communal than expected from a woman, and judged harshly.

Unless women exhibit both agentic and communal qualities simultaneously, women leaders can experience backlash.

Research on group deliberation found that men’s social influence increased when their opinion included an expression of anger, whereas women’s social influence diminished when they expressed the exact same opinion with anger.

Whereas participants confidence in their own position diminished when a man was expressing his position with anger (observers were more likely to question their own stance around an angry man), it solidified more when a woman expressed her position with anger.

The researchers found that “Participants regarded an angry woman as more emotional, which made them more confident in their own opinion.” While anger added to credibility for men, and increased their authority, it led to dismissal for women.

Women, unlike men, are also likely to be perceived in a poorer light by both men and women if they express anger about situations that have personally caused them harm rather than share with emotional neutrality. Women’s anger was attributed to her personality in this case, whereas men’s anger is perceived to be motivated by external circumstances.

It’s Different When Women Exhibit ‘Empathetic’ Anger

Not all anger is the same. Sometimes it helps to have anger attributed directly to personality, when it comes to advocating for or defending others.

A recent set of studies revealed that when women display genuine empathetic anger – “anger that is caused by witnessing or learning of harm done to another person” – they are positively perceived as signaling both agentic and communal leadership traits.

Women were significantly more likely to benefit from displays of empathetic anger than men, including being seen as more effective in their position. The reason is that observer’s more strongly attributed the empathetic anger in women leaders to their personalities, which reflected positively upon the leader’s character.

The researchers encourage women to be very forthcoming in displaying their empathetic anger, because it allows women to be witnessed positively as agentic while increasing their communal perception too. Empathetic anger is associated with prosocial behavior.

It’s frustrating to have women’s expression of anger under greater scrutiny by everyone, women included. It’s also good to know that when anger has a more collective feel, it works for reinforcing women’s leadership, as the injustices one women faces are rarely faced entirely alone.

When it comes to empathy, it’s one place women are rewarded for getting “too emotional.”

Authors Bio: Aimee Hansen is a freelance writer, frequent contributor to theglasshammer and Creator and Facilitator of Storyteller Within Retreats, Lonely Planet recommended women’s circle retreats focused on self-exploration and connecting with your inner truth and sacred expression through writing, yoga, meditation, movement and ceremonies.

By Aimee Hansen

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Managing your Emotions at Work for Maximum Productivity

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You take a coffee or healthy snack, start a friendly conversation with a colleague, listen to your favorite music, watch some funny YouTube stuff (but don’t go overboard), visit your favorite site, rearrange or make up your working place, make a list of places to visit or movies to watch.

Emotions at workThese are great mood busters that will help you in critical situations. When the initial fire is coped, you need to sit down and analyze the case, identify the source of distress, and how you can overcome it.

Sometimes it is hard to keep up a good performance at the workplace. The burden of responsibilities, tight deadlines, a never satisfied boss, unfriendly customers, and co-workers, can turn your work into hell. Everyone may face similar situations, but not everyone knows how to avoid negative emotions.

The ability to control your feelings is no less important than well-honed professional skills. Negative feelings like frustration, anxiety, anger or distress may undermine your reputation, hinder working productivity or even lead to burnout. Nonetheless, there is a solution of how to deal with emotions to maximize productivity.

Below, you will find four elements to consider that will help you deal with your emotions and maximize your productivity:
Self Control

Research and surveys have shown that negative emotions are quite common in the workplace. The pressure of constant duties gradually degrades our mental and physical stability, which may result in a lack of emotional control. Eventually, problems may demotivate or strike the working efficiency, and people give up to negative emotions.

The majority of people are used to suppressing their feelings, but psychologists suggest that the better option is to learn to control your emotions. Constant restrain or denial of emotional issues does not solve the initial problem, and when negative emotions gradually pile up, it may eventually lead to a nervous breakdown or burnout.

So, how do you stop negative emotions at the initial stage? The most common way is to pause if you feel that negative emotions or frustration overwhelms you. It’s great if you have the possibility to take a short break and evaluate the situation from different perspectives.

Try to realize the primary cause that has put you out of balance. For example, if a client or your boss is late to the meeting, the worst option is getting annoyed. Instead, it is better to accept the situation and use this time for relaxation, to get a jump on the next task or answer a quick email.

Emotions Are Necessary For Work

Of course, we are not robots. It’s human nature to experience emotions. In some cases, feelings are necessary for work. Empathy, positivity, and politeness are highly important in the workplace, especially in the service field. However, while positive emotions are preferable, negative feelings should be put aside.. Excess emotionality may cause misunderstandings and problems even in simple situations. For example, aggression is a surefire way to lose customers and ruin a company’s reputation. Employees that directly communicate with customers create the overall impression of the organization. Besides, negative emotions may worsen the atmosphere in the team and demotivate your colleagues. The workplace is an interconnected ecosystem, where the emotional sustainability and welfare of each employee depend on everyone.

Short Pause

Sometimes it is hard to preserve a healthy working atmosphere, especially when people don’t know how to effectively cope with their emotions. Some choose to withdraw from social activity and limit communication, while others prefer to take the anger out on colleagues which is a self-destructive way, as it damages social connections and team unity. The good news is that there are plenty of positive methods that you can use to control your emotions. In this respect, relaxation and distraction are the best friends of each overwhelmed worker. Sometimes you need a short pause. Distract yourself from your task for a moment to gain perspective. Or take a longer break as today more and more companies offer wellness activities and understand the importance of mental and physical health.

Find A Golden Mean

The next step is to learn how to prevent negative emotions. Avoid any sources of anxiety. For example, organize your time to do all tasks on time and stop the rush. Set achievable goals to bypass frustration. It is also necessary to improve your mindset. Be respectful and courteous to your colleagues and clients. Treat every person as you’d treat yourself, or better still how you would like to be treated, and you will avoid accumulation of negativity right on the spot. Finally, it is essential to find a balance between those things that you enjoy, and those that take you out of the comfort zone. It’s necessary for your self-development and performance.

All of us face bad days and black lines: high working load, miscommunication, or personal issues. But we shouldn’t allow them to control our social and professional life. Of course, emotions make us human beings, but we need to use them wisely so that they do not destroy our lives. Try to avoid focusing on negative feelings and prevent excessive expression. Relax when you need it, analyze the problematic situation, listen to other people, and find a golden mean of your working performance. That will definitely help in both dealing with negative emotions and maximizing your productivity.

About the Author

Matthew Finnighan is a professional content writer. He writes for various blogs about higher education, entertainment, and social media. He aims to supply quality and unique content on the basis of human need. He is happy to share experience in writing, education, and self-development in his publications. If you are interested in his writing, you can find Matthew on Twitter or Facebook.

The opinions and views expressed by guest contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of theglasshammer.com

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