We’ve been told not to bring our feelings to work, but we argue that that’s where we need them most.
Feelings have been left out of the conversation around work for a long time now - especially since culturally, feelings are associated with weakness and lack of competence. Conventional “wisdom” therefore tells us to separate our work life from our personal life (this, despite the fact that adults spend most of our time at work). While there is merit to compartmentalising (a necessary cognitive skill), the expectation has become that we should be able to completely cut ourselves off at work and focus only on the tasks at hand. This year’s World Mental Health Day theme - Mental Health at Work - is a timely reminder that unless we turn our attention towards our emotional experience of work, we’ll continue to see record high levels of stress and burnout around work.
We at Centred have adopted Susan David’s principle that emotions are data. Your feelings are important messengers, delivering information that you need to make decisions that are aligned with your values (see more on Dr. David’s work here). Your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are always in relationship with each other, even though we as a society tend to put more weight on thoughts and behaviours.
At our core, humans are feeling creatures who think, not thinking creatures who feel, so the advice to “leave your feelings at home” is not only unhelpful, but ultimately impossible. You NEED your feelings to guide you, to protect you, to signal you toward action. Learning how to identify what you feel at work (without judging it - just noting the feeling as useful information) can help you to make necessary changes that will improve the quality of your experience every day. Here's a simple formula to use:
For example, when people add meetings to my calendar without asking, I feel annoyed and disrespected. If I want to feel calm and respected, I can respond with my availability or block times out of my calendar in advance.
We want you to feel more empowered at work (and in life, but today's focus is work), so please consider the following resources -
Useful Tools:
Feelings Wheel for identifying what you feel
Recommended Reading:
Emotional Agility by Susan David, PhD
Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett, PhD
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown, PhD
Recommended Listening:
ReThinking and Work Life with Adam Grant
Dare to Lead with Brené Brown
Checking In with Susan David
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