How I am Dealing With Difficult Emotions as a People Manager
My Journey to a Practice of Softening, Nourishing and Accepting My Emotions.
People in leadership roles know how they feel can affect people around them and thus their emotions are no longer theirs.
All human beings experience emotions. Some of these we don’t rather express. This can intensify even more in the work environment. Especially people in leadership roles know how they feel can affect people around them and thus their emotions are no longer theirs. So we try to take control of them. We ignore them, push them away, judge them, judge ourselves for judging them and suddenly all control is gone, we overreact or get scared of what is the mess and pain inside us that came out of nowhere and makes little sense.
The good news is that we don’t have to experience all the above. With practice, one can bring more understanding and acceptance to their feelings. Combining mindfulness practice and principles of non-violent communication has been a fundamental change for me.
My Day-to-Day Fights With Emotions
Having a tough performance review in one minute; then jumping into a meeting where without fighting one won’t get a word, followed by a conversation with a colleague that is going through a tough life situation. This is an emotional rollercoaster that can easily fit just within an hour and a half of my working time.
Looking back at how I was dealing with all these emotions, I was:
- Ignoring them.
- Judging them and judging myself for doing that.
- Over-analyzing them.
- Scared of them.
I kept asking myself, how other managers do it they don’t seem to struggle with their emotions. Now I know one important thing — they do, we all do and that’s ok.
At certain one point in my life, my body and mind showed me that the above-mentioned strategies won’t work anymore. My anxieties and panic attacks brought a powerful message to me — you either accept your emotions and yourself, or you will keep suffering. I had no choice; I kept trying, discovering various ways and in the end, I figured 5 steps that often help me.
On the Path to Acceptance — 5 steps
1. Recognizing
Recognizing means noticing an emotion and naming it properly. Figuring out the right words for emotions can be hard, especially when we experience complex emotions or a mix of various emotions at the same time. It might be very useful to go through a list of emotions and pick those that we experience at that very moment. The key and the challenge at the same time is to be honest with ourselves, even though we have feelings we would rather not experience.
2. Giving Space
Giving space means to stop and allow emotions to be right there. It does not mean analyzing and creating stories that support why I feel that way and rehearsing these reasons in my mind. It means allowing the emotion itself to be there with me at that very moment. While it might intensify the emotion at the beginning, after a while the emotion often starts losing the grip over me. It is hard, but patience is fundamentally needed. Allowing ourselves to spend time with the emotion is crucial, and it pays off.
3. Identifying Uncovered Needs
In some situations, our emotions are an outcome of unrevealed needs. Many times I catch myself feeling nervous, upset or even rejected during a meeting. What I often missed in that very moment was that I did not feel respected by the other side or felt they did not hear me. It happens to me especially in meetings with colleagues that are not skilled listeners. I still consider this type of meetings to be the most challenging for me. Not being heard belongs to situations in which people undervalue themselves the most. And that applies no matter the hierarchy. Whether it's a CEO, director or team lead, we all experience the same moments.
Putting together a list of emotions with a list of needs can help us understand the situation a lot better. Some situation even allow us to work on fulfilling those needs.
4. Self-compassion
Once I know how I feel and what I need, it all makes way more sense. This might make it easier to evoke kindness and self-compassion. Usually it helps me to admit the circumstances are indeed difficult for me and I do my best. It takes some practice to agree deeply. Going back to Self-Compassion meditation, part of the Relationship program in the Smiling Mind app helped me.
We tend to be very hard on ourselves, and sometimes we simply cannot provide enough compassion to ourselves. If compassion is not there, don't force it.
5. Accepting and letting go
Going through previous steps often helps me accept my emotions, address the needs and/or letting the emotion go. And if the emotion is still there, it’s ok. Maybe the moment of acceptance is still about to come. Being aware of that is already good enough.
Emotions are precious and fast signals that our needs are not fulfilled.
The Power of Understanding
Acceptance not only makes a relationship with emotions better. Emotions bring an important message to us. Perhaps we need to slow down; we long to be heard and respected. Our bodies discover these signals quickly. Therapists often work with their own emotions as a tool to give them further insights in the situation, and it is a very efficient tool for people managers as well. As managers, we often push away our emotions, while they might be one of the most important signals to work with.
The more I understand my own emotions, the less I judge and the more I respect and love people around me.
When I started approaching my emotions with openness, a beautiful thing happened. There were no longer bad emotions. Yes, there are still very unpleasant and painful emotions, but there is a certain beauty inside them as well. Sometimes suffering brings me back to whom I truly am and what is important for me. Sometimes it doesn't, and this is how it should be.
There is one more important aspect — the more I understand my own emotions, the more I understand people around me, connect to them, love them no matter how angry, jealous, or hostile they are, because I am all that as well, we all are, and that’s ok.
We are all ok.
