Written by: David Kegley, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Many, if not most, of my clients are leaders, highly educated and very skilled. We got to where we were going by being very focused, working hard and wasting no time along the way. Emotions may have seemed unnecessary or unwanted for a long time. But now, we can’t seem to avoid them. They seem to be demanding attention. They spook us by showing up at unwanted intervals. About the time we want to show our best side, they show up and hold us back. Just when we want to make a play for a new angle in our work, they put the squeeze on and we feel surprisingly ill at ease.
We’ve come to find that our once supremely agile self is now in need of a make-over.
This is not uncommon for many people. If we were not taught how to value our emotions or what to do with them, we are often at a loss when they demand attention. It turns out that emotions are much more key in getting things done than we were ever led to believe!
Our Emotions Move Us!
What if emotions were actually THE key to getting things done! What if BEFORE we do anything we engage with our emotions to find the best way forward. That’s what many psychologists have found. What’s going on in the deepest recess of our motivations is an emotional trigger that either says “Oh, that’s juicy enough to move toward!” or “blah, blah, blah” nothing’s gonna happen there.”
Some of us in the world of coaching say it this way: “Emotions are the predispositions for action,” meaning that we are moved by our emotions to act. What this, in effect, does is to turn much of our common thinking about emotions on its head. We usually assume that our thinking or even our behavior is what convinces us to act and that our emotions will just take care of themselves. We leave our emotions out of the equation. We do that at the expense of a significant part of ourselves.
Two Strategies to Tune into Our Emotional Reality
In conversations with my clients, many of them will tell me that they aren’t sure what they are feeling or how to proceed into the woods of their emotional territory.
You really can get there better than you may be led to believe, regardless of your gender or age. Men in western cultures are taught not to feel very deeply, women are supposed to be feelers. Both stereotypes should be broken. The key is that you can govern yourself. You can manage how deeply you traverse your emotional territory, when you do, just how you go about doing it and for what purpose. Put yourself in charge, just be respectful of the mystery at play in your personhood. You can’t tell yourself what emotion to feel but you can decide the particulars about your discovery process. Do your best at dispelling the fear around your emotional territory or the mystery of spending time with your emotions.
The one qualification I would give you is that if you do feel significant problems around your emotional background and there are issues in your emotional past, that would be the indication for you to consider a therapist. A therapist can help you sort out what may have tripped you up in your past and they may provide suggestions about how you can proceed into your future and work with a coach. If you need to work with a therapist, ask them about working with a coach and about working with present-day and future modes for emotional work. For all others, if you are confident about working with your present and future, exploring the following suggestions are entirely possible.
Strategy One: Respect and Honor Your Emotions
As you prepare for the exercise, you might want to keep a list of emotions near you for reference. In my training workshops we often help our clients by providing a list of emotions for them to refer to. Simply do an internet search and you’ll come up with some great lists, some of them in brilliant color.
In order to respect and honor emotions, I have my clients develop a practice of doing slow, deep breathing exercises as a way to calm their emotional systems. This should feel wonderfully relaxing and easy. After a rhythm of slow and easy breathing has been established, I have them name an emotion that they want to focus on.
I then ask them to identify a place in their body where the emotion they’ve named seems to live. Sometimes people need a little encouragement to use their imagination or to scan their body for that place. Usually, for most people and sometimes even to their surprise they can identify a place. For those who can’t, no problem. Simply naming the emotion and being with the emotion is plenty. Now we’re ready for the next step…
The next step is to spend a little time with the emotion in that place in the body (if the person identified a place). Maybe 30 seconds, or up to two minutes. Doing this is often a unique, surprising and remarkable experience. Two guidelines: 1) Avoid “thinking about” the emotion and instead feel the emotion; 2) The focus on the place in your body where the emotion lives helps you get out of your head and more in the body and the emotion. Therefore, please don’t use your head as the place where your emotion lives (it might instead be tensions in your eyebrows, the back of your neck or shoulders).
When you finish, journal what you experienced. Use terms based less on thinking and more on feeling/emotion. Avoid saying things like “I felt like,” “I think that,” in favor of terms like: “I felt ___ emotion (anger, calm, joy, etc.),” “I felt ____ sensation (heat, cool, vibration, tension, etc.),” “The place where my emotion lived moved to ______” or “I felt moved to do _________.” (some action)
Sometimes this is difficult to do without a coach trained in the technique itself. Other times people can get this and run with it. I suggest you try it and see what happens for you. It can be a fantastic way to develop your emotional repartee.
Strategy Two: Unload Your Emotional Baggage
Another strategy is to develop the skill to clear the emotional baggage you have built up for the day or the week. We often get overloaded by other people’s emotions. We can absorb the emotions of others and start feeling what they are feeling to the point it becomes burdensome. People may even have difficulty sorting out whose emotions they are feeling, their own or someone else’s. Spending a few minutes at different times in the day, at the end of the day and/or the end of the week (you choose) to sort out those emotions can help you to unload them. You can do an exercise to identify them, perhaps write them down, let them go and settle yourself so that you don’t have to keep carrying them around. Again, for some it helps to work with a list of emotions to help you name the emotions.
One way to achieve this exercise daily is to set the alarm on your phone or watch (perhaps one set on vibrate, so only you are aware of it) at three different times during the day. When the alarm goes off, take a brief inventory of the emotions your are feeling and identify if they are your own or if they belong to someone else. Then go on with the rest of your day. Allow just five or so minutes each time so that the exercise itself doesn’t get burdensome. At the end of the day or week, take some time to review what you’ve learned from your inventory. Note also how your emotional vocabulary is expanding and see if you are getting better at identifying your own emotions and those of others. Additionally, challenge yourself at certain times of your choosing to increase your ability to feel the emotion, to respect it and then let go of the emotion purposefully.
Improving Here Means Improving Everywhere
Richard Boyatzis at Case Western Reserve University and Daniel Goleman (when he was at Harvard University) found that when you improve your Emotional Self-awareness, it allows you to be more able to improve in what they call Competencies. Here are a few of the other Competencies: Emotional Self-control, Adaptability, Empathy, Inspirational Leadership, and Conflict Management. There are many others. These are essentially unlocked when a person improves their own Emotional Self-awareness.
What I can personally add is that this may not be true unless a person consciously applies themselves to the task of increasing both Emotional Self-awareness and the other competencies and it may take some focused training on the competencies themselves. What I can say is that becoming better at Emotional Self-awareness alone has tremendous payoffs both for yourself and for those around you. You know yourself better, your motivations, your sense of self-direction and the emotions at play around you. Others can sense this and after some steady practice on your part, engage you as a more emotionally mature person.
The only way to know this is to try it out. I can guarantee you won’t be disappointed!
You can reach David at: drkegley.com or LinkedIn
David Kegley, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Dr. Kegley specializes in coaching well-educated, progressive leaders and executives who have been stopped in their tracks due to health setbacks. His doctorate is in theology and preaching. His first 25-year career was in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., where he was a Pastor and Head of Staff. But, after getting nearly burned out, getting diagnosed with Prostate Cancer, and going through cancer treatment, he emerged as a credentialed coach. Now he Coaches in the areas where he experienced his own humility and growth: Health and Wellness, The Cancer Journey, Burnout Recovery, and Leadership and Executive.
