Crying, never. Getting angry, in private. Being surprised, never. We think keeping our emotions frozen makes us more mature adults and better professionals. We live accustomed to ignoring emotions, which for us are uncontrollable forces that arise from an ungovernable abyss we fear to peer into. However, the development achieved by attending to emotions is immense, and the damage avoided by giving them a voice is multiple.
Emotions are an essential part of our lives and provide us with fundamental information for understanding who we are, how we act, and how we perceive our surroundings. Emotions are a constitutive part of how we learn and develop; they help us make decisions and build the future. Without emotion, we could not choose between A or B. Without emotion, we would not run away to save ourselves.
Harnessing emotions and using them as allies is what we at the European School of Coaching (EEC) call Emotional Awareness, a job in which we've been immersed all year round to help people become friends with their own emotions; with all of them, the so-called positive ones (love, joy, surprise) and the negative ones (anger, fear, sadness, disgust). What we propose is to listen to them all without judging or rejecting them. Emotions are optimal indicators of our processes of change, they are subjective experiences that result from the personal evaluation of each situation, they are phenomena that have a purpose, not only to maintain our balance and help us survive, but beyond that, also to lead us to optimal circumstances.
To have emotions and to have them as allies is what we call Emotional Awareness.
Joining forces and becoming friends with emotions means giving ourselves permission to feel them. It's about analysing and integrating emotions so they can do their job, with awareness of a fundamental factor: all emotions have a positive intention. Every emotion is legitimate and signals something that is important for us to see. What message lies behind the anger we feel at a specific moment? What does a fear specifically hide? What is sadness trying to let us know?
We motivate ourselves from our emotions
Emotion is the foundation of motivation. For example, when we allow ourselves to experience the emotion of sadness, we understand that this emotion is telling us that something important to us has been lost. Every time we desire something, if that desire is then satisfied, or if we simply realise we are not going to obtain it, we go through a period of grief or loss. If we let the emotion of sadness run its course, sadness will be the driving force for a new desire. If, on the other hand, we deny it, disguise it, or simply tiptoe around it, the new desire will struggle to be noticed. In a way, sadness is the engine for new desire and provides the necessary energy to re-motivate ourselves.
Learning what emotion we need to achieve what we want is fundamental. When emotion and action go hand in hand, we can achieve extraordinary things. But when what we think doesn't align with what we say, and what we say doesn't align with what we feel, it's difficult to know what we want and almost impossible to do what we need to do to achieve it. If we gave ourselves the space to recognise the fear we have, the doubts that invade us, the sensation produced by being treated in one way or another, we would generate a different kind of bond with the groups we are part of, we would listen to what is happening to us, and all the people involved would have the capacity to modify and make proposals to change the emotional atmosphere.
The body is the theatre of emotions
To be able to decipher the coded message that emotions deliver to us, we must take a step back and discover in the body what we are feeling, the emotion that is trying to break through. That is Emotional Awareness: paying attention to the message that emotions communicate to us, accepting what is happening to us as part of our responsibility.
Every emotion is about making us aware of a message we weren't understanding. It's about feeling how our body and mind, as an indivisible whole, prepare themselves to respond in the most adaptive way possible to each situation. It's about realising when these phenomena arise to increase our freedom and our capacity to choose a response. For while we don't have the ability to control what happens to us, we can indeed choose our response to what happens to us. Each of us contains all possible emotions: those we like and those we don't. We have the capacity, for example, to choose whether we want to engage with an emotion or not. We can even stop being addicted to an emotion, which happens when we are so used to feeling or expressing an emotion that we need much more of it to get what we want. Emotional addiction robs us of our identity and authenticity, as we allow our own routine to hijack us.
Emotions, companies and results
Breaking the habit and choosing to voice emotions to avoid the damage caused by denying them. This happens with emotional outbursts, those moments when we become pressure cookers that explode, that overwhelm us and leave us with no control over what we say or do. Outbursts that happen, in many cases, because we haven't given emotions the space they had previously been demanding. Denying emotions is also a loss of richness, as we stop appreciating them in their true splendour and deny them the opportunity to become true allies in whatever we want to achieve.
Addressing emotions also reduces the stress produced by separating emotion from action. A separation in which we habitually live, with our action on one side and our emotion on the other. Uniting these factors of action and emotion has a direct effect, for example, on creativity and on results. In business, connecting emotion and action means that in addition to being physically in our role, we feel emotionally connected to what is happening there and give our best.
Understanding the messages our emotions give us therefore opens up a whole world of possibilities. What would happen if we were encouraged, in our own workplaces, to talk about emotions without feeling judged? What would happen if we learned to spread the emotions needed to achieve what we require?
Today, we know more than ever that what is possible from a certain emotion is impossible from the opposite or inverse emotion. And, therefore, that if we want to achieve the desired challenge, it becomes essential to connect with the appropriate emotion that allows the necessary change. Change, growth, learning, and results are our daily tools, and they are things that do not happen or are not possible without emotions involved. We also know that a leader's greatest responsibility is to create the right context for things to happen, even more so if we discover that the emotional context the leader creates carries specific weight and can be the key that brings them closer to or further away from their goals.
Addressing concerns, fears, doubts, interests, and preferences brings out the best in each person and employee. Creating Emotional Awareness and generating a space to validate my emotions and those of the team is the key to harnessing emotions and overcoming barriers and limitations. Aligning what we think, what we feel, and what we say allows us to achieve a very high level of coherence and precision and to focus energy on what we want to achieve. The results we achieve depend much more on emotions than we like to believe.
