Let’s get real about emotions in the workplace. The bias that sits with emotions is not resigned to work it’s everywhere. Yet in work, it seems we are less tolerant, less perceptive of others emotions, ignorant [1] even and if you believe the perceived perspective (bias) that females are more emotional at work than men then we all have a bias towards emotion - although it is been proven men are 60% more emotional in the workplace than women [2]?!

Cognitive bias is emotional bias- why?

The study of human psychology shows that emotions influence cognitive processes like when we are in a positive state we can react better, be more optimistic to inconsistent results, actions than when we are in bad moods- this is called cognitive judgement bias. Understanding that we all have a basis that fluxes and changes with our mood can allow us to understand how and why we get “surprised” by someone’s reaction when something occurs at work.

Bias is led by assumption and judgement, these bedfellows impact our emotional responses, language and reaction to others. Ever liked someone, thought their work was good and then someone you respected told you that they were not great, not every good and they thought their work was sub-par and YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND about them? Yet moments before you had seen them as integral to plans, roles, promotions. Being self-aware of how our bias is in each relationship we have is a key business skill.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers explores a lot of this bias, assumption and judgement on how our emotional responses are connected to liking, knowing and or fearing, worried about or even from a deep intimate connection we react and apply bias without consideration.

Understanding we have these biases is all well and good yet what can we actively do about them?

Emotions are still in this 21st-century world considered a female vice, a weakness, an area of concern. We are seeing some glimmers of hope and openness to it being genderless. We are humans we all feel emotions, it’s an incredible part of who and what we are. Emotions have been used as weapons to tap into someone’s psyche and create blame, shame, guilt, fear, insecurity a power trip and all of that is genderless. Let’s use emotions to benefit not hinder, damage or use as weapons of power.

EMOTIONS CREATE EMBARRASSMENT, THEREFORE ITS EASIER TO IGNORE THEM FOR OURSELVES AND OTHERS

Can we be effective and also share our emotions? The answer is yes, of course, it is possible to be emotional AND being effective (personally or professionally) the key and starting point is identification.

IGNORING OUR EMOTIONS IS LAZY

Emotions happen to us; feelings are natural, again genderless, it doesn’t matter. We have created stereotypes and label people as weak

….“ don’t ask them, they are one of those emotional types, you can’t say what you want in case you upset them”…

Or worse still used an even more derogatory term

“it’s time of the month stay clear.”

“they are affected that way you know.”

All of these I have personally heard used on other people. Or even used as a recognition of strength in the wrong way

“Ah yeah tough as nails, you won’t hurt them say what you like.”

“She’s cold, no emotions like a guy, she one of the lads, good thing.”

“Their aggressive, you know, doesn’t do the emotion thing, so make sure you don’t show any”

Again all heard first hand in the workplace. None of these is good, and they also demonstrate the other person’s issues more than the person they are describing.

I have never coached anyone who hasn’t demonstrated their emotions to me. We all hurt, get sad, angry, annoyed frustrated, hurt, excitable, energised, fearful,antcipatry, over-enthusiastic- just a few of the ranges of coaching emotion we can have! We all get affected and impact by words and poor (and great) behaviours.

WE ALL FEEL OUR FEELINGS.

Any emotion can impact us and how effective we are, including enthusiasm, happiness, joy, excitement, pleasure, awe, play have an impact too. For example ever been on a workshop or course, meeting and your colleague is distracting or annoying for others through their over-enthusiastic responses? We can avoid them and react badly to this positive display. as this energy is hard for others to work with and alongside. So we then react badly to them. No one wins in this situation as the person who is over-enthusiastic feels ridiculed and we create issues within the relationships as we get annoyed with our emotional response to them too.

Emotions don’t make us ineffective we allow it, we permit it to envelope up is in its arms with a false sense of this is okay. They can creep up on us, through a time of anxiety or happiness, dealing and caring for others, create a slowness that is appreciated and also a veil of deep sadness and lack of energy or over-enthusiastic approach that could be annoying. Emotions are a choice. We choose to allow them to become our reaction or response.

EVERY EMOTION IS A CHOICE.

Big statement? Nope, I don’t think so, and we choose to feel, we wish not to feel. Consider anytime when you’ve had to deal with a situation where you can’t present how you feel, be it work when someone has made you so angry, so annoyed. Yet, you have to show a warm, open face, dampen the intense, hostile emotions and respond in a way that means you won’t lose your job and the security it brings for you. You CHOOSE to manage your feelings.

What is interesting in this management of emotions is that when we - hold them, suppress them in situations, we avoid them or transfer them, they WILL spill over -my husband calls this emotional leakage.

This can be pretty instant for some; for others, it stays there for a long, long time. We allow them to be something else. Using our example of being so angry at work, that internal heat of anger bubbles away inside, we hold our face and emotions to check for a long time. We head home, and when something like the tea isn’t ready, the house isn’t tidy, you wanted a particular reply, the traffic is so dense, those trapped contained emotions come tumbling out offered on the innocent and expelling us from the pain we had chosen to hold. It creates a cycle of other emotional responses from embarrassment, and then we carry it on because we can’t tell the real reason or we don’t realise it in that heated moment.

This ability to choose our emotions is one we all need to master as it can be beneficial not only for ourselves for those around us too. To be effective, we need to have an understanding of ourselves before we work through it starts with looking at our language, words.

Language is an emotional superpower

How we talk about emotions ourselves is as important as how we talk with others. If you are a parent and you regularly say to your children - Don’t be sad, Don’t be angry, Don’t laugh like that now, Don’t feel that way etc. you are telling them subconsciously not to connect to their emotions. The feeling is critical in a child as they explore and learn. Many neurological and psychological studies show the correlation between being told at a young not to feel and then having suppressed issues as an adult.

The best way to deal with having good healthy emotional conversations is to ask how they are feeling. Then ask why to explain it’s okay to feel that way and allow them to understand ultimately this kindness we share with children is how we should manage our own emotions.

I struggled for years dealing with negative emotions. Telling myself, I am cold, distant, as I had an upbringing that was emotionally void and all-encompassing grief as a young widow, which created an emotional barrier for me to live in so that I didn’t feel anything. It stored itself up as anger, bitterness, and deep aching sadness. I told myself I wasn’t worth it, and if anything terrible things happened, it was all deserved. Now, this isn’t about my emotional state, and it is about the impact of language used - we may mock self-care and self-love yet that language has a powerful impact on how we deal with emotions, life and our balanced wellbeing.

Note the words I had used about my past- negatives, self-deprecating, blame, shame, guilt, fear, loss all mean we can all use this language when we self communicate. Ignoring our emotions, buffering and protecting ourselves or so we think.

CONSIDER YOUR LANGUAGE - HOW YOU DEAL WITH YOUR EMOTIONS; IT HAS A TRANSFORMATIONAL IMPACT ON BEING MORE PRODUCTIVE.

The best action is to start using different words yourself and then share them, we coach this activity and it’s hugely powerful when some starts to understand their own emotional language and the bias impact it has on them directly first. Start using different words, dig deeper into the emotion, for example, if you say confident - is it more - trusting, courage, optimism? Really look at how you can learn and develop your emotional langue to limit your bias.

TEN WAYS TO WORK WITH AND MAKE EMOTIONS YOUR POWER

1. LOCATE THEM -when you have a “feeling” be aware of it. Where is it in your body? This may seem an odd observation to make yet we all carry our emotions in different parts of ourselves. By locating them, we can learn to understand them better. I have a client who holds their sadness in their cheeks, and their cheeks ache when they are sad- this impacts them as they get incorrect responses from others and they have to work harder (less effective) to overcome this. Another client who holds anger stress in their left shoulder and spine to the point of such pain that they snap at others with their pain and this makes them less effective as they cant work at their best.

2. NAME THEM FULLY- The focus on being specific with what you feel and naming it is key to being more effective. The process of naming the emotion means you are dealing with it through the naming process if you’ve never seen the feelings wheel before (created, adapted and by Gloria Wilcox adapted by Pluchick) is a psychological tool that allows you to be specific about how you REALLY feel. By name, we also identify the behaviour that goes with the emotion and our response. Look at the centre of the wheel and work outwards, be definite and ensure you can answer why it feels this, what behaviour you demonstrate, how you work or don’t and what if now you know what it is you can work with it rather than against it. More updated neuroscience study and work by Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on emotion connects our language, words and the power of them and also the ease we can boost our brain and self to be more effective using language as a starting point to grow skill and self-awareness. Being able to use words better to describe our emotions means we can get better at dealing with, accepting and also helping others. We use limited words when expressing emotion (the core have been for many and in research Joy, Happy, Sad, Angry, Mad). Barret’s work focuses on more core words and then identifies positive and negative separately so there is an expanded vocabulary immediately.

The best action is to start using different words yourself and then share them, we coach this activity and it’s hugely powerful when some starts to understand their own emotional language and the bias impact it has on them directly first. Start using different words, dig deeper into the mention so if you say confident - is it trusting, courage, optimism? Really look at how you can learn and develop your emotional langue to limit your bias.

For example, I worked with a client who kept saying they had anger issues. We explored this through several sessions and identified the actual emotion wasn’t anger. They had always been told it was anger and, it was scepticism about their ability, and how others perceived them; thus, this was an angry emotional response and how others received it. By naming it fully, we worked through the energy wasted on this emotion and how to identify and respond when this came up.

3. FEEL THEM might sound odd yet we say we feel a certain way and are mostly lying about our true feelings. Ever use- I’m fine, Yes I am Ok when you just not. you don’t want to either have the conversation or have to make the other person feel uncomfortable in any way. Our language dismisses our actual feeling. We fight our emotions and by doing this we are disguising our true self, hiding behind a lost emotion and by doing this makes us ineffective too. Te boost to effectiveness is the best way is to feel them fully- at that moment.

4. TRIPLE A TECHNIQUE I created this technique to help myself and coach it now to great results. The tripe A is easy to remember. Accept- Acknowledge- Action. Watch the video to see the technique

5. USE THEM AS ENERGY emotions bring us sensations physically, and this is how you can maximise them to assist you. The most straightforward examples are nervous emotions anxiety, panic, upset, as they are strong physical emotions and by slowing your breathing down, deeper breaths you can harness the negative energy- noting this works with overconfident or overzealous emotions.

6. USE STATECHANGER TOOLS use NLP techniques or Statechangers, anchors to help you work through each emotion. We have techniques called MindChangers. Used to change state and deal with emotions better. (Join our Free Membership for access to more) 

7. LET THEM GO. One of our daughters has slight autistic tendencies and expressing emotions can be a challenge, she’s a musician, and we discussed seeing the feelings as musical notes playing a great tune. Let the music play, the whole song out, let the notes dance without interruption. Let your emotions flow; let them go. (Triple-A technique does this too). This is key, feel, flow, go.

These last three actions are interconnected and allow you to deal with your emotions to benefit your responses

8. CONTAIN THEM sounds contradictory to the rest of the advice, yet if you do have some severe emotional reactions you need to be able to contain them (now they exist, and give yourself a time and place to deal with them). The anger example we’ve used is that we can feel angry, we recognise it, we can choose to deal with it when we are not in a situation that could impact us and others negatively.

9. NEVER IGNORE THEM the next few go hand in hand with dealing with containing emotions until you have the opportunity to manage them. The difference between our original example of anger in the workplace and holding it in, pretending you are not is not containing them either. It’s ignoring them, moving on and letting it spill out in the wrong place or person. If you have to provide any emotional responses, feeling you MUST deal with them as quickly as possible from when they occurred. WE can convince ourselves they don’t matter, and we have dealt with it (inadequate containing emotion response). If you just look at this as a neurological challenge - you tell your brain you are not angry. Yet, your physiological body is telling you; otherwise, the mind goes into I must protect mode, and that’s when it goes wrong, and you react badly or internalise creating a ticking emotional negative well-being bomb inside. Deal with them.

10. SHARE THEM it’s not easy talking for some, and as a natural “internaliser” I have to work hard to say this is how I feel. It’s also not just talking, and it’s about having real conversations about how you feel, why what is it that triggers these emotions (good and the bad), how do you need help or how can you be better. It deepens relationships, and builds rapport, it impacts your effectiveness as you learn and so do others. Start the conversation with a coach or confidante if it helps first, then start exploring a wider circle of friends, colleagues, family.

The key to sharing and talking about emotions is NOT to fall into the general pot of just agreeing. If someone is expressing their emotions to you, listen, stop, it’s not your emotions, it’s not your story, it’s not your feelings. Listen to others and learn how you can explain how you feel. We fall into the nodding and general trap as we get uncomfortable, so instead start building your way of saying how you feel.

Another great way to share is to journal, scribble, jot down, write down allow yourself a way to express yourself, it works best when you have someone to share it with, however, we aren’t all that fortunate. Make a way to share, write a blog, join a forum, join a group find what works for you.

We all have bias

There is no normal, yet we are human and as humans we have bias. Our personal awareness, our ability to be more perceptive, to ask am I biased? Actively seeking our different opinions, perspectives, thoughts will aid in improving and limiting bias- it will exist part of it is self-protection too.

Accepting the emotions of yourself and then in others will aid in better working relationships, asking better questions, responding with better answers. Connection and improved rapport are the outcomes that are boosted when you become more emotionally aware, less biased and most of all accepting that your bias is only through one lens- find more and be more curious in all you do.

Overall we need emotion in the workplace it boosts effectiveness, productivity, builds a positive work culture, drives team retention, boosts learning, enhances customer service, emotional integrity, creates diverse and inclusive workplaces, builds psychological safety. Knowing all this why wouldn’t you choose to be emotional at work? Biased?

Research and references

[1] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/emotional-acknowledgment-how-verbalizing-others-emotions-fosters and https://phys.org/journals/organizational-behavior-and-human-decision-processes/

[2] https://www.totaljobs.com/advice/emotions-at-work?WT.mc_id=E_A_AF_AWIN_TJ&awc=21134_1631554465_6c78316f37329c83c647b750d6df92a9#what-triggers-our-emotions-if-were-a-woman-or-a-man and https://www.totaljobs.com/advice/emotions-at-work?WT.mc_id=E_A_AF_AWIN_TJ&awc=21134_1631554465_6c78316f37329c83c647b750d6df92a9

[3] Entreperunial and emotional links to cognitive bias https://internal-journal.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00625/full

[4] emotions and cognitive bias Mathews, A. & MacLeod, C. Cognitive approaches to emotion and emotional disorders. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 45(1), 25–50 (1994). and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71994-9