Managing emotions at work

We all experience emotion at work. Sometimes it helps us and sometimes it hinders us. This week, Sarah and Helen talk about the positive and negative emotions that show up at work. They discuss concepts like ’emotional labour’ and ’emotional agility’ and share tips to help you to be in control of your emotions rather than your emotions controlling you.

About this week’s episode:

I was delivering a training programme recently, where one of the attendees said that she had received feedback about being too emotional at work. It had really affected her confidence and she asked me for my help in resolving the challenge. We talked through various things and she came away with some practical actions she felt comfortable with and committed to doing. I walked away thinking about showing emotion at work. When was it a good thing and when did it hold us back? How much of the issue was about other people’s perceptions or discomfort with dealing with emotion?

We decided to tackle the topic in this week’s podcast and we discovered some really interesting things!

Did you know….

• Research shows 41 percent of women say they’ve cried at work within the last year
• Cynthia Fisher’s research identified the 5 most common negative emotions experienced at work as; Frustration/irritation, Worry/nervousness, Anger/aggravation, Dislike, Disappointment/unhappiness
• Emotional Labour,a term first coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, is the work we do to regulate our emotions to create “a publicly visible facial and bodily display within the workplace”

There are some really useful resources if you want to dig a bit deeper into the topic:

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2013/01/09/from-crying-to-temper-tantrums-how-to-manage-emotions-at-work/#30be356c4bdf
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtDf6YIS_gM
• https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_41.htm
• https://www.amazon.com/No-Hard-Feelings-Embracing-Emotions/dp/0525533834 (out on 5th Feb)
• https://hr.nd.edu/assets/52816/emotionsatwork.pdf
• http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180619-why-suppressing-anger-at-work-is-bad