Don’t Leave Your Emotions At The Door

An emotional moment in a film and you break down in tears.  A sad song gets the tears flowing.  Or maybe a cute SMS brings tears to your eyes. Is this is the case, you’re over-sensitive. For a lot of individuals, it’s an emotional curse that can make it difficult to focus on your day-to-day activities. Highly sensitive individuals need to learn to shield themselves from negative emotions and negative catalysts in their social circle. Otherwise, they are doomed to a life of suffering. However, emotions are not always a bad thing.

If you know how to manage yours, you can achieve great things by listening to your feelings. For a start, most transformations that you go through in life are dictated as an emotional result of a difficult event. But more importantly, there may be a lot of greatness that comes out of being able to follow an emotional clue in your career. The bottom line is that there are many very good reasons why you should never leave your emotions at the door of your workplace.

Big life change, big me change

Do you know what the first thing you do after a bad breakup is? Okay, not the first thing.  The priority will probably go to calling your friends and then comforting yourself with a tub of ice cream, or maybe the other way round. But the first thing you do when you start to feel better and decide to take back control of your life is changing your appearance. It could be the physical proof that you are over your ex. Most people decide to get some new clothes or  go for a new hairstyle. As you wave goodbye to the memories of the past as you cut your hair.

Creating the change, you need in your life starts with your appearance. While it’s just hair, it’s often the primary response to a big life change, whether you’re going through a stressful situation or are trying to get back to the dating scene. It’s only natural to listen to your emotions when you are dealing with personal situations. More often than not, your emotions guide you through the correct path to get better – unless of course, you focus your energy on breeding negative emotions and in that case you won’t be able to improve much.

But why stop here?

So it may be surprising when everything in your personal life points towards a deeper and stronger understanding of your feelings, that most traditional workplaces continue to function along the motto: It’s business, leave your personal feelings at the door.  Of course, there’s a natural inclination to believe that you can’t mix business thinking with emotional behavior, but at the core of everything, it’s impossible to separate an individual from his or her emotions.

The take on not mixing feeling and business is based on a strategic approach to the business environment in which employees and employers are just a bolt in the great machine. At this level, it might even seem preposterous to talk about individuals. When no feelings are involved, a business might be composed of functions, tasks and a series of data on the pay slips. Additionally, in such a constellation, it becomes tricky to create essential marketing tools such as an emotional hook, which is necessary to approach a new audience or even an engaging content piece. Without the inclusion of emotions, the image of a business becomes only two-dimensional.

You should bring your emotions to work

You can’t let your business fall flat. So you’ll need to accept and acknowledge the importance of emotions in the workplace. Indeed, emotions play an essential part in the way people interact with each other or even how motivated or passionate they can be about their job. Without emotion, there is no passion. Consequently, if you want employees who are dedicated to serving the interest of their customers in the best way they can, you need to make emotions part of your business.

Feelings are at the center of creative work and positive atmosphere at work.  Emotions can enrich the project and help you to deliver a carefully produced solution or product.  And they can also make it easier to understand a target audience. As the world of business relies on the ability to collect data, it’s important to keep an emotional side to give meaning to lifeless facts. For instance, knowing what your visitors do on the website is pointless information unless you can put yourself in their shoes and understand how to improve the site for their benefit. And it’s only your emotional awareness that can help you to make sense out of behavioural data.

What happens when something stresses you out?

When you bring your emotions to the workplace, not only are you more creative and better equipped to understand your customers, but you are also more exposed to sharing your feelings with co-workers. It doesn’t take much observational talent to notice when a colleague is struggling with a stressful situation. Ignoring is not an option anymore, especially as stress is spreading rapidly in the workplace environment.

Being in a position to recognize negative feelings and want to act to improve them is the best thing you can do. In short, use your emotional acuteness to know when to act and how to help. Consequently, the best emotional response is to be empathetic and offer a friendly ear to your colleague. Let them know that they are understood and respected, and give them a hand if you can. Sometimes, you can share the workload or simply help them to define a priority list to tackle their tasks efficiently. Recognizing stress in others is the best way to reduce and destroy it before it spreads out.

What are the emotional signs that it’s a good place?

A workplace that understands emotions and how to maximize their positive impacts is a place that makes you feel good as an employee. Even if you’re feeling stressed out about a specific project, it’s important to recognize the signs of a good workplace. For a start, you’re not dreading the idea of going to work every morning. You’re rather excited to get up and go to work. Difficulties are not perceived as such; you see them as challenges. You appreciate them as much as solving a crossword clue! Besides, you’re an expert in your area, and your workplace knows it, as others seek out your opinion on specific projects. Finally, you don’t watch the clock when you work. Time flies past, and you don’t even notice it!

Are you emotionally ready to take a chance?

What if you want to approach something bigger and make a bold move to improve your career. Every change of career or company needs to be accompanied by positive feelings. Indeed, if you decide to approach a new job with anxiety, it’s likely that you will, firstly, fail to impress your new colleagues and, secondly, not be able to make a positive difference in your new company. However bold your professional move is, you need to be emotionally committed to making it work. This is the first piece of advice that graduates hear when they consider moving abroad to advance their career. It’s an exciting and productive decision.  But it can only benefit you if you are prepared to embrace something new.

Additionally, just as foreign employees are required to learn English when they want to work in an English-speaking country, you might find that you have to emotionally committed to developing your language skills. Why emotionally committed? Because you need to care about something to learn it.

What if you the workplace creates negative emotions?

Unfortunately not every emotion that you experience during your working life is positive. There are companies or work environment that can be emotionally draining so that you might race towards a certain burnout syndrome without even noticing it. How does it happen? More often than not, people who put too much emotional pressure on themselves to achieve high standards exhaust themselves physically and emotionally. However, they are some indicating signs that can help you to stop before it’s too late.

For a start, a common sign is to experience a strong feeling of not wanting to go to work in such a manner that you become completely detached from your professional responsibility. You might not even feel happy at the idea of going back home at the end of the day because you can’t de-stress. If you experience any of this, you should talk to a counselor to find out what to do.

What if you have negative emotions about quitting the job?

So, you’ve discussed the situation with a counselor, and you’ve decided to quit. But instead of making you feel better, you feel ashamed of yourself, as if you were giving up. Quitting is a choice; it’s not a fatality or a sign of weakness. You quit because there’s something better for you elsewhere.

Your emotions are a thrive for improvements in your life and your career. But they are also deeply connected to your well-being, especially if you are suffering from a lot of negative feelings. The safest way to make your emotions part of your career is to embrace the positive ones and learn the lessons for improvements from the negative feelings.