Liane Davey's Blog, page 6

7 Things That Drain Your Energy

 

In my previous post, I discussed some things you can do to boost your energy levels, like making deposits in your energy bank account. Today, I want to talk about all the withdrawals you’re making and some of the unnecessary withdrawals that are really eroding your energy and burning through your batteries. I think there’s an opportunity to reduce that so that you feel more energized throughout your day and your week.

1. Distraction

Distraction is incredibly de-energizing. Switching from one thing to the next requires tremendous brain power, what’s called “Cognitive switching.” You burn energy every time you have to do that. Reducing distractions from your life helps preserve and protect your energy levels.

The research on phones and what an energy drain they are is alarming. One study examined how having a cell phone near you is still a huge drain even if all notifications are off and it’s turned upside down. A large amount of energy goes into attending to that phone. Even when it’s off, it must be in a different room so it doesn’t zap your energy.

2. Irrelevance

Irrelevance and administrivia are things that zap your energy because we know making meaning and doing things that matter boosts our energy. When we’re spending time on things that are just like digging a hole and then filling it back in again, that can run down our batteries.

What things can you remove from your day that feel like doing nothing? Can you delete them all together? Ask yourself, “Why am I even doing this?” If you can’t remove them, can you do them more efficiently? Can you do a “good enough” version? If you can’t do that either, how can you find and contain, build a fence around some part in your week to do these tasks without letting them bleed into everything else?

Many people have realized that a lot of emails are low-meaning and low-value. You can prevent them from constantly draining your energy by checking them only a couple of times a day. Watching somebody respond to emails is funny because they often let out a big sigh because it’s draining their energy. Remove those trivial, irrelevant tasks from your day.

3. Negativity

It’s incredible how being around negative people significantly impacts our mood due to emotional contagion—monitor who brings you down. If possible, avoid them altogether, even if you once considered them a friend. For those you can’t avoid, like your own child, find ways to create safe spaces and manage the impact. Recognize how these interactions affect your energy levels and take steps to protect yourself.

4. Suppressing Emotions

Another thing that drains a lot of energy is suppressing our emotions. Suppressing emotions is exhausting and leads to burnout. My friend Michael Bungay Stanier always asks, “What are you pretending isn’t true?” because pretending consumes tremendous energy. Instead, ask yourself, “How do I work through this? How do I pay attention to this emotion? What is it telling me? What can I do to make it better?” Suppressing emotions burns through your charge whenever you try to keep it tucked away somewhere.

5. Clutter

Another one, which is smaller and maybe more manageable, is clutter. We know that clutter creates a drain on our energy. Physically, in your environment, if you’re feeling low or want to maintain your energy, take the time to declutter. We don’t even know that clutter is having that effect on our brains, but it absolutely is. Find at least a safe space. There may be other places in your house or at the office that aren’t organized the way you need, but if you can arrange your desk, for example, so that the clutter is behind you and create a clean, sterile space in front of you, it can help protect your energy.

6. Not Taking a Break

We expect ourselves to have amazing energy from 8:30 in the morning to 5:30 at night, but no. We don’t have big, huge cycles in our lives. We have ultradian cycles, which are shorter cycles lasting 90 minutes to two hours. Understanding and honoring these cycles and taking breaks instead of trying to push through our day’s natural ebbs and flows can be helpful.

You have to use very expensive energy to be highly productive for two or three hours. It’s like a boat that’s not planing in the water yet—it’s just pushing water and burning a ton of gas. Once the boat gets on top of the water, it becomes more efficient. Similarly, working past the two-hour mark is like pushing water, burning a lot of energy. So pay attention to those and find your natural breaks.

7. Telling Unhelpful Stories

The last one is the stories we tell ourselves. We have emotions, experience the world, and then create stories about what’s happening—whether we see ourselves as victims or find hope. It’s important to understand that these stories greatly impact how much energy we expend, and stories where we paint ourselves as victims burn a ton of energy. Can you find a story you’re telling yourself that you can reframe, reassess, or find an action to move forward? Because when it just sits there and hangs over you as this unhealthy narrative, it will burn a ton of energy.

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Protecting your energy matters so much these days. There is so much coming at you. Find the opportunity to put deposits in your resilience bank account with good sleep and play, and all the other things we know contribute to energy. It’s hard, so it’s even more important that you be aware of the things that are sapping your energy and cut them out as much as possible. Where you can’t cut them out, put nice ring fence boundaries around them and be more deliberate about how you spend your energy. But, many ways we deplete our energy are things that we control, such as clutter and distraction.

Find ways to make sure that you’re not draining your batteries any faster than is absolutely necessary. You can find some strategies for boosting your energy levels in this post.

More On This

How to build your resilience

Gas in the Tank?

8 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed by Your Workload

Video: Dealing With Frustration at Work

The post 7 Things That Drain Your Energy appeared first on Liane Davey.

10 Ways to Help People Say Uncomfortable Things

Are you struggling to foster open, frank, candid communication among your teammates? Do uncomfortable conversations happen behind the scenes or not at all? Have passive-aggressive conflict styles stuck you with the same unresolved issues month after month? It might be time to focus on making it easier for people to say uncomfortable things.

There’s no surefire way to get someone to say something that feels risky. The right prompt depends on whether sharing their message might reflect poorly on them, spark conflict and friction with other team members, slow things down, or create uncertainty in some other way.

Here’s a list you can draw from that covers the landscape. Using any of these approaches can make it feel less daunting for people to express to you an unpopular or uncomfortable point of view.

Ask for disagreement. Let’s start with a simple question: just ask for it. Tell the person that you need someone to present other sides of the argument. Try, “I’d like to hear dissenting perspectives now so I can bake them into my plan,” or “I really value it when you’re transparent with me.”Request that they share a different perspective. It can be helpful to name your biases and encourage people with different perspectives to share them. “I’m not a salesperson, so my perspective is biased. Could you share how this looks from the sales perspective?”Express the value you get from the person’s candor. People might remain silent because they believe speaking up could do more harm than good. You can counteract that by being explicit about the importance of their input. “I know it’s hard for me to hear, but when you help me spot the flaws in my plan, I get to a much better outcome.”Find a private spot to ask for contentious input before a meeting. If you have a meeting where you’re worried the stakes will be too high for people to air their grievances, ask for input in a safer environment. “We’re doing talent calibration tomorrow, and I need candid feedback on Anders. Could we grab a couple of minutes in private so I can get your thoughts?Frame disagreement as helping to reduce implementation risk. You can make it more likely that someone will share an uncomfortable message if you position it as helping you for later. “It’s tempting to push this through, but I need your thoughts on how this might go wrong during implementation.”Thank people (publicly and privately) who disagree with you. If you want more people to share uncomfortable messages, reward them for it. “In yesterday’s meeting, Fran’s feedback about how my delegation wasn’t clear enough really made me think. Fran, I’m grateful to you for sharing that.”Explain your reactions. If you have a strong (or even a subtle but clear) adverse reaction to someone raising a contentious issue, take a moment to explain it so that it becomes less aversive. “I’m reacting because I’m worried about how I’m going to communicate that to the team, but I’m very grateful for you pointing it out.”Leave silence. Do you know what stops someone from saying something uncomfortable? When they can’t get a word in edgewise. Sometimes, you need to let the silence drag on for longer than seems normal. The person might start to find the silence more uncomfortable than saying what needs to be said.Encourage hypotheticals. People don’t have to admit to having contrary thoughts. It can be valuable if they just imagine what contrary thoughts might be out there. Encourage them to share by asking, “Hypothetically, if someone were to complain about this, what would they be worried about?”Ask broad questions that allow people to share their values. The right question allows the person to paint your blank canvas with the most personal answers. Try questions like, “What is this about for you?” “What’s at stake here?” “What would be an unacceptable outcome?”

In Conclusion

Beyond all the specific words, the vital thing to realize is how you engage with difficult conversations (and with colleagues in general) affects how comfortably your teammates share contentious messages with you. If they’ve seen you start yelling at someone, don’t expect them to step up to be the next in line for a dressing down. If you’ve gossiped with them and violated someone else’s trust, they probably won’t be willing to risk sharing their discrete message with you.

That doesn’t mean you have to be perfect. If you do get angry at one person, make sure your apology is public so others know you were in the wrong. If you need to sleep on an uncomfortable message before seeing its value, return to the topic when you’re ready to acknowledge the person’s contribution. Mistakes can be remedied well and are just as important as getting things right the first time.

Additional Resources

If Your Team Agrees on Everything, Working Together is Pointless

The Art of the Difficult Conversation

How to deal with passive-aggressive people

 

The post 10 Ways to Help People Say Uncomfortable Things appeared first on Liane Davey.

How to Boost Your Energy Levels

 

Managing our energy these days is a challenge. And what if you feel like you need more energy to deal with all that’s coming at you in your work and personal life? I get it. There are many times when I feel like my batteries are depleted, when I realize that I need more energy, and need to bring more to the situation.

Let me take you through a series of things you can do to boost your energy levels. I’ll start with micro-resilience, the teeniest, tiny, in-the-moment things, because that’s what many of us can do. I’ll then move on to meso-resilience strategies, or the biggest, most important things you can do to have energy for a lifetime.

Micro-Resilience1. Adjust Your Body Language

Let’s start with the tiniest things. First of all, adjust your body language. It’s amazing how we forget that our bodies send our brains signals about how we’re feeling based on what’s going on physically with our bodies. For instance, if you are sitting slouched in a chair, if your body language is saying to your brain, “I’m tired,” you’re probably getting a powerful signal that you are tired. Part of that might be that you’re slouching. The first thing you can do—no, you don’t have to join a gym—is think about your posture, adjust your posture, spread things out a little bit, and send a new signal to your brain.

2. Hydrate Often

Another short-term, super simple thing is hydrate. It’s incredible how many people need to hydrate. I’ve seen stats that around 70% of people are dehydrated at any given moment. Even little sips of water can really make a difference in your energy levels. Our bodies need so much water to function effectively, not to mention flush out the toxins that build up if we’re dehydrated. Try hydrating. And again, that’s something you can do in the middle of a meeting, “I’m just going to grab a glass of water.” Nobody will look at you sideways for grabbing a drink of water.

3. Fuel Yourself

Along with hydrate is fuel. Fuel yourself. If you’re starting to feel low energy, ask yourself, “Have I eaten? Did I skip breakfast? Am I just going on coffee so far today? What can I put in my body?” I have trail mix in my drawer that I can grab at any time. I love trail mix. I love the bits of raisins, chocolate, and nice pieces of that long-lasting protein. What is it that you can fuel yourself with? That energy dip may be something you can fix with hydrating or fueling your body.

4. Have a Motor Release

Having a motor release is valuable when you are feeling low energy. And again, this is something you can do in the middle of a meeting. My favorite is silly putty. Squeezing silly putty or a stress ball is a low level of motor activity that can help you pay attention. It can help you feel more energized in a meeting when you have to do something over the long haul. I’m a doodler, and some people think doodling is a sign of distraction, but actually, doodling helps some folks focus. If you’re feeling low energy, your silly putty, your stress ball, or your doodle are things that can give you a little boost of energy in the very short term.

5. Breathe

I would put everything I’ve mentioned in a micro-resilience category: things you can do to get you through a meeting. And the last micro-resilient thing you can do is breathe. It’s super-obvious that breath is our first energy source; we are creatures that need oxygen at all times. But we get into really unhealthy breathing. My Apple Watch has the Breathe app, and I can do that deep breathing for one minute, which puts me in a completely different situation. I’m capable of doing that. I can hit it on my watch without it being visible. I can do it in a meeting or Zoom call when I just need to breathe.

What’s interesting about breath is your exhales. It’s more important than your inhales. If you’re trying to bring yourself down, you want your exhales to be really long. But if you’re trying to pick yourself up a bit, take a long, big, deep inhale, but use your breath. Again, you can do this in a meeting, quietly exhale, and use your breath to get back on track.

Meso-Resilience

Micro-resilience: Don’t think that if you had a lousy sleep last night, there’s no hope for maintaining your energy levels today. It’s not true. You can absolutely use your body language, hydrate, fuel yourself appropriately, engage in physical activity, and control your breath to boost your energy for an hour or two. However, we move from micro-resilience to meso-resilience to maintain energy beyond an hour or two.

1. Practice Good Sleep Hygiene

In talking about meso-resilience, we return to discussing sleep. Sleep is so important, and you may need a reset on your sleep. You may need the physical surroundings to change. I have reached that embarrassing age where pillow matters. And it’s horrible as a business traveler because I don’t sleep well the first night in any new hotel room if the pillow isn’t right.

Physical surroundings also matter. Do you have curtains so that it’s dark? Are you avoiding blue light before you go to bed? Are you using alcohol in a way to help you sleep? Because alcohol interrupts sleep. How do you get back on track if things interrupt your sleep? There are so many great resources for that.

2. Move

Moving your body creates energy. I’m not an athletic type. I hate running and all those sorts of things, but I understand that I need to move more often if I want to have energy. I do like dance. Dance is something I can do without dreading it. I like to go for walks, too. Getting movement will help energize you. And as it gets easier for your body to move through the world, you use less energy to exist. That’s really helpful.

3. Play

The last of the meso-resilience strategies is play. We don’t play enough anymore; play is so important, whatever play is for you. One of my favorite forms of play is reading fiction. I’m into a good book right now, and playing in that world is wonderful. It’s escapist. But play could be a hobby. You may love woodworking or something else. The vital question is, when was the last time you played, lost yourself in time, or did something fun just because you enjoyed it? Play is a great energy source and is good for so many other things, too. It makes so many connections and consolidates information when we have downtime. So find that play!

Macro-Resilience

I promised I’d get to the bigger, heavier, longer-lasting, really important thing. If you want energy in your life, we know from studying people over 80 years that the best source of resilience, energy, health, and vitality is actually through connection with other human beings. It’s easy to say that different things are more important—like, do you smoke, are you obese, all of those things. But you know what? The most predictive thing in our long-term energy, health, and resilience is connection.

If you are lonely, if you are isolated, how do you find people to reach out to who notice you, who care about you unconditionally, and who you can be yourself? That is the greatest source of resilience over a lifetime.

You won’t fix that if you’re sitting in a two o’clock meeting feeling like your energy level is low. But it will drain you if you don’t fix it at some point this year or next. As humans, we are energized by connection. And if you’re feeling isolated, lonely, or disconnected, find ways to connect in your community. Who can you help? How can you get out there? How can you find ways to create connections? That’s the ultimate renewable source of energy in our lives.

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If you need a quick pick-me-up, remember it doesn’t have to be massive; micro-resilience strategies can do the trick. For the midterm, meso-resilience strategies really, really matter. And over a lifetime, it’s about creating connections that matter to people we love.

For more about managing energy and dealing with some of those negative things that come up in our lives, check out the key to managing conflict in meetings in my next post.

More On This

How much energy are you wasting?

Bolster your stress reserves

Are You Taking Steps to Prevent Burnout?

Video: How to Manage Your Time

The post How to Boost Your Energy Levels appeared first on Liane Davey.

How to Strengthen Connection in Your Virtual Team

A social media post by Adam Grant about the value of “pebbling” got me thinking about how to open and strengthen virtual team connection.

The term “pebbling” derives from the behavior of Gentoo penguins, who gift one another with pebbles to help furnish their nests. The term has now been co-opted into human dating parlance to refer to sending memes or gifs as bids for connection.

Although I didn’t know the term, I’ve been a proponent (and an appreciator) of pebbling for ages. I frequently send videos or gifs that I think will bring a smile to a colleague or client. The value is less about the video and more about the signal that I’m thinking of the person. Attention is the currency of our time, after all.

That got me thinking: What are some other ways you can establish, strengthen, or reopen a communication channel with a teammate you don’t get to see in person? Here are a few. I’d love to crowdsource a few, too. Add your ideas to the comments, and I’ll insert them into the post.

What to Send to a Teammate

If we stick with the pebbling idea for a moment, a few things might be more valuable to your colleague than dropping pebbles on their desk.

Send Something Interesting

As you’re cruising around the interwebs, what are you finding that might help your teammates do their work more effectively? This morning, one of my clients sent me a Mastodon thread about using LLM (large language models) to bolster human learning. Cool!

Alternatively, it might be less work-related and more geared toward their interests. My brilliant friend Mitch Joel and two of his friends started picking one link each week to send to each other and have kept it up for 729 weeks! The nice part is they share those six links with anyone who subscribes. That weekly digest is an excellent source of pebbles you can forward to others.

Or show your teammate you’re paying attention by sending a YouTube video about their upcoming vacation destination, an event notice for a band they love, or a Pinterest post with a cool crochet pattern. This will reinforce that you’re interested in your coworker as a person, not just for what they can do for you with Excel pivot tables.

Sign on the bathroom wall at a workshare office in London

Snap Pictures in the Wild

Another fun way to show someone you’re thinking of them is to take pictures of things you encounter on your travels. (I don’t mean sending your colleagues envy-inducing pics of you on the beach in Bora Bora while they’re sweating it out in the office.) I mean things like this shot I captured in a public washroom. I had a friend who I felt was taking on too much. This shot provided the “sign from the universe” that even the bathroom mirror was trying to convince him to turn off the taps!

I’m sure you have dozens of other ideas for a simple, easy thing to send to demonstrate to a colleague that you’re thinking of them.

What to Say to a Teammate

You don’t need to have something to send your colleague; you can also create a connection with what you say to them.

Pass on Praise

There are few nicer forms of outreach than when someone lets you know they heard something flattering about you or your work. What positive messages have you heard about your teammates that you could pass along? A quick email that says, “Were your ears burning? We were just talking about how your revamp of the monthly report template is SO much better!!”

And if you want to do the adventure club version, don’t email—phone! “Wait, what?!? PHONE! Did she say phone? Nobody phones anymore.” Yeah, I hear you, but that’s why it’s fantastic. Recently, I watched a talk by my friend Michael Bungay Stanier. It was amazing. Amazing enough that it moved me to phone him to share what I got from it. Guess what? He answered the call, and we had a few minutes of genuine human connection.

But if it had gone to voice mail, that would have been great too because I could have left a rambling message about how fantastic he was… who wouldn’t want to have a voicemail about how awesome they are?

Whose praises could you sing today?

Request Help

One of the most effective ways to open a line of communication with a remote colleague is to ask for help. Requests for help set off a cascade of positive effects, starting with you signaling that you value the other person’s perspective, accelerating with your demonstration that you trust them enough to be vulnerable, and ending with some helpful cognitive dissonance that when they help you, they end up liking you more.

However, if you’re trying to bolster connections, these requests for help shouldn’t be urgent. Instead, you’re looking for something like, “I’ve just taken over the Acme account, and I know you have so much insight there. When you have a chance, could we hop on a call, and you share your thoughts about who the best champion is inside their company?”

What to Show to a Teammate

And if you’re not the direct type, you don’t have to communicate directly with your coworker; you can use social channels, Slack, or Teams to make the connection.

Post or Comment on LinkedIn

Another valuable connection point is mentioning a colleague in a LinkedIn post or comment. A post might include a description of something your team has accomplished with tags acknowledging the specific contributions of your teammates. You can also scroll through their LinkedIn feed and add reactions or comments showing interest in their perspectives.

If you want a slightly less direct approach, you won’t have difficulty finding people on social media trying to drive up their views by asking you to tag someone who has done something extraordinary for you. Just hop on one of those bandwagons as a spot to give some public recognition to a far-away colleague.

In Conclusion

Improving communication is more than just sending clear messages and listening better; it’s also about having an open channel when needed. Small bids for connection can help you establish and maintain a line even with teammates you never see in person.

Okay, over to you. This is a wholly incomplete list; let me know in the comments what you would add (and feel free to mention a colleague who does this well!)

Additional Resources

How to Strengthen Connection on Remote and Hybrid Teams

An Easier Way to Ask for Help at Work

Communication Challenges on Hybrid Teams

 

 

The post How to Strengthen Connection in Your Virtual Team appeared first on Liane Davey.

Workplace Empathy

 

I’m starting to worry that there’s not enough empathy in our teams these days. And empathy is super important. Research shows that when we are empathetic and can understand and appreciate the emotional state of our teammates, our teams have higher collective intelligence. We’re just smarter as a team, and we get better outcomes on a whole variety of different problem-solving tasks. So empathy matters, but it’s in short supply.

Why You Should Care About Empathy

Sometimes, sympathy isn’t in short supply, meaning teams start to feel the same. Emotional contagion can take a whole team down, which isn’t healthy. We don’t want sympathy where we all have the same mood swings as colleagues and feel the same thing, whether highs or lows. We do want empathy, where we have a little intellectual and emotional distance from it, but we can appreciate it and understand where someone is.

Two Benefits of Empathy1. Less Drama

When we have greater empathy, we’ll have less drama. This sounds counterintuitive. You might ask yourself, “But if I make space for emotions, aren’t I going to get the drama, gossip, and whining?” The answer is no. Emotions turn to drama when they don’t have a healthy outlet or when people enable them and don’t work through them. However, we get less drama when we empathize, understand that emotions exist, and help somebody work through them.

We also gain greater trust, and we know that teams with greater trust have many positive aspects: They’re more productive, innovative, and engaged. We want the trust from your colleagues’ understanding that you care and notice what they’re feeling and experiencing.

2. More Awareness

Another benefit of being empathetic is that you can learn what someone’s triggers are if you pay attention. Are there things in your own team processes that are creating more stress than they need to? By empathizing and understanding how the way you do things affects people emotionally, you can actually learn and make things better. There are lots of benefits to it.

How to Think Differently

What if you’re not feeling it? What if you have a ton of stuff going on, have your own emotions you’re trying to manage, or think emotions aren’t professional for the workplace? How do you think differently?

I will tell you that as long as there are humans in the workplace, there are emotions in the workplace. And the more we manage them effectively, the more effective our teams will be. But what do you do?

1. Talk About Emotions

First, I talk about emotions and think about emotions as another piece of data. We often, especially those who consider ourselves more logical, believe that data, facts, statistics, and evidence are more important and valid than emotions. Emotions, however, are just another set of information; they are how the human brain works. We make decisions emotionally. We process our world emotionally. Trying to deny that is not very effective. Instead, say to yourself, “Okay, I need the facts and the statistics, and I also need to understand the emotional state.” Put it as another piece of data. It can help you frame it as something more constructive and more positive.

2. Don’t Get Distracted

Next, don’t get distracted by someone’s emotional state. People’s emotions are driven by the story they tell themselves about something deeper—something they value, believe deeply in, or care about. They interpret these emotional signals in their bodies as a threat to something they value.

Don’t get distracted by someone with tears running down their face or someone red in the face and yelling. Instead, think, “Oh, okay. What is that about?” Empathize with their emotion, but focus on understanding where it’s coming from. What story are they telling themselves? What treasure are they protecting? What feels under threat? If you can get to the root with questions about how they interpret the situation and what’s at stake from their perspective, or if you can get them to reveal the treasure to you, you’ll be in a better situation to help them process the emotion and get to the other side of it. That is really important.

3. Give Them Your Hypothesis

Share your hypotheses as you ask these questions and try to understand their treasure and emotional state. Tell them what you are sensing, but be careful not to present it as a statement like, “Okay, so you’re upset because of this.” That approach can feel intrusive and overstepping, so don’t do that.

But you can propose it as a hypothesis. “As I’m listening to you, it sounds like this might be about not having a project plan. There are a lot of moving parts, and it feels like maybe you’re uncertain about what’s needed from you and what’s coming next.” When you do this, what’s fascinating is that you demonstrate empathy. You show that you’re picking up on the fact that there’s an emotional aspect, not just an intellectual one, and that you’re going to make space for that and appreciate it, which is great.

Another interesting aspect is that if you put out a hypothesis, the person might still need to understand what their big emotions are about. They may not have formed a cognitive story behind their feelings. By offering a hypothesis, you might help them gain clarity. They might respond, “No, that’s not really it.” Often, we hesitate to say anything because we’re afraid of being wrong. However, if you present it as, “I sense that,” or, “Is it this,” they will likely appreciate your empathy. They might then clarify, saying, “Now that I think about it, it’s more that I’m anxious,” or, “I’m anticipating my team will be anxious.” This helps both of you understand their emotions better. Your empathy creates a safe space for them to process their feelings.

4. Stay On Their Side

The final thing is when we get more empathetic, particularly when we feel these things strongly and how aversive it is for the person, it’s easy to jump in and solve things for them or rescue them. That is not being empathetic. In many ways, the person can misinterpret that as “You don’t trust me” or “You don’t think I can deal with my own issues.” You know, “Who are you? You’re overstepping.” So stay with them, remain beside them as they move through it, but don’t make the mistake of trying to take the lead, if anything, just that gentle hand on their back, which could be, “Okay, where from here,” or “What do you need?” Those kinds of things. Don’t rescue them, though. Don’t say, “Oh, I’m going to rush off and get us a project plan.” Solving for somebody isn’t empathetic at all. That’s a big secret.

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Being empathetic leads to all sorts of really positive, business-oriented, productive things on our teams. It’s just a matter of paying attention, being with somebody, asking questions, and being curious, but it means the world to people, and you’ll see how much it strengthens your relationships.

More On This

How to Become More Self-aware

Tsunami of stress

Rising Emotions and the Risk of Emotional Contagion on Teams

Video: How to Be a Better Listener

The post Workplace Empathy appeared first on Liane Davey.

Why Your Message Might be Misinterpreted

Have you ever shared a message and been surprised by the receiver’s reaction? Maybe you said something you thought was innocuous, but the person responded by taking offense. Or you asked them to do one thing, and they did something entirely different? Why is it so hard to communicate? Here are a few reasons why your message might be misinterpreted.

Missing Context

Context is integral to how humans process information. If your audience doesn’t have the same information, background, or schema as you, they’re likely to interpret your message differently than you expect. That’s especially problematic if their different interpretation leads to inappropriate behaviors or unproductive reactions.

For example, imagine you have a new member of your account team. Before your weekly account planning session, you pass along an email from the client peppered with colorful language, a litany of complaints, and a threat that he will pull his business. Before your meeting, the new team member is sweating it out, worried she’ll be fired before even getting started. She walks into the meeting with dark circles under her eyes and a detailed plan for how to remedy every problem (and anticipate a few that haven’t happened yet). You chastise yourself for not filling her in on good old Roger sooner. This week’s email was tame relative to normal, and he’s been a client for 23 years. Whoops. A little context would have gone a long way.

Individual Differences

Another reason your message might not have the intended effect is that people respond differently to the same stimulus (i.e., message, body language, tone, etc.). I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen one person attempting to be very clear and dispassionate in delivering a message only to be told they were harsh or too direct. In these cases, the sender often fails to create the desired effect because the receiver feels hurt or becomes defensive.

The opposite happens, too. A person trying to be kind and diplomatic obfuscates the message and is surprised (and annoyed) when it doesn’t land. But the receiver didn’t even hear the message because it was too indirect or sugar-coated to register as an issue.

To reduce the impact of these individual differences, most teams benefit from a personality assessment tool that allows you to calibrate on dimensions like directness or authoritativeness. My favorite tool is the Birkman Method®, which includes multiple measures that help you dish out your message in the form most likely to allow them to swallow it.

Cultural Differences

Early in my career, I managed a young woman from Hong Kong. She was intelligent, kind, and eager. Although her English was a bit tentative, that was the least of our communication challenges. The bigger challenge was that she reacted to not understanding what I was saying by laughing. I had no idea that she wasn’t understanding what I wanted from her, so I left her in the deep end over and over. Once I learned this tendency, I knew to respond to her laughter with offers of assistance.

Another fascinating cultural difference is the diverse interpretation of eye contact across cultures. I was raised in an Anglo-Canadian household, and making eye contact was a sign of respect in our home. Even in school, it was common to hear a teacher say, “Look at me when I’m talking to you, young lady!” I recently spoke with a client who grew up in the Caribbean. She told me the exact opposite story about eye contact in her home. Looking an elder in the eye would have been a sign of confrontation and disrespect. Fascinating!

It makes a huge difference if you’re trying to convey respect and your actions are being interpreted as the exact opposite! The best way to uncover and appreciate these cultural differences is to talk about communication with your team. What are the norms that you grew up with? Have you lived and worked in different cultures; if so, what have you noticed about the discrepancies and sources of misunderstanding? How will you come to a common set of norms for communicating in your team?

Contradictory Body Language

Have you ever listened to someone telling you one thing but whose body language was screaming the opposite? The first example that comes to mind for me is the person who says, “I’m fine,” while every muscle in their body is tensed, clenched, or pinched.

When what you say doesn’t match what you show, the receiver is more likely to believe your body language than your words. Are you saying you’re “ready to collaborate” while dropping eye contact and slumping your shoulders? Are you saying you’re interested and listening while twitching and nervously shaking your leg? Tune in to your body language to ensure it’s not undermining your message.

Baggage and Bias

One final source of misunderstanding in communication is bias, which comes from our prejudices about the sender or the message itself. Our brains are not the logical, unbiased machines we might wish they were. Instead, they are highly susceptible to interpreting things subjectively based on preconceived notions.

You might send a message to a colleague that you intend to offer assistance to help them deliver an excellent presentation. If they like and respect you, your colleague might interpret your offer as kind and generous. If, on the other hand, they think your ego is too big, they might interpret that message as condescending. I refer to that as the “Mother-in-Law-Effect” because you might interpret the same message differently if it comes from your mother versus your mother-in-law.

It isn’t just people who trigger biases; you might also find that a word has baggage for you. I remember working in an organization where I used the term “empowerment” and watched everyone in the room gag. Here, I thought I was using a positive expression that would excite them when, instead, I was raising the demons of a misguided initiative that had tarnished the word empowerment forever. Who knew?

In Conclusion

It would be nice if you could transmit a message and have confidence that it would be received as you intended; unfortunately, with most people, you probably can’t. Differences in context, personality, and culture cause people to interpret messages idiosyncratically. The complexity of body language and bias exacerbates those challenges. As you work with colleagues long enough, you may be able to calibrate more easily, but most of us need to put more care into ensuring our intent leads to the desired impact.

Additional Resources

The 1 thing you can do to improve communication today

Tips to improve the connection when you communicate

When Culture Doesn’t Translate by Erin Meyer

The post Why Your Message Might be Misinterpreted appeared first on Liane Davey.

Is a Bad Mood Contagious?

 

Have you noticed how the emotional tenor of the workplace has become more negative? There are many reasons for this. People feel overwhelmed with too much to accomplish and think about, leading to a constant sense of never being done. There’s also significant stress in society, with political tension and financial pressures contributing to negative emotions in the workplace. The problem is that we know emotions are highly contagious.

When we’re around people in a mood, whether positive or negative, we can pick it up through what’s called emotional contagion, which is why protecting yourself from the bad moods of those around you is super important.

What can you do to protect yourself? Let’s talk about things you can do to inoculate against emotional contagion and bad moods, things you can do in the moment to reduce the transfer, and then things you can do to cure it if you’ve picked up a mood from somebody else.

Innoculate Yourself Against a Bad Mood

How do you inoculate yourself or prevent and make yourself a little more immune to negative emotions?

1. Invest in Your Energy

When our energy is low because we haven’t slept, eaten properly, or processed our own issues, our self-regulation suffers. We become less aware of the moods we’re picking up from others and less able to recover from negative influences. The best way to protect yourself against bad moods around you is to invest in your resilience, both at work and at home.

For example, I remember having two teenage girls in the house, and I needed to invest in my self-regulation. On the days I didn’t, it was awful! You could feel their moods coming and had no control over picking them up. But on days when I invested in my resilience and felt high energy, I could sit beside their emotions and watch them happen without the same infectious effect.

2. Work on Mindfulness

The way emotional contagion works is fascinating. Early science believed that when someone near us feels an emotion, they convey it through body language, gestures, and tone—a very physical expression. Through mirror neurons, we, as social creatures, mimic their furrowed brows, pinched faces, and slumped shoulders. Our brains interpret this body language as, “Oh, we must feel bad.” This multi-step process is why practicing mindfulness is the second tip for inoculating yourself against negative moods.

Whether through meditation or mindfulness practice, many great apps and resources can help you improve. The benefit of these different options is that they increase our awareness of physical sensations in our bodies. You start noticing when your palms get sweaty, your face scrunches up, or you wear your shoulders as earrings. Remember, their emotion turns into their body language, which turns into our body language and then our feelings. By noticing these signs before our brain interprets them as stress, we can interrupt the process. So anything that makes you more in tune with the physical sensations of your body will make you immune from that emotional contagion effect.

Reduce the Transfer of Emotional Contagion in the Moment

What about in the moment? For example, I’m standing beside somebody who is highly infectious with negative mood. How do I make it less likely they will transfer their negative mood to me?

1. Name What You’re Seeing

The first step is to name what you’re seeing. Remember, in the transfer, emotion goes from someone else’s body language and gestures to yours. If you can back it up and say, “Oh, I see they’re talking quickly,” or ” Wow, I notice they’re breathing shallowly,” you can name it. By doing so, you have the chance to interrupt it before it affects your body language. This is really interesting.

2. Become a Sleuth

Next, become a sleuth. We want to interrupt the automatic subconscious emotional story that’s happening. By engaging our intellectual side and asking, “Hmm, what might be going on for them? What could this be about?” we can make it a more analytical exchange. This approach helps protect us from picking up that emotional state in the same way.

3. Ask for Their Help

Another counterintuitive but effective strategy is to ask for their help. Research shows that offering help makes us more empathetic and kinder to ourselves. So, if someone is in a bad mood or not feeling well, try flipping it on its head and ask for assistance with something manageable. You might say, “I’m struggling with this,” or, “I don’t know how to approach this.” When they help you, your body language becomes more positive in response, and this positive body language can help improve their mood and make them kinder to themselves. It may not be your first instinct; you probably want to say, “Just get me out of here,” but if you can find something genuine and authentic to ask for help on, that may turn the tide of their mood.

4. Create Distance

If nothing else works, then you probably want to create some distance. It sounds like I mean physically, and maybe physically, but more importantly, I mean creating emotional distance.

We’re more susceptible to emotional contagion from people we have much in common with or identify with. If someone at work is upset or frustrated and telling you all about why this is horrible and you’re doomed and whatever else, creating emotional distance can help. For example, you might remind yourself, “This person has a different manager than I do, and I have a different relationship and a more positive experience, so I have a reason to feel emotionally different than they do.” Or, “They have three kids under five at home, which is a lot to deal with, while I got eight hours of sleep last night.” This perspective helps maintain emotional separation.

Create a little distance, not to other them, but to empathize with them, while also recognizing that you can have a different experience, narrative, or perspective about the same situation due to your unique circumstances or because they’re different from you.

Cures for Emotional Infection

You can do four things in the moment to reduce the transfer of negative emotions. But what if you realize, “Oh, no, I’m fully infected. Now I’m feeling deflated.” You might need some cures.

1. Change That Feeling

One thing you can do to recover from that is interrupt. Emotions are subconscious and automatic—they happen quickly, and we often lack control over them. However, what we perceive as emotions are actually feelings, which are emotions processed through our past experiences, biases, and stories we tell ourselves. What you can do is recognize that just because you’ve caught someone’s negative emotion doesn’t mean you have to take on their narrative, which may not be a good narrative.

Okay, what’s another approach?

Ask yourself: What’s another explanation for how I’m feeling? What can I do to change how I’m feeling? It’s important to recognize that emotions and feelings aren’t the same. Emotions simply exist, but we make them bigger, badder, and scarier by attaching elaborate stories, typically with an unreliable narrator in our heads. By interrupting this process, we gain the ability to select a different course of action, which is really helpful.

2. Sync With Someone Else

If you’ve been infected by negative emotions and you need to restore a neutral or positive mood, another thing is to sync with someone or something else. Emotional contagion isn’t solely negative; it can absolutely be a positive emotional experience as well. Who could you find to sync with? Who could you talk with and say, “Hey, I just had a really rough conversation, and I could really use some cheering up. Can we reminisce about something, or can you tell me about something I have to look forward to?” Even just being around their positive body language, gestures, and tone can help shift your mood towards something more positive.

Of course, it may be a thing if there’s not a person. Music is an incredibly effective option. I have a playlist of songs that I can’t be grumpy to, and I put on one of those, and I’m like, okay, I’m good.

If you’ve synced with somebody who is in a negative mood, you can re-sync to someone or something else to disconnect from that negative emotion.

3. Limit Your Exposure

The last thing is to intentionally limit your exposure. We have to have empathy for people with depression or mental health issues, but if someone is in a rough state for a prolonged period, it’s really important to take care of yourself. You won’t help them if you get pulled into that despair. So, what are the things you can do to limit your exposure and sync with other people more frequently? Be deliberate about syncing with others more often. Pay attention to when you engage with them or spend time together: it’s essential to do so when your own resilience is strong. Recognize there are days or moments when your resilience might be low, and during those times, it’s important to limit your exposure.

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As humans, we naturally catch the emotional states of those around us. We can influence how likely we are to pick up the emotional state of others by investing in our resilience and becoming more mindful and aware of our bodies. In the moment, we can limit exposure by being more aware and labeling what we see in terms of body language, being more intellectual about it, and creating some emotional distance from it. We can also recover when we’ve been through it. Just knowing and being aware that you can catch emotions like you can catch a virus means that you need to practice good emotional hygiene just like you would everything else.

More On This

Strategies for Managing Emotional Contagion for a Healthier Team Dynamic

Why Your Message Might be Misinterpreted

How to Deal with Someone Who is Not Self-aware

Video: 4 Tips for Managing Your Emotions at Work

The post Is a Bad Mood Contagious? appeared first on Liane Davey.

How to Communicate Better

You might think you’re doing a great job communicating with your colleagues, but do you know that your messages are landing as intended? There are myriad reasons why attempts to connect fail, so if you need to get your message across, consider these tips for communicating better.

What is Communication?

Before we get all practical about communicating more effectively, it’s worth taking a moment to consider what the word means. Communicate comes from the Latin communis, which means to “make common.” That’s what communication is supposed to do—get you to a common understanding.

However, the word’s meaning was diluted in the 16th century when “make common” became “share,” which makes sense, but then it slipped into weaker synonyms for share, including give, transmit, or impart. Therein lies the problem: we’ve lowered the bar in communication to convey a message when the goal is to reach a common understanding. The gap is pervasive and problematic.

How to Send a Clearer Message

If you’re trying to reach a shared understanding, the first step is to send a clear, unambiguous message. You might want to do the following:

Remove Adjectives

If you’re a regular visitor to the blog, you’ll know that I’m not a fan of adjectives. They’re slippery, slimy little creatures that blur communication. Why? Because they’re inherently subjective. What does innovative, rude, tepid, or collaborative look like? You might have one answer, but there’s not much chance it’s the same answer as the person you’re communicating with. And if your audience has 100 members, asking them all to be more innovative will likely send them running madly off in all directions. Instead, replace adjectives with nouns and verbs. Innovative becomes, “I’d like you to come up with a new process that will make processing 10% faster.”

Remove Jargon & Acronyms

Jargon and acronyms are right up there with adjectives on the Most Wanted List of communication criminals. While these language shortcuts can foster efficient communication among people in the know, they degrade communication with people who aren’t.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that most people won’t ask for clarification because doing so highlights their exclusion from the group and opens them to judgment or ridicule for not knowing. If you want your audience to get on the same page as you, make sure the book is written in a language they speak.

Add Analogies

When you want someone to envision what you’re talking about instantly, try connecting your new idea to an idea that already has purchase with them. That’s the notion behind the screenwriters who sold the movie Speed using the trope “Die Hard on a Bus.” How could you invoke an analogy or a metaphor to help your audience get your drift more easily? Is your thing like some other thing they already know? Find the perfect analogy, and your audience will have that “A-ha, I’m picking up what you’re putting down” moment.

Use Examples

While many people benefit from abstraction, others do better with a more concrete approach. Instead of pitching them “Die Hard on a Bus,” they might need to hear the plot details. “There’s a bomb on a bus. It detonates if the bus’s speed drops below 50 miles/hour.” Combining abstract connections with tangible examples gives you the best chance of landing your point as intended.

Use Their Currency

We’ve already discussed the importance of using your audience’s language; now, let’s focus on using their currency. By that, I mean you should talk about things that matter to them rather than highlighting what seems important to you. What has currency, cache, and credibility with your audience?

The pithiest version would be the quote, “No one wants a drill. What they want is the hole.” If you’re talking to your manager, you might want to discuss how your proposal would increase efficiency rather than framing it as making life easier for you. Speaking in the audience’s currency increases their motivation to listen.

Say Less

If you want your audience to understand your message, splitting it into smaller chunks rather than spewing a litany of information will make it easier. If I’m struggling to take in a long-winded statement, I often encourage people to restate their point in the length of a tweet. It forces them to think about what they really want me to know and deliver that point succinctly.

How To Ensure Your Message Was Understood?

If you’ve delivered your message clearly and concisely, you’ve set up effective communication, but you don’t know if you’ve achieved it. You can’t “make common” on your own. Or, as I like to put it,

“You can’t communicate to someone; you can only communicate with them.”

Now’s your chance to find out how your message landed.

Check and Iterate

Stop and ask questions that allow your audience to share how your message landed with them. You could say, “Tell me what you heard,” or “What are the most important points?” At first, you’ll need to be transparent that you’re asking to ensure you conveyed the idea clearly rather than as a test of their listening. Another more subtle way to check for understanding if you don’t have preexisting rapport is to ask, “What questions do you have?” or “Which parts would you like me to clarify?”

Then, with more insight into what your audience heard, you can try again to deliver your message.

Are You Actually Communicating?

You’ll notice that email, Slack, DMs, and other asynchronous transmissions make it hard to know if communication has happened. In my experience, they are excellent conduits for miscommunication, where the parties get further apart rather than closer together. Consider whether a digital message will do the job if you need to do more than transmit a message.

I won’t hazard to guess what percentage of the time I see a wide chasm between the sender’s intended message and the receiver’s interpretation, but it’s a big number. If you use the standard that you’ve only communicated if you’ve reached a shared understanding, you’ll put more effort into sending a clear message and checking that it landed. Enhancing the quality of the communication on your team will improve quality, increase efficiency, foster trust, and reduce conflict. It’s so worth it!

Additional Resources

Communicate with, not to

Tips to improve the connection when you communicate

Checklist for Effective Business Communication

 

The post How to Communicate Better appeared first on Liane Davey.

Strategies for Managing Emotional Contagion for a Healthier Team Dynamic

Emotional contagion has powerful effects on teams. It can cause the tenor to rise to match a great mood or fall in line with a sour one. I’ve previously talked about ways to prevent yourself from taking on negative emotions and how to help someone out of a bad mood. But what if you’re the team leader and trying to manage the emotional state of your entire team? How do you manage emotional contagion to get a healthier team dynamic?

Be aware of your mood

The first step in managing emotional contagion is to be aware of your own emotional state. Being aware of your mood is easier said than done. Self-awareness is usually in short supply, and when you add the stress of modern leadership, it can be difficult to stay tuned in to how you’re feeling. But it’s essential to make the effort. Research shows that leaders with greater emotional control are rated more favorably.

But that doesn’t mean suppressing your emotions, which is unhealthy for leaders and other humans. It does mean choosing when and how to act on the information your emotions are providing. So, before you engage with your team, take a moment to check in and be aware of what emotion you’re spreading.

Quick Tip: Create a ritual to lift your mood. It might be looking at a picture that reminds you of something positive, having a song that pumps you up, reciting an affirmation that centers you, or doing a minute of deep breathing.

Consider your non-verbal cues

You’re constantly communicating as a leader, and much of that isn’t through words. Your gestures, facial expressions, and body language can often carry more weight than what you say. To manage emotional contagion, it’s essential to be intentional about your words, but it’s equally crucial to be aware of what your body language conveys.

Quick Tip: Find a way to see your reflection when interacting with people. If it’s in your office, strategically place a mirror so you can occasionally glance at your expression. If you’re on a web call, keep your camera window open. Sometimes, you might be taken aback by the angry, grumpy, sad person reflected back at you. That’s a good moment to reset your facial

Make a connection

When attempting to buoy your team with a positive mood, experts advise that making direct eye contact with people will strengthen the effect. That means some emotional subjects warrant prioritizing in-person or on-camera interactions over written communication.

If you’re meeting in person, consider the setup. Are you sitting facing one another for one-on-one meetings so that eye contact is easy? In team interactions, does your meeting room setup promote eye contact or (as in many rooms I get stuck in) make it extraordinarily difficult? In virtual meetings, does your computer setup naturally capture your eyes? If not, you’re likely missing this powerful opportunity to spread a positive mood.

Quick Tip: I bought an inexpensive webcam and this camera holder to ensure my camera is right at eye level so I can transfer as much of my positive mood and enthusiasm as possible.

Neutralize negative contributions

Given how powerful emotional contagion can be (and the sad fact that negative emotions transfer more easily than positive ones), you need to be highly attuned to members of your team who are projecting negative emotions and find a way to reduce their impact. If you notice in the moment, you can give the person a forum to address their concerns constructively (hoping to change their mood with action). Alternatively, you can deny them your eye contact or attention to reduce the disruption and provide feedback after the meeting about what you saw and how it impacted you.

Quick Tip: I like to respond to emotionally charged comments with questions that accept where they’re at and help them take ownership for moving forward. My favorites are, “What do you need?” and “Where from here?”

Create virtuous cycles

Research by shows that leaders who convey positive emotions using expressive gestures, smiles, nods, and other enthusiastic body language transfer those positive feelings to their team. But don’t think you can just send an email or post a happy Slack message. Findings comparing the positive emotional lift between those who saw a leader communicate a positive message and those who only read a transcript suggest that your enthusiastic face is doing the heavy lifting, not your buoyant words (Johnson, 2009).

Quick Tip: If you need to communicate asynchronously (for example, if you lead a team that’s in different time zones), take a moment to record a video message so that you capture the full effect of your positive facial expressions and gestures.

Interrupt vicious cycles

Finally, noticing and interrupting when your mood and team members’ moods are spiraling downward is essential. Unfortunately, the vicious cycle can be more of a tornado than a virtuous one because negative moods are more contagious than positive ones (Sy and Choi, 2013).

You can stop the swirl and manage emotional contagion in multiple ways. One method is to call out what’s going on and intentionally investigate the negative emotions to get a better understanding. Don’t do that by saying, “You’re all very grouchy today.” Instead, you can be candid about your own emotions by saying something like, “I’m noticing that I’m feeling grumpy about this. Can we take a moment to talk about where we’re at on this project?” If you choose not to be transparent about your feelings, your option is to describe the behavior you see, such as, “I notice everyone is looking down, and we’ve dropped our eye contact. Can we take a moment to share how we’re feeling about this?”

Another way to reverse the direction of the emotional contagion cycle is to slowly start changing your gestures, expressions, and body language to lead your team in a more positive direction. Try making constructive and forward-looking comments with body language to match. For example, if you come up with a possibility, you could say, “What if we were to…” As you say the words, raise your brow, smile, and open your eyes a little wider. You can also alter the mood in the room by picking up your cadence or widening your body language to reflect more openness and positivity. Your team will take their cues from you.

Quick Tip: This might be the perfect moment to have a funny video to show or to refer back to an inside joke that will help break the tension. I keep a file of memes, videos, and affirmations that I can pull out. Don’t deny the mood in the room; you can call it out and then say, “I think we need a little pick me up.”

Conclusion

Emotional contagion is likely happening constantly among your team members. As their leader, you need to be attuned to it and aware of how you’re affecting it. This is not a simple task, but you must take it seriously to create the team dynamic necessary for the team’s health and productivity.

What questions do you have about managing the emotional contagion on your team? Let me know.

Additional Resources

Managing Emotions Step-by-Step

Managing Fear and Emotions

Effective Ways to Manage Your Emotions at Work

How to Be Less Emotional at Work

 

The post Strategies for Managing Emotional Contagion for a Healthier Team Dynamic appeared first on Liane Davey.

How to Be Less Emotional at Work

 

In my last post, I talked about how to manage your emotions at work. But what if you’re thinking, “I’m tired of managing my emotions at work! Can’t I just be less emotional?”

I get it. And yes, that would be nice. The good news is that there are things you can do to bring that emotional water level down so that you don’t feel like you’re constantly bailing the boat to keep up. Let’s talk about a few ways you can be less emotional at work.

1. Add Transitions to Your Day

When we used to go into the office every day, we used to have these commutes, these great transitions between the kid who was driving us freaking crazy by wasting the milk in their cereal, and we would have 15, 20, 30 minutes of commute where we were listening to the radio and looking at things going by in the window, which would allow some of those emotions to dissipate. This meant we didn’t have the same emotional bleed into the next thing we did. But if you’re dumping the milk down the sink and then clicking on a Zoom call, that emotional contagion and spillover will likely be high. It’s the same with leaving a physical meeting, walking down the hall, grabbing coffee, and making other transitions that prevent leakage from one situation to the next.

Try to bring some of those back.

I’m a big advocate for the 50-minute meeting to ensure we have 10 minutes to recalibrate afterward. I also have a Spotify playlist. It’s my dance-break playlist with a bunch of songs that I cannot a) sit still or b) feel cranky when I’m listening. I put them on for three or four minutes, and then I’ve had a transition that prevents the emotions from the compounding that happens if we go straight from one thing to the next. So, add more transitions.

2. Compartmentalize

Second, compartmentalize. It’s the same idea that if we’re worried or thinking about a bunch of things at once, what I call having a heavy thoughtload, we are more likely to have our emotions jumping in. Instead, we want to focus on one thing at a time, turning off all notifications and shutting every window on our computer that isn’t the one we’re using. That focus can help us have something constructive and useful to get into focus and flow. And when you’re in flow, you’re much less likely to have that intrusive thought of the emotional reaction. So compartmentalize.

3. Communicate Often

Third, communicate earlier. When we’re unsure about something, or we don’t like it, we stay quiet because we haven’t got the perfect response or the perfect thing to say. But then our concerns start to build and snowball. And then, by the time we’re talking about it, we’re emotional about it.

If, instead, you communicated early, you could indicate whether you were still having an intellectual or logical reaction to the issue. When you feel something in your plan isn’t right, communicate it. For example, you could say, “I’m worried. Let’s take a minute and figure out who we should be talking to.”

When you can do it early, you’ll communicate from a constructive place and not let it become an emotional conversation. So communicate a lot earlier than you think you should.

4. Healthy Relationships

Next, healthy relationships. In the Framingham study, the extensive longitudinal study of what makes us healthy in the world, healthy relationships win. They win over everything else in the study. Where are your healthy relationships in your week and your month? Think about who are the five people you could connect to in any given month that would help you feel seen, give you a place to feel safe and connected, and be deliberate about getting those in your week and in your month. They will create that natural place to bring in many positive emotions and vent some negative things that may be building up. Invest in healthy relationships regularly.

5. Self-Regulation

If there’s one thing the research says about bringing down your general emotional load, self-regulation is very high on that list. And the number one self-regulation strategy is effective sleep.

Make sure you prioritize your sleep and address problems that are affecting it. Don’t put up with poor sleep. That’s something you should discuss with your physician. Get into your sleep hygiene. Make sure you prioritize sleep and the fuel you put in your body. If you have wild insulin swings, it is not going to be surprising if your emotions start to get out of control.

Also, make sure you’re moving your body and getting out into nature. There are many studies about how emotional regulation improves when we spend time physically in trees.

Find joy. What are your hobbies? Where do you nerd out? Nothing is better for creating positive emotion than doing something you nerd out on. One of my favorite questions to ask my clients is what kind of nerd are you? Even as they start talking about it, it’s incredible how they light up. And you can see the positive effect that it brings to the room.

6. Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness is another extremely effective thing. You hear about it everywhere, but you know what? It works. It works because it helps us to understand that our emotions are not us. We can observe our emotions from over here. We can put ourselves on the couch and be the therapist. As we learn to do that, our emotions hold less sway over us. We are more fluent in what our triggers are. It’s an effective thing. If you are serious about being less emotional, bringing down your general emotionality, you can’t do much better than that.

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These strategies have lots of research evidence that we know works, but you may need more than that. There are many folks for whom there are mental health reasons why these strategies are not enough: hormone imbalances, the way your neurotransmitters work, and past traumas. All sorts of things may mean that these strategies are insufficient to help you bring that emotional waterline down far enough. In that case, your best bet is to seek professional help.

There’s a lot of help these days. Talk with your physician or engage a therapist. There are helplines in every region of the world. Get the support you need if these strategies aren’t enough to help you get on top of that emotional wave that might feel like a tsunami for you.

For most of us, however, the issue is that we don’t invest enough in our healthy relationships, self-regulation, or sleep. We don’t create a day with the proper transitions, focus, and compartmentalization. But, try all of these things first because you’ll find a meaningful decrease in how frequently you get emotional at work and the severity of those emotions.

Okay. Dealing with other messy, emotional, and complicated stuff at work? Check out this post, managing emotions at work.

More On This

Dealing with Negative Emotions

When Conflict Gets Emotional

Your teammate is not weird part 2–emotion

Video: Become a Pro at Dealing With Emotions in the Workplace

The post How to Be Less Emotional at Work appeared first on Liane Davey.