Acting like emotions don't exist is a poor strategy

a brief co-written harangue

I wrote this post with my friend Misha, who does coaching, consulting, and weird events.

When we can talk about our emotions at work, we can address the actual substance of what’s actually going on. When we don’t feel valued, or feel angry at a co-worker or client, we don’t have to litigate this via a proxy battle. And most importantly, we don’t have to lie about who we are. Work can be part of our self-exploration, rather than a place where we sit behind a barrier, locked in an exhausting performance.

But mostly we don’t do that.

We have seemingly decided that feelings are dangerous. They need to be cordoned off in special rooms, and only discussed with certified professionals, or your closest friends. They certainly can’t be discussed in the workplace. When you’re furious at your boss because you don’t feel taken seriously, you can’t actually talk about that, even though it’s the most important thing. You have to fight a proxy battle instead—like, fume about whether the presentation’s slides have enough white space, or whether you’ve chosen the correct vendor—even though such issues are of relatively minor importance.

Both of us internalized this perspective and brought it into our work. When Sasha started coaching people on writing, he thought he’d show up and talk about technique: this is a good way to end a paragraph, this is what a snappy sentence feels like. And those are reasonable things to discuss. But they are also very easy to learn if you’re actually willing to express yourself. Getting to that willingness involves confronting embarrassment, the fear of rejection—feelings stuff. That is the important bottleneck, so if you’re stuck, that’s probably the thing to address.

Sasha didn’t realize this obvious truth, at first. He just noticed something odd—he had two kinds of coaching engagements. In the first, he just talked about writing technique, and those engagements didn’t, finally, do much. In the second, he talked about feelings, thinking, “Weird, I’m not supposed to do this, I’m not a therapist, right?” In those, profound change became possible. It was revealed to him that his job is talking about feelings—because if people can let down their defenses, it’s much more possible to express what’s beneath.

Misha used to teach communication through game theory exercises, and theoretical discussions about how it’s in your self-interest to listen. These techniques did accomplish something. But in working with organizations, he quickly noticed that everyone knows, theoretically, that you should listen to your co-workers and communicate sincerely. What people don’t know is how to actually bring that mentality into the situations that matter. Often, learning how to communicate emotion is more like getting over your fear of heights than it is like learning a recipe. The hard part is that it’s scary, not that you don’t know the right words. 

So he started making this the focus of his work, and the businesses he worked with became more effective. But he had the same thought as Sasha: “Isn’t this a therapy thing? Am I allowed to talk about this?”

This occurs often with professional service people—coaches, wealth managers, executive assistants. There’s a funny phrase you hear when something is working. “Haha, this is like therapy.” Meaning: oh, it’s weird that we’re talking about feelings. But it shouldn’t be. Emotions are the substance of motivation, and so, if you’re trying to get people to do things, you are interacting with emotions. If you’re not filing your taxes, and incurring costs for doing so, the problem is probably primarily emotional: you’re avoiding dread and anxiety. Thus, talking about dread and anxiety is part of an accountant’s job. Learning to address these feelings is the important first step towards facing down the IRS.

It’s amazing how often emotions are neglected in writing about work in general. Think of productivity books that don’t talk about the emotional roots of procrastination, or books on entrepreneurship that don’t talk about the importance of cultivating esprit de corps. This is like if a guide to interior decoration contained guidelines on how to move furniture into your apartment but nothing about aesthetics. 

If you’re running your business on the premise that the people you’re working with are automata who aren’t emotionally influenced, you’re operating on a false premise. This falsehood might seem obvious—of course, we all know what people are like. And yet, we encounter it in the wild with regularity. Misha often asks his clients: What percentage of your problems are people problems? They often answer something like: 70%. And yet 1% or less of their budget goes towards fixing it. 

An approach like this is a form of wishful thinking. If we decide there is something called “being professional” that means excluding our feelings, then our feelings will vanish. Perhaps in the future, feelings will go away for the first time. But to this point, they remain stubbornly important.

Photo credit goes to Robert Frank.