How emotionally aware are you?
I invite you to spend a minute or so thinking about the last 24 hours. I mean, really think about it.
How was it for you?
Write down as many feelings as you can recall experiencing during those 24 hours.
Looking at that list, how many were positive experiences versus negative?
Is that a typical ratio for you? What might be the ratio of positive to negative experiences that your friends, family or colleagues are experiencing right now?
What sort of outcomes are you seeing from those experiences?
Why do we react the way we do?
Sometimes our brains can become overwhelmed with emotions.
But what’s happening inside our brains in these moments?
It might be helpful to think of your brain as being like a house, with an upstairs and a downstairs, and people living on both floors. The people living downstairs help to signal what emotions we are experiencing, and they also keep us safe by being on the lookout for danger. The upstairs floor is where the thinking people live, and they help us to understand our emotions; to decide how to behave and how to solve problems.
Everything works in harmony when the people on both floors talk to one another and work together.
But the people downstairs sometimes takes over. This could be because they sense danger, or get overwhelmed with a feeling, such as fear or excitement, and the noise they create makes it hard for the people upstairs to think. This is called ‘flipping the lid’ (take a look at this video to learn more: Flipping Your Lid – A Scientific Explanation).
Essentially our brain is trying to protect us. It is sensing some form of danger and triggering the fight, flight or freeze response. Although our noisy brain is trying to keep us safe, it’s not always very helpful when we flip our lids. However we can do some tried and tested things to close the lid and re-connect with upstairs.
- Focus on your breathing
- Connect with your senses
- Talk to someone
- Take a walk
- Take a break
- Slow it down
The study of positive emotions
In the mid-1990’s, American psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson, began studying positive emotions. Her research led her to develop a theory called Broaden and Build. The central idea is that positive emotions play an essential part in our survival. Positive emotions, like love, joy and gratitude, promote new and creative actions, ideas and social bonds.
When we experience positive emotions, our minds broaden and they open up to new possibilities and ideas. We are more willing to try new things, we become more creative and become more engaged and engaging.
At the same time, positive emotions help us build our personal well-being resources, such as resilience and social support. With this broadening of our minds and building of personal resources, comes enhanced health, survival, and fulfilment, which, in turn, creates more experiences of positive emotions, creating an upward spiral.
The theory also suggests the opposite occurs with negative emotions.
When we experience anxiety, fear, or anger our thinking becomes narrow, we close ourselves off to new possibilities and ideas, we are no longer open to building new relationships or resources, we become disengaged. Our brain is focused on the perception of imminent threat, whether it is real or imagined.
The link between how people feel at work and how they perform
Our emotions and feelings are not restricted to home or private lives. We experience a wider range of emotions as part of our everyday working world too. Interactions with our colleagues, customers and other stakeholders provoke emotional responses, as do the relationships we have with our Line Managers.
A 2011 study by Dr. Christina Boedker et al, looked at several hundred organisations in Australia and studied objective criteria to split them into High Performing Workplaces and Low Performing Workplaces (HPW & LPW). As part of the study, they researched emotions in both environments.
The figure below illustrates their findings. It shows that positive emotions were much more commonly experienced by those working for HPW’s and conversely negative emotions were experienced more by those working in LPW’s.
The study also found that High Performing Workplaces had lower employee turnover, higher leadership capabilities, higher levels of innovation outputs, higher levels of job satisfaction and customers reporting a better overall experience.
How do I start my upward spiral?
The benefits of positive emotions are clear, both from a personal and organisational context, so how can you go about increasing your own positive emotions to broadening your thoughts and build your personal resources?
Here are six techniques to try:
1. Gratitude Practice
Daily, usually at the end of the day, make a note of three things that you are grateful for that day. What went well for you and why do it go well?
2. Create a Habit of Mindfulness
“Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.” www.mindful.org. There are many forms of mindfulness that you can try and there are numerous apps to help the uninitiated.
3. Consider Loving-Kindness Meditation
This is meditation for compassion. It is a specific meditation that places deliberate emphasis on directing well-wishes and goodwill to yourself and to others. There are a number of good quality, guided Loving-Kindness meditation apps, as well as plenty of videos on YouTube.
4. Reframe negative events
Developing skills to cope with adversity can help us become more resilient and positive.
Reivich and Shatté (2002) describe a sequence of steps you can take to examine and reframe negative events, which include:
- Identifying the type of emotion experienced
- Identifying thinking traps that are preventing us from seeing the bigger picture
- Putting our negative thoughts into perspective
- Taking positive action
5. Create positive experiences
Carry out a random act of kindness, help a friend or colleague with something, volunteer regularly, offer support to others. Creating positive experiences, that are shared with others, can have a lasting impact on our emotions. A far bigger impact than material things.
6. Hold a good posture
When you are in immediate need of positive emotions, paying attention to your body language and adjusting it accordingly can be beneficial.
Amy Cuddy’s book, Presence (2016), and her 2012 Ted talk, “Your body language shapes who you are” explain how our posture affects our emotions.
Summary
Our emotions influence our decisions, our behaviour and our performance, so all emotions are important, whether we like them or not.
We can’t stop unpleasant emotions but what is important is that we pay attention to how we feel and to act more intentionally with our emotions.
Notice and deliberately act, rather than allowing our emotions to take full control.
After all, you can’t stop a bird landing on your head, but you can stop it building a nest.
When you want to find out more about the work we are doing all over the world, building outstanding leadership cultures and high performance teams, do get in touch.
We are ready when you are.
