Top Tips to Address Workplace Emotion Challenges & Authentic Power
Do You Know the three primary workplace emotion challenges?
The other night, I had the pleasure of meeting some people who candidly shared their frustrations at work, and I saw myself in them.
Years ago, when I was convinced that it was fine to put on a mask to play the game of the corporate world, I secretly felt overwhelmed, disappointed, and drained. However, I kept on going with a fake smile on my lips that came automatically every single day.
The challenges human beings face at work are numerous, such as not knowing how to handle emotional responses to change like anxiety, resistance, sadness, or excitement. Stress and burnout due to high workloads, tight deadlines, and lack of work-life balance policies, or managing coworkers’ emotions and not knowing or wanting to know how to respond when an employee is distressed or unhappy because we have too much on our plates. Negative moral emotions like guilt, regret, and shame show up in our body, mind, and soul, but we tend to disregard them because going on autopilot is easier than pausing to reflect and ask ourselves, “How can I handle all of this consciously?” It does not even cross our minds to ask ourselves these questions because we mostly go on autopilot.
Here are three keys to growth versus superficial success equals authentic power:
1. Emotional Awareness is Key
I have been advocating the vital importance of emotional awareness for years. What I have seen is interest in knowing about it but resistance to start a daily practice. This practice holds the potential to help us recover our connection with our authentic power, enabling us to make focused choices and share our knowledge, experience, vision, and perspective that spring from our most authentic self.
For example, it’s not easy to admit that it’s not about pleasing people, but about being able to re-evaluate behavioral patterns that we have been practicing for years. At some point in our lives, we came to believe that this is the way to pave our professional success. These patterns are connected to deep-seated beliefs and tendencies we learned early on. Since we have not brought them to the surface due to lack of self-awareness, we assume we will outgrow them. However, the subconscious information remains hidden, affecting our daily lives. I’ve learned that when we are inauthentic, we do not celebrate our success from our hearts but from our egos.
This might not seem like a problem initially, but it keeps piling up, creating a sense of dissatisfaction that we tend to fill with outer experiences. Once we stop practicing these subconscious programming, such as trying to belong or be accepted, we start to walk the path of self-empowerment and recover our authentic power. We realize that we are on a journey of growth and evolution, not superficial success. This requires that we constantly betray ourselves by playing roles that are not authentic to us.
2. How can we use e-motions to Self-Regulate?
When we can regularly scan our body to recognize our emotions, which are energies in motion that affect our organs and systems, including our cognitive abilities, and we can see ourselves through different lenses of consciousness, we start to experience life from a different perspective. Our intentional body scan helps us focus on those parts of our body experiencing stress, frustration, anxiety, overwhelm, and burnout and listen with attention to recognize the thoughts and feelings that go with it. Once we choose a more conscious and loving way to live our lives, we have connected with that part of us that is free from conditioning and programming, and we return to our power because we can choose.
One simple yet effective way to self-regulate is to take a couple of deep, conscious breaths. This practice calms our nervous system and brings us to the present moment, a crucial step in reprogramming our mind from autopilot to presence, which helps us recover cognitive clarity.
We could practice 1 Minute of Self-Reflection, a tool I have created based on emotional intelligence, the conscious use of emotions, mindfulness, and neuroscience. It is a powerful tool for increasing daily awareness and experiencing life with greater consciousness. If you are willing to explore it, send me an email. It’s a small but powerful tool that can be easily integrated into our daily routine.
How do you consciously attend to your emotions?
3. An Ideal We Keep on Postponing
Becoming the authority in our lives is an ideal that we often put off until after we’ve paid the mortgage or school tuition. The price to pay is high, but the current is so strong that we feel incapable of playing the game under our own rules because we are disconnected from our true power.
Reconnecting requires a great deal of energy, self-love, courage, determination, and intentionality, which is not always available because all our energy is focused on surviving.
Growth versus superficial success equals authentic power, and living under this principle is possible even when we still have a mortgage and school tuition to pay if we remember that we are here to thrive, not to survive, and we choose to act on it.
Related content:
From Adversity to Achievement: The Strength of Latina Entrepreneurs
