[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Leadership requires understanding your people and helping them understand themselves. To do that, they need to learn something new or change an existing belief.
Their relationship with emotions is one such place to learn. For instance, since the impulse of guilt is to hide and feel wrong, most people are unlikely to see the benefit of it. However, if we understand that guilt is telling us that we have violated our personal standards or values, we can see that its message is not to “feel bad” but rather to celebrate that we have standards. Our guilt shows us precisely what those personal standards are.
Differentiating Service and Sacrifice as an Example
For many people, service is an emotion they believe to be good and beneficial. There is another emotion that we sometimes confuse with service, and that is sacrifice. They both involve putting effort into helping others, but there is an important difference. When we act from service, we feel nurtured by our activities. When we act from sacrifice, we will experience depletion. One is not better than the other, but they are different. If you have a young child and get up in the night to attend to him or her, you are probably doing it at least partially from service because he or she is someone you love and recognize needs your help. However, you are also missing sleep and so depleting yourself. That part is sacrifice, and it is not indefinitely sustainable. It can help us understand why if you are in a helping profession or a parent of young children, you are so exhausted and may feel resentful even when you are doing something you love. This understanding can be the basis of balancing your choices so that you can be of service and have time to regain the energy that sustains you.
Each of the 250 emotions has such examples. Many occur in clusters, and by understanding how they are similar or different, you can employ emotions much more effectively and use them as a tool in your leadership.
Differentiating Fear, Anxiety, and Doubt as an Example
It isn’t unusual for people to say they feel fear or anxiety without stopping to think which it is. They are many times used interchangeably. There is a third emotion that often shows up with those two, and that is doubt. They show up together in situations that are new or challenge us to be at our best. But to understand how they can be useful, we need to understand what they are telling us. Fear is telling us that we are aware that something we are about to encounter might harm us or someone we care about. Anxiety is telling us also that harm might be on its way, but the source of the danger is unknown. Doubt is telling us to pay attention because we are doing something new, and our chances of success depend on our preparation and attention.
Learning to Analyze Emotions in Your Own or Your Employee’s Real-Life Situations
So, imagine a situation such as driving a car for the first time alone. You could feel fear that you’ll hit another vehicle; you might feel anxiety that something you aren’t expecting might happen, or you could feel doubt about directions or whether you are going too fast or slow. In other words, these three emotions could occur together, but they are each giving you unique information. Doubt is telling you to pay attention and be sure you remember all the safety rules you learned, fear is telling you to stay in your lane and not get too close to the parked cars on the side of the road and anxiety is telling you to not get complacent with your driving. The same analysis could be applied to giving a work presentation, taking a new role as a team leader, or many situations we encounter in daily life.
When we encounter this type of situation, we can ask ourselves or our employee what the mix is among these three emotions because each can be navigated differently. With doubt, we can prepare all that is possible and not assume we know how things will go. With fear, we can look for the specific things that might harm us and take care of them in advance, and with anxiety, we can pay attention to how things are unfolding and be prepared to defend ourselves or change direction.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]