Welcome to the new Manager podcast.
I'm your host, Kim Nichol. Hello and welcome.
I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well.
Years ago, when I was a people manager, I discovered that there
were plenty of situations that I had no plan for.
I didn't have a lot of guidance, and I kind of had to figure
things out as I went. My manager was fine, but they
were not in the same location. They were, you know, located
across the country in a different office, and they were
really busy. So my direct supervisor was not
very helpful in terms of being a source of support.
I also didn't like to bother anybody.
I didn't want to reach out and ask for help because I just felt
super awkward about that conversation.
And I thought, you know, my boss is really busy, I should be able
to figure this out on my own. As a tip, if you are someone who
is also very self reliant and maybe as a little bit of that a
student perfectionist tendency, if you're really good at
figuring things out on your own, then you are probably going to
recognize yourself in some of this.
And the reason I share all of this with you is because what
really helped me in that situation where I had a team,
you know, most of my team was older than me and I had a really
nice manager, really lovely person, but not very present or
helpful in terms of providing me with support or guidance as I
stepped into this new role. What really helped me through
those days was my meditation and mindfulness practice.
Now, I had started meditating years before, not because
honestly, this sounds weird, but not because I, I wanted to.
I, I didn't think, oh, meditation, I need to do that.
I actually had been invited to a class by a friend of mine and at
the time I thought, no, I'm not that interested.
You know, meditation that seems like for stressed out people.
I'm not that stressed out. I'm fine.
And it also seemed just like a little bit out there for me.
You know, it seemed kind of boring and maybe just a little
bit weird. But I ended up going to this one
class because she had kept inviting me.
And finally I said, OK, I'm, I'm curious enough to go, let's try
this out. And what I discovered in that
experience was that it's actually very interesting.
I think my fear was that I would be bored or I would not be good
at it because from the outside it looks like meditation means
you sit quietly with your eyes closed and then you just kind
of, I don't know, I thought like you like wait for something to
happen or you clear your mind or you follow your breath or
something. And it just from the outside, it
didn't seem very interesting. But what I discovered in the
course of the experience of it myself and in the way that I was
taught and guided through that experience, I actually became
very interested in noticing the different sensations I was
feeling in that moment. I became very interested and
very curious about the different thoughts I was having as they
were arising, the different conversations that were
happening inside my own mind. And as I became more discerning
and more able to be present with my experience as it was
happening, it began to really shift my experience of everyday
moments. I began to feel more calm and
grounded. I felt like I had a little more
space between the, you know, stimulus and the response as is
described in that famous Viktor Frankel quote.
Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is your freedom to choose how to respond.
And in that choice is your is your freedom.
And I think I stumbled upon that quote.
I don't think I said it correctly, but that's
essentially the gist of it, is that between stimulus and how
you respond, there's a space. Within that space, you get to
choose, what does that mean for you?
How do you want to respond? And in that choice, there's so
much power and autonomy and agency.
And so coming back to the workplace as I was facing all of
these new situations that I hadn't been in before, you know,
like going from essentially being in the passenger seat to
being in the driver's seat and realizing, oh, there's a lot of
stuff that comes with managing a team that I hadn't really
understood until I was actually in that role.
It helped to have this practice and perspective from mindfulness
of how to be present. Mindfulness is a quality of
attention. And when my attention was
present and not spinning in a circle or feeling worried or,
you know, just activating heavy self judgement, it meant that I
was able to respond in the moment in ways that I believe
really served my team better than, you know, had I had, I not
had that. And so I'm sharing this with you
because I was recently posting on LinkedIn about how I see your
workplace as a venue for being human.
You're a human first, and then your workplace, your work, your
career. That's a place where you
experience your humanness, and you experience this with other
humans too. And it's not always easy.
It can be hard to be a human, and it can be hard to work with
other humans because we experience things differently.
We have different priorities, different things that motivate
us. We sometimes think, you know,
oh, I'm going to be a manager and I'm going to be so great.
I'm going to be the exact kind of manager I wish I always had.
And we forget that the people you're managing, they are
different. They might not want the kind of
manager that you want. They may not have the same, you
know, priorities that you had in that role.
And so beginning to realize, OK, this is not just about me being
the best kind of manager I want to be.
It requires I also pay attention to who are these people, who are
these people that I'm working with?
And even realizing that your manager and the the people that
you report up to, they might be lovely people and they might not
be available or they might not be great mentors or sources of
support for you. It doesn't mean there's anything
bad about them. It's just helpful to me.
I think very accurate and honest about what kind of relationship
you have. And you know how they think
about leadership and career and management.
It might be different than you. So all of this, you know,
sometimes can feel a little bit lonely, like you become a
manager and all of a sudden it's like, oh, there's no one you can
really talk to in your organization about what you're
going through and how you want to get better or what you're
struggling with and the kind of help you want.
It can sort of feel abrupt like that.
And you know, if if being human is the most important thing.
And then the question of what does this look like in the venue
or place of work is the second part.
Then things start to get interesting because we're asking
these questions about people, you know, how do people get
along? How do they communicate?
How do they respond to uncertainty or pressure or
stress? All of this becomes really
important now. This brings me to the main thing
I wanted to call your attention to you today, which is this
additional dimension of emotions at work.
So you are a human, you have emotions, you work with humans.
They have emotions too. We all experience them, but we
can have different levels of intensity around emotion.
And most of us had different, you know, kinds of rules about
what kinds of emotions are allowed or rewarded or like the
emotions we would get in trouble for.
And so then we learned to hide them or compartmentalize them
or, or distance ourselves from them.
And so I wanted to distinguish for you today the difference
between feeling and emotion and reacting to an emotion.
This is important for you as a human, and especially in the
context and venue of work. You want to feel emotions, but
not necessarily be reactive about them.
When you are feeling an emotion, think of it as what is the
sensation of that emotion? How would you describe the
experience of that emotion? So for example, let's say you're
feeling happy. What is the physical sensation
of experiencing happiness? Where in your body do you feel
that? And then go to a different
emotion, maybe disappointment. Where in your body do you feel
disappointment? When you feel disappointed, like
what does that like? What is the sensation?
What does that look like as a contrast?
Very often with disappointment that has sort of a down feeling
or a down and kind of like curled in a little bit.
Even the language we say, oh, I feel let down.
I feel disappointed, I feel let down.
There can be this, just like, you know, this downward kind of
feeling around disappointment. On the other hand, happiness or
joy, that tends to be something that goes a little bit more up
and out, right? Like I, as I'm describing this,
I'm even feeling it like in my face, there's like a brightness
in the cheek and in the right around the eyes and my heart
center space like around my chest feels a little bit more
relaxed, a little bit more, a little bit more open.
And so feeling and emotion is where we get curious about what
is the experience, what is that physical sensation that I'm
noticing when that emotion is present.
And if identifying emotions are kind of tricky, of course, you
can always consult a feelings wheel that can be really helpful
for getting more precise with the vocabulary of emotions.
But fundamentally, feel an emotion by being curious and
paying attention to the physical sensation in the body.
How do you experience that? That's feeling and emotion.
Reacting to an emotion is when we, for example, take it out on
others. Like I am feeling angry and so I
am going to take it out on you by lashing out or being
impatient or being unkind. And it may have nothing at all
to do with you. I'm just in a really bad mood
and I'm feeling angry because of something that happened on my
way to work. And so I'm going to react from
that emotion and act it out towards somebody else.
You can also think of it as when we allow emotions to drive our
behaviors. The reason I'm behaving this way
is because I feel, because I feel angry, because I feel
happy, because I feel deeply sad.
That's reacting from an emotion. And so we want to just start to
kind of calibrate attention so you begin to notice so it
doesn't just become kind of this big tangly blur, right of, oh,
I'm, I have an emotion. And so, you know, I, I'm feeling
overwhelmed or there's, you know, they don't know what to do
with it. We just want to just start to
notice these two different ways of having an emotion.
One is to simply feel it, notice the sensations, notice what it
is. Sometimes this is a hard thing
to do because, you know, emotions can feel very
inconvenient if we're having a physical experience and might
feel very vulnerable. Or you might feel like I don't
have time for this right now. I have to present a very
collected, you know, grounded, you know, presentation.
We get really good at masking by the way.
So you might just realize like I don't have a lot of practice
actually feeling emotions. And the fun thing is you
actually can't practice. Like you can say, I just want to
practice getting acquainted with what is, what does this emotion
feel like for me when I'm feeling this, you know, angry.
What does anger feel like for me?
Just to like an experiment, like a little scientific inquiry.
Can I get comfortable experiencing this emotion
without spiraling out and turning it into a big story and
kind of reactivating? Can I just experience the
sensation of having this emotion, of letting it be
present here and then noticing, OK, now when I reacting to an
emotion when I'm making decisions or when I'm behaving
because of a certain emotion that's driving those choices,
can I become more mindful and just notice when and where am I
doing that? It's even interesting to
consider the people that you work with and to just notice,
huh. I wonder, is this person acting,
you know, from an emotion? Are they being reactive right
now? Is that what you're seeing?
Sometimes we see that in passive aggressive behaviors.
It's like, oh, this person is acting and behaving from a
feeling of frustration or aggression, but they're trying
to kind of hide it or just do it sideways.
But you can still sense. I think there's some emotion in
there that is not being fully realized, but OK.
And what happens as you begin to get more comfortable working
with emotions your own, as well as being in the presence of
others? It becomes a little easier when
you become more familiar with your own emotional range.
It becomes easier to be present to the emotional range of
others. That means that you won't feel
as reactive to someone else's disappointment, anger,
happiness. You won't feel as sort of pulled
into their emotional field. You'll still be able to perceive
it. You can still have plenty of
compassion. You can still have plenty of
empathy, but it's more like you're able to stay grounded in
your own body and your experience and you don't over
identify and then are not moved to react by what you are
perceiving of this other person's emotion.
So I think emotions are very interesting and kind of
underlooked dimension of being human and working with other
humans. I think generally as you know,
as people, we don't get a lot of guidance on how to be an
emotionally alive person. We focus so much on the
intellect and we tend to overlook the emotion, you know,
the emotional range or the emotional aspect of being a
person, but ignore it at your peril.
Because if we are ignoring or disregarding emotions, we're
missing out on not just a full richness in your own life, but
emotions are very useful to understand when you're working
with people. It's helpful to know how to
respond if someone is disappointed, angry, or
frustrated. It's really helpful to
understand and know how to work with someone and what are the
things that motivate them or inspire them or what are the
things that make them feel happy to be doing this work even when
things are hard. So understanding emotions is
really valuable. It's really important both in
your personal life and your professional life.
And so that's what I wanted to put on your radar today.
As you go through the week, I would invite you to simply
notice what are the different emotions that come up for you
and can you practice feeling them?
Can you practice being curious and noticing, oh, this emotion,
it feels like this in my body. This part feels tense or this
part feels open or this part feels contracted or this part
feels, I don't know, kind of cloudy.
But start to notice and develop your own language and your own
that your own way of identifying when you are in an emotional
state. And if it also feels interesting
to you, start noticing, you know, how would you describe or
how would you notice the different emotional tones of the
people around you? Sometimes an organization will
have a general kind of emotional tone, and then different groups
or teams or departments will have their own distinct kind of
emotional tone. That can be really interesting
to start paying attention to as well.
But you know, just put this on your radar.
Emotions are part of being human.
They are not a problem to be solved.
They are something to learn about and to become more
skillful with because you know, it's part of embracing being a
human and you know, working and being and living with other
humans here on the planet. So I hope you enjoy having fun
with that this week. And if you want to do more of
this kind of work, then join me in one of my upcoming courses,
link in the show notes or reach out to work with me privately
with one-on-one coaching. It gives us this.
Space and the time to focus more specifically on you, on your
goals and your situation. And that's what we do in
one-on-one coaching. So you'll find more information
about that in the show notes or of course, go to my website,
kimnickel.com. For all of that, please leave a
review and follow this podcast. If this has been helpful to you,
share it with a friend and thank you so much for listening.
I hope you have a great week and I will talk to you next time.
When you're more effective at work, you're happier in your
life, and when you're happier in your life, you're more effective
at work. I can help.
Go to my website, kimnickel.com and sign up for a coaching
consult. It can get better.