How to Learn Emotional Balance to Improve Your Performance at Work

I’m about to tell you one of my LEAST favorite feelings at work…

That cringey feeling after a meeting you join when you’re incredibly irritated where you leave fully understanding that you showed up unprofessionally. Maybe you didn’t say much, but you sat with arms crossed, multitasking or giving vaguely judgemental looks? 

It’s one of my least favorite feelings as a leader, where my presence probably brought some people down, and I came out looking smug. While I’m in the middle of it, I don’t FEEL that I’m smug or being a jerk, and it doesn’t feel as terrible as it does when I reflect afterward. 

But sure enough, I’ve let my behavior reflect the emotions triggered within me.

On the one hand, being able to regulate emotions and maintain composure, especially in high-stress situations, is a mark of an effective leader. 

On the other hand, being authentic and genuine builds trust, creates meaningful connections with others, and allows us to be our true selves. 

So if I’m pissed at someone at work because they threw me under the bus or went behind my back, am I supposed to fake it? Or when someone is putting me in a terrible situation? How do you strike a balance between maintaining a level of emotional professionalism and being authentic in the workplace?

Both understanding this and teaching this to our teams are paramount for our upward professional trajectory and overall well-being.

A Major Leadership Differentiator

When people talk about emotional intelligence, they often reference those who are “good with other people” or are especially attuned to others.

But understanding and influencing the emotions of those around you is only one part of emotional intelligence. The foundation of emotional intelligence is understanding, navigating, and managing your emotions, otherwise known as self-awareness. In case you missed that post, I’ve recently written about how to increase self-awareness. I’ve also made a toolkit for those who want some great resources.

And a key part of self-awareness is emotional balance, or the ability to remain clear-headed, rational, and productive during a particularly stressful moment. I am starting to believe that it is a TRUE differentiator.

Emotional balance starts with identifying your emotions. All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act. And sometimes, we don’t even realize how powerful they are in our bodies. 

Emotions are SO powerful that they have distinctive biological signatures that we may not even notice. 

• Take anger – blood flows through the hands, making it easier to grasp a weapon or strike an enemy. Heart rate increases and adrenaline generates to allow quick energy to support an intense action. 
• Or fear – Blood moves to the large skeletal muscles, such as the legs making it easier to run.
• Or on the other side, happiness or joy produces increased activity in the brain center that inhibits negative feelings and fosters an increase in available energy.

These propensities to act based on emotions are shaped by our life experiences and culture, and we are products of our past. 

At work, we are all supposed to magically come together in harmony underneath this umbrella we call “culture” and figure out how to work together despite wildly different experiences and a limited purview of what each other’s lives outside of work are like.

We can’t control our emotional response to something. And we shouldn’t pretend we can, as that leads to stress on our bodies. What we can do is control what happens AFTER that emotion arises. 

Practices to Increase Emotional Balance

So what do we do when we are in the middle of or entering a situation feeling triggered and want to prevent showing up in an unprofessional way, yet staying authentic to ourselves and our experience? 

PINO. I must have acronyms to remember anything… you’re welcome for the wine-adjacent acronym.

1. Pause

Catch the trigger as soon as possible and remind yourself this is an automatic response, but not the most logical one. 

Essentially what could very well be happening is an amygdala hijacking. Here is what psychologist Daniel Goleman who literally wrote the book on Emotional Intelligence, has to say about it:

“Cognitive research shows that disturbing emotional reactions hinder our ability to focus and make good decisions. The key player here is the amygdala, circuitry in the emotional centers that constantly scan for threats in our environment. If the amygdala perceives a threat (even if a symbolic one) these circuits can hijack the prefrontal cortex—the brain’s executive center—and trigger our fight or flight response. That shuts down the thinking brain for the time being and so disrupts our ability to think clearly, let alone manage our emotions.”

Our goal here is to pause and notice what is happening. 

As I mentioned, you may only sometimes be able to identify why you feel a certain way. But you can pause and feel your body, which is your best indicator. For me, my stomach gets tense, I squint my eyes, and my palms start to get clammy. I have to use bodily indicators because my brain can’t see it.

2. Inhale. 

When you are triggered and feeling anger, fear, frustration, or even excitement or big love, your sensory signals bypass the neocortex, which is responsible for our executive functioning. This is called amygdala hijacking for a good reason. It hijacks our ability to think clearly and react helpfully.

The breath can be a powerful tool to get you out of this hijacking. 

Here are two breathing methods to try:

• Physiological sigh – Take a long inhale through your nose, immediately take another short inhale, and then exhale through your mouth. The double inhale re-inflates the little sacks in your lungs and lets off more carbon dioxide that has built up during a stressful event.
• 4-7-8 breathing – inhale for four seconds, hold for seven seconds, exhale for eight seconds.

3. Name

Renowned Psychiatrist Dr. Dan Siegel coined the phrase – “to name it is to tame it”. 

Naming your emotions can help get us out of the spiral. The only problem, we know very few emotions. 

Use an emotions wheel to identify what you’re feeling quickly. You can find one in the self-awareness resource kit here.

4. Open Your Options

Now that you’ve chilled out, you can think about the options in front of you. In the case of a meeting that you’ve walked into feeling incredibly salty, your options may be to:

• Pay attention to your body language, listen to others and write down your thoughts to communicate at another time. 
• Succinctly express that you’re not in a great place and will listen. For example, “I’ve had a rough morning, but I’d appreciate sitting in and hearing your perspective.”
• Or you may feel that a conversation is needed before a productive meeting. You could say: “Before this meeting, we need to address what happened in last week’s discussion.”

Leadership Tactics to Encourage Emotional Professionalism

Great leadership means teaching this to our teams and implementing tactics to promote a level of emotional professionalism and emotional balance. Here are some things to try:

1. Two-Word Check-In – Before your meetings, share two words describing how you’re feeling that day. Everyone begins understanding where others are, fostering connection, and inspiring your team to identify how they are feeling. I learned this exercise from Dr. Brene Brown.
2. Practice Reflective Listening – Reflective listening is responding to the other person by reflecting the thoughts and feelings you heard in his or her words, tone of voice, body posture, and gestures. It can help promote understanding in a conversation and help your team members refine how they communicate their emotions. 
3. Actively Resolve Conflict – Often, we let seemingly inconsequential conflict fester and affect other work. A tool I’ve used often is the Rumble Process, also from Dr. Brene Brown’s teachings. 
4. Give Feedback – Concise and clear, future-focused feedback can challenge people to understand better their emotions and how those emotions are coming across to the larger organization.

Ultimately, we are humans first. Some of us are deeply feeling and emotive folks. And others of us aren’t. We have an incredible opportunity as leaders to make work more fulfilling for others and ourselves by better understanding emotional intelligence. 

Sources:

• Nummenmaa, Lauri. Bodily maps of emotions. PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 2014.
• Doucleff, Michaeleen. Mapping Emotions On The Body: Love Makes Us Warm All Over. NPR. December 30, 2013.
• Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence. 10th ed., Bantam Books, 2007.
• Ramirez JM. The integrative role of the sigh in psychology, physiology, pathology, and neurobiology. Prog Brain Res. 2014.