Office Emotions

Traditionally emotional energy has not been welcomed in our workplaces. I love how our worlds have developed to include more of our human behaviours and traits. Bringing our whole selves to work is now way more normal than it used to be.

Our emotional energy comes from how we feel. Emotions are currents of energy that run through us. Think of your emotions as guides: they show you how you feel in any situation. Emotions are the raw data, your reaction to your reality. They are sensations in your body, physiological experiences or states of awareness that

give you information about the world.

Feelings are what we make them mean. Feelings are generated from our thoughts about our emotions, from conscious awareness of the emotions themselves.

Humans are meaning-making machines. We make up stories to explain why certain events happen in our lives. Most humans hate uncertainty, so it reassures us to create a story about why something has happened. These stories comfort us even if they are not true!

However, more often than not, these stories do not serve us. Say a colleague ignores you at an event. You might create a story about how she doesn’t like you.

You might even go down a tunnel of all the other people you do not think like you and dig up feelings from the past. But your colleague may have been preoccupied or busy and simply not seen you.

Your story might be completely untrue. Creating it has caused you unnecessary pain and distress! Emotions can be stimulated by many things: a thought, an event, a social interaction, a conversation or a memory. We cannot choose the emotions we feel, but we do get to choose our feelings –the ways we respond – through emotional awareness.

Emotional awareness is the ability to recognise and make sense of your emotions. Being in touch with your emotions is a wonderful outcome of knowing yourself.

You know what you like and what you don’t. You are able to identify and discuss how you are feeling. Being emotionally unaware is exhausting. It’s like being in a country where you do not understand the language: you are constantly confused!

Unfortunately, most of us are not very good at experiencing our emotions. We often avoid our feelings as they can be painful and ugly. Who wants to invite pain and ugliness into their lives? No one! From an early age, our emotions were often shut down.

We were taught not to cry, that it was not OK to get angry, that feeling jealous meant we were bad people. We were taught that our emotions are our enemies and that we should avoid them at all costs!

However, feelings are a necessary part of being human. The reality is that if you do not access and process your feelings, they will turn up in other ways.

Having regular stillness in your day will create space for your awareness and connection to yourself to grow. It’s very hard to hear your feelings while you are running around a busy office! We often go to stillness when we are feeling overwhelmed or searching for guidance, but it is the everyday quiet that will boost

our emotional energy. We need to make space for feeling. Connect to your breath and check in with how you are really feeling. "I am exhausted" might lead you to "I am disappointed", to "I am really sad". We need to create the space to feel. Daily!