You Can't Be Great at Your Job Without This

“The truth is, I just can’t do what I do if I can’t feel my feelings.”

These were the words a client knowingly shared with me, wiping the tears from her face after a quick cry on an S.O.S FaceTime call from her parked car. She is an actor in LA, and she had just been torn to pieces by a world-renowned acting teacher in a scene study class.

After she told me what the teacher had said and how it had rocked her trust that she is even in the right profession, I asked her what was going on in her personal life. Turns out there were some pretty big shifts that, though positive, were close to her heart in a way that made her want to shut down. When I asked her what it felt like in her body she said, “like having armor on, or like a corset that’s too tight for me to breathe.” It had been like this for a few months.

I encouraged her to sit with the sensation of the tight corset and let it just be there. Within moments, tears quietly came and she became aware of what was under the surface: she was really scared that all the positive shifts in her life wouldn’t end well. The corset loosened. “No wonder you couldn’t do the scene,” I said, “How could you feel anything with that emotional corset on?”

It makes sense that an actor has to be able to feel their feelings in order to do their job well—if they’re a knotted up mess of “I don’t want to go there” about something in their own life, they won’t be able to get out of their way enough to get into the feelings of their character. Sure, they can understand what is being asked of them emotionally, but they won’t be able to get there in a visceral way, which means the audience won’t find them believable.

It’s easy to think that it’s only actors or people who’s jobs traditionally call for empathy and connection who need to be able to feel their feelings in order to be good at their job. But if you are a human and you want to be an expert at anything, not feeling your feelings will impede you because it disconnects you from your inner and outer experience. It’s like having a mind full of fog and trying to think clearly. Or like having bubble wrap from head to toe and trying to interact with the world around you. 

And believe me, I wish that weren’t true. On days when I feel spun out about something, I so wish I could stuff what I feel and buck up in order to “be present” for my work. But it doesn’t work that way for me. Nor do I see it work for others.

If you’re a nurse who is emotionally shut down, you won’t get the intuitive hit about what might be causing that new symptom in your patient. 

If you’re a general contractor who is numbing out, you will be mentally sluggish or mentally revved up and you’ll miss a calculation and drill a hole in the wrong place.

If you’re a salesperson who is pretending it’s all ok, you’ll lack a sense of emotional coherency and the personal connection needed to build trust with your client and make the sale.

If you're a manager who doesn’t know how to feel your feelings you’ll project your own discomfort on your team in the form of more criticism and less collaboration.

So what do you do about it?

This is a big topic and there is a lot that I have to say about how to actually go about engaging with your feelings in a way that is conducive to, not destructive to, your career. I intend to do that over time, but for right now I’d like to begin by asking you to really consider this: you do have feelings. 

I recognize that seems obnoxiously obvious, but it bears stressing because we live in a culture that doesn’t like to admit that we do—especially at work. 

But we do! All of us. All of the time. And your feelings don’t just go away because you want them to—at least not without a cost to your mental sharpness, your ability to be present, your physical energy, your ability to make effective decisions and your level of resilience in the face of stress, among many, many other abilities that make you better equipped to do your job.

People tend to be on board with this conceptually, and yet, we go on not feeling our feelings? Why? Because we forget this other truth: we are relational beings. And more than anything, we want to feel like we belong, we matter and that we’re safe. And if we’re in a setting where it’s not acceptable to have feelings (and if, to add to it, we’ve never learned how to have feelings in a healthy way) then damned if we’re not going to do everything we can to live neck up.

That said, I applaud your courage for reading this far. There’s been a lot of mention of the word “feelings” and you haven’t clicked away yet. I wish I could reward you by telling you that being willing to feel more is going to be comfortable. It probably won’t, at least at first. But this is one of those things in life, like exercise, that doesn’t always feel comfortable while you’re doing it but almost always feels better once you have—and it ultimately makes you a healthier, more vital person if you do it regularly.

So how do you tiptoe toward your feelings? Well, since most of us are trying to avoid feeling something most of the time, that’s the perfect place to start: get curious about what it feels like in your body when you are having some big emotion that you’d rather not have. 

Maybe it’s a day when you had an argument with your partner right before leaving for work, or after a meeting where your boss calls you out in front of your team, or when you’re working on a project and you just can’t seem to get it right.

What are the actual physical sensations that happen in your body? Does it feel tight? Hot? Cold? Heavy? Floaty? Numb? Does your nervous system get revved up? Or does it shut down and feel flatlined? 

Begin simply by noticing the sensations so you’re more likely to be able to catch yourself—“Oh, that tight feeling all over is happening. I must be trying to avoid feeling something.”

I know it seems like an insignificant gesture, but it’s not. It’s a small way of getting consciously closer to yourself in a moment when you are unconsciously pulling away—and subsequently also pulling away from all of your internal resources that make you awesome at your job.

And in case you’re wondering, once my client acknowledged her fear and let it be there rather than trying to operate on top it, she went back to the scene study class the next day and knocked the scene out of the park.