DO WE NEED MORE EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE?

Is your emotional resilience wearing you out?

We are constantly hearing news that challenge our emotional equilibrium. Maybe you even feel like you just want a good cry. We all need a good cry from time to time when things just get too much to bear, and we can no longer ignore the impact it has on us. But being strong is not the same thing as not feeling emotion.

I remember the first time I saw my dad cry, not from joy but from letting his heart stay wide open during a challenging time. I gained so much respect for him after that because I learned at that moment that he was breaking up with the idea that being strong meant suppress the pain.

He told me stories when I was young about how my grandfather, who was a butcher, had told my dad he was too sensitive and had to learn how to be a man and not cry.

And yet, it was the sensitivity that my dad had that made him so good at listening to other people with care and curiosity.

During our conversations when he was dying, I understood the full impact of care and curiosity as a key to not only relationship building but as a crucial factor in how we navigate challenges and stay engaged in our lives and work.

What I had to learn during that time was to let my emotions guide me into a more connected and fulfilling relationship with both myself and my dad.

We could not change the fact that he was dying; We had to accept it and instead use it as an opportunity to grow closer to for the time we had left. 

Life has a way of reminding us, over and over, that we are not in control of what happens; all we can do is choose how to respond to it.

The question is, how do we choose to respond to it? 

I HAD RESILIENCE ALL WRONG.

Being bullied in school, I learned to be strong. When my mom had a bipolar episode, which was really scary, I learned how to be strong. At the time, that meant to pretend it didn’t affect me.

I learned how not to feel, or rather, to ignore how I felt. To pretend I didn’t care. The thing is, it didn’t make me strong; it just made me isolated. As a young adult, I tried to avoid conflict instead of learning how to listen to and use my emotions to guide me through difficult situations. 

During my career and journey as a young leader, disappointments and challenges took their toll on my emotional equilibrium, because I didn’t have the tools for emotional agency.

It was through reflecting on my failures that I learned how to integrate emotions and harness the power of listening. It changed how I work; individually, with my teams, and collectively it becomes the foundation for building healthy relationships, which essentially is what makes us more resilient - we grow stronger together. 

EMOTIONAL AGENCY.

We talk about being more empathetic at work so that we can cultivate a more healthy, human-driven culture, however, it starts with us. It starts with our relationship with ourselves. 

We often have this idea that we have to be strong when finding ourselves in difficult situations, either in personal or interpersonal relationships at work.

But strength doesn’t come from avoiding; it comes from vulnerability.

Being vulnerable is about being true to ourselves instead of putting on the mask that we think others will accept, the mask that we think protects us from criticism or hurt, or showing we are uncertain and wants to hide not knowing.

Vulnerability doesn't mean we are falling apart; it means we honest with ourselves and others about how we feel. And then communicate that with respect and care for both yourself and others. 

The key to care is communication. 

Communication is essential for navigating difficult situations and relationships at work. We tend to avoid conflict instead of realizing the possibility of conflict is to bring us closer together. However, that takes a shift of mindset from conflict as a problem to solve and instead see the opportunity to learn more about each other, our perspectives, and what we care about. 

CARE AND WORRY ARE TWO SIDES OF THE SAME STORY.

We tend to react based on what we worry about, and a conflict can bring up fear and anxiety about not being included, valued, or even safe. We tend to align with what we care about when we choose what matters to us. So our emotional resilience is therefore not about pushing through the FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but rather using it as information so that we can take charge of our response and move toward what matters. 

Emotional agency is when we can pause to listen inside to become aware of our internal dialogue, the communication we have with ourselves, and our emotions as well. The inner dialogue might be stuck in the pothole, focusing on what’s broken and not working, and it might tell us that we are not capable of making it work. We might be dismissing our FUDDY emotions of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, telling ourselves we should be stronger. Now we can ask ourselves, what do I need so that I can feel more safe, capable, confident… whatever we would like to feel like? 

Power-Pausing is that moment, that small gap in time, where we pause to notice if we are feeling triggered and about to react, and instead, we choose to pause for just a little longer and remind ourselves what we are trying to achieve and choose how to respond. It is in that pause that we harness our emotional resilience.

To be emotionally resilient from the inside out, it’s important that we make the unconscious conscious, which essentially means being more sensitive instead of less—being able to listen more deeply to our own felt sense and emotions. 

Having emotional agency means being willing to listen to ourselves and others with respect and care, focusing on what we hope to achieve, and then asking what we need so we can stay open-minded and open-hearted and make a mindful choice about how we want to respond.