Written By: Cinzia Nitti
Early morning, same old story. Wake up, shower, breakfast, laptop, hurry up and last bag checking. Everything’s ready, right? You think so – let’s go to work. Are we sure it’s all so simple? Imagine your life as a big box filled with many other little treasure chests, gardens of thoughts, heavy reminders and often trifling suggestions. Here they are, closed, tight and bruised – ready to explode when you least expect it.
Where? Behind your desk, of course!
There are social schemes (not to mention bosses and co-workers) that always want us impeccable, efficient, diligent and emotionally detached at workplace. More generally, it’s about behavioral models so entrenched to determine a negative final performance even before settling a project work. One – or a few more missteps and you lost the job.
Who said that emotions should be placed in the drawer and left there to suffocate? Emotions are all that define us as unique human beings, far from reproducible movie models translated into apparently non-affective super-women like Miranda Priestly… or ruthless managers like the Wolf of Wall Street!
Emotions make us exactly what we are and how we act in response to external and internal stimuli, memories, situations, traumas, worries, successes and life experiences that it’s humanly impossible to leave outside the office door.
Without forgetting tensions between team-mates, competitive backgrounds, deadlines and big goals to achieve: additional objective factors that contribute to make emotional stress a topic that holds forth without any apparent solution.
It happens in Big Companies to set very highly skilled targets by employing academic brilliant minds with perfect curricula, laudable ethics and flawless operational schemes.
What happens when – all of a sudden – there’s a glitch in the team system? Employees have been working hard for months to achieve the Company’s best goal and the emotional burnout of a member calls into question the project. What the good compromise between an effective and winning work performance, and the management of the most intimate part of oneself and relationships in the workplace?
A positive approach to the management of emotions, is not given exclusively by the implementation of Emotional Intelligence of which Solovay and Mayer have traced outlines, development and peculiarities in the history of recent neurosciences. The real and concrete source from which the functional balance for a competent, positive and successful performance springs, lies in balancing the emotions by mitigating the most impacting aspects of an emotion and self-awareness in the application of one’s technical and sectorial skills.
So, if well managed, emotions can become a skill; at the same time, if well applied, even the hard skills become functional and useful for a successful performance at work!
The “containment” (on a personal level, I would call it “embracement”) of emotions is therefore not to be considered negative in the transformation of an initially inconvenient condition. On the contrary, if expressed and translated into a positive and effective action, it can even produce an unexpected result.
Often the reason why many fail to express their potential, lies in the fact that we are precluded from any possibility of giving voice to our interiority at work.
“If you want maximal productivity and if you want work that gets the best results, you want the people doing that work to be in the optimal brain state for the work. You are a person who can evict them from the zone of optimal performance by slothfully handling your own interactions with them. So it’s up to you to take responsibility for your impact on their ability to work at their best.” – Daniel Goleman
Every Company should consider the option to introduce “Emotional Creativity” training sessions to allow their employees to get familiar and aware of their good emotional potential and gain the best from one’s flaws, sectorial skills and individual peculiarities.
A winning team combines cognitive and emotional competence without ever repressing what moves the individual to be what he/she naturally is: an Emotional Creative waiting to fully show and share all the best has to offer to the Business cause.
