Episode 4: Workplace Emotional Literacy & Pitfalls of Not Letting in Emotions

🎧 Episode# 4: Workplace Emotion Literacy and Pitfalls of Not Letting in Emotions 🎧

Antonio Damasio hits the nail on the head, “We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think.”

We are “feeling machines” not just in our personal lives, but at work as well. We can’t just “turn off” our emotions and feelings because we are at work.

So how do we best approach it is the workplace?

Ashley Andersen, SVP ClearEdge Rising, and I tackle just that: workplace literacy and equipping managers with the tools to handle and talk about emotions.

With the world of work changing it’s approach to focus on mental wellness and wellbeing, you’ll learn about what emotional literacy is and how it ties into emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a skill that helps you manage both your emotions and the emotions of others.

It’s said that most people can only identify 3 emotions in themselves when they are experiencing them, but more than 80 emotions and emotional experiences exist beyond the common ones: glad, mad, and sad.

Ashley and I will talk about how to get comfortable having conversations about emotions. We’ll discuss surfacing them, understanding the implications of how they show up, what they look like, and what they are there for. Most importantly, how to work with people going through those emotional experiences. As fellow human beings (not a therapist) we can empower people, leaders, and organizations to foster an environment with psychological safety.

Ashley challenges us to consider, “how we can enact our own internal courage to be able to stay in that discomfort, in service of being be able to better know what we need and to ask for what we need and help others to do the same.”

Simply put, our feelings just want to be felt, heard, and recognized. If we put in the work to build the skill to be present and show up with emotional literacy, our organizations can experience increased productivity, morale and overall satisfaction on the job. But leaders must put in the work - it has to be more than just the intention of doing so. Ashley will show you how.

Episode Highlights:

🗣 We tackle myths surrounding mental health and the workplace

🌟 Importance of recognizing your own emotions to get curious about others’

🦸 Psychological safety and how getting comfortable with the uncomfortable is everyone’s job, not just HR

💻 Pitfalls and implications of not letting in emotions in a professional environment

💞 Toolkit for fostering an environment to ensure employees are seen, heard and understood

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