Embracing Challenging Emotions: How Allowing Yourself to Feel Leads to Growth and Success
“Mom, can’t you just let me feel bad?” My teenage daughter said this to me recently, exasperated.
She had been discussing a particularly bad day and I, not wanting to see her in pain, was pushing her to quickly move beyond the challenging feelings and focus on the opportunity for growth. There was only one problem: she was still trying to sift through her emotions.
Her words really affected me. I thought about those intense emotions during the adolescent years (betrayal by a friend, getting cut from a team, failing a test, or having a broken heart.) These feelings are raw and acute. Yet, urging my daughter to move past feelings right into solutions was actually doing her a disservice.
Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler, executive coach and founding principal of Alignment Strategies Group, gives a compelling talk to Google on “Mastering Conflict.” She stresses the importance of transforming challenging emotions to master conflict. Challenging emotions are a part of every difficult conflict at work and in life. Goldman-Wetzler suggests only when you allow emotions to sit and settle, can you transform them into something more constructive.
One of my biggest failures in the workplace happened early in my career. I had relocated to a new city, started a new job and gotten married all within a couple of months. Just a few weeks after my wedding, I delivered my first large group training. Needless to say, I had not taken the time to prepare. I struggled through every moment of that training. I received harsh reviews. I felt humiliated during the training, and after, when going over the evaluations with my new boss. I felt defensive and scared that I might lose my job. I wanted to fast forward past these difficult feelings, forget the whole experience and just move on.
In the decades since my bombed training, I’ve frequently been tempted to shortcut preparation needed for big presentations, especially as I’ve mastered the material. Instead, I have transformed the difficult emotions of failure and embarrassment into motivation to always do the work of preparation. I really needed to experience those challenging feelings in order to learn a lesson that would be incredibly helpful in my career.
Disappointments at work can feel as bad as those teenage emotions of heartbreak and betrayal. We might not have gotten a project we really wanted, a proposal we’ve submitted isn’t accepted, a team we’re leading is rife with conflict. At work we are often taught that suppressing emotions is a sign of maturity.
In my role as a coach for both my children and a younger generation of leaders at work, I need to encourage others to identify and sit with their feelings. Only then, can they transform them into valuable life lessons.
Sue Elias is EVP of Parks & People Foundation in Baltimore, MD and has 25 years working in the nonprofit sector as a leader, executive, and volunteer. Reflecting on the experiences and events throughout her career, she witnessed great leadership despite limited resources or adverse circumstances – and thus, her blog content was born. Sue, a Buffalo native who knows that chicken wings should only be served with blue cheese dressing (never ranch), lives in Baltimore with her husband and 3 children. She believes that being a mother of teenagers is her greatest leadership challenge to date.