Part 1: Why Your Internal State Is Driving Your Performance
Most people assume that they should separate out their emotions from their work. But, nothing could be further from the truth. Understanding your emotions – energy in motion (e-motion) – is actually one of the very best things that you can do, both for your wellbeing and for your work. This is because your energetic state – the things that you’re thinking, feeling, and embodying – can never really be separated from anything. They are you at that particular time. You are them.
To understand what is happening we have to take a step back and view emotions more clearly and scientifically. We have to view them as what they are – energy. Emotions are a vibrational wave that passes through the body and its systems, caused by the way that we think, perceive and view the world. All things that happen are actually neutral – it is our mental state, the beliefs we hold, our collective consciousness, our perceptions and assumptions, and the ways in which we think that causes an emotional – or energetic – reaction to something.
Unfortunately, talking about the “energetics” of something has, over the course of the 20th century, become linked to new age spiritualism and “woo woo”. This is absolutely not the case. In fact, Einstein (and countless others, including and even predating Pythagoras) have stated that everything is energy. It is the fundamental nature of the entire universe, and pretty much every modern day scientist would agree with that. So, once we accept that everything is energy, it then becomes a natural step in understanding all aspects of our lives and world as energy also – including emotions.
Learning to master your emotions isn’t about not feeling them. Remember, they are energy telling you information about the situation that is arising, and thus something about your internal way of thinking, perceiving and reacting. They are an energetic wave that we have come to recognize and label as a particular thing: love, fear, happiness, grief, joy, sadness etc. We all know what these feel like to experience. And there is no way to just “switch them off” (not without hard drugs and addictions anyway, and even then only temporarily). We need to remember that our emotional state is always going to fluctuate with emotional waves passing through us.
When most of us experience strong emotions, we try to switch them off when it comes to work. We think that they have no part in our work lives, or we even try to use work as a way of focusing on something else so intensely that we briefly forget about the emotions that are coming up for us. Even if you’re able to stop thinking about the things you were obsessing over before you began work, that doesn’t mean the effects of that energy moving through your being and body stop too. In fact, what you ignore becomes louder and louder until you have to deal with what is coming up for you. The body will even begin showing you physical symptoms to get your attention that something desperately needs to be looked at and released.
Choosing to block out emotions is a terrible long-term strategy. The energetic waves in your body don’t go away unless you actually deal with them, i.e. you acknowledge them, and process why they’re there, actually listening to what information they’re telling you. By blocking them out to work, or by using work as a blocker, you’ll compound and ramp up the emotional signals your body is telling you, and these energies will build up, layer by layer. Before you know it, you’re crashing out, snapping at others, and breaking down over seemingly “nothing”. Your work also suffers: your productivity drops, your standards and quality control slips, and everything feels 1000% more difficult than it usually does.
Not only does the cost of ignoring and misunderstanding your emotions massively affect how you feel internally, it wreaks havoc on your work life. These then begin to amplify one another: your worsening internal mood makes your work worse, your worsening work makes you feel even worse internally. In this situation its common to also begin having louder physical symptoms that add to the mess; insomnia, indigestion and headaches just to name a few. All keep adding up until something – or someone – breaks. Who would have thought all of that could come from blocking out some emotion for a short amount of time?
Fortunately there is a far better way for you to avoid all of that, which doesn’t involve trying to block out emotions. Instead, understanding your emotions (emotional mastery) is about witnessing the energetic waves that are passing through you, and then learning what this information is telling you. It means becoming aware, and then facing things head on, regardless of work. This is the only way that emotions are actually released, and thus the energetic waves actually dissipate so that they don’t impact all other areas of your life. Sometimes that means carving out some personal time to process things outside of work, but most of the time we don’t have that luxury.
This means we need to get good at emotional awareness and processing even during our work hours. This is something I’ve had to spend more than a decade working on, as someone who naturally used to block out all of my emotions, and especially during the years where I used to work 80+ hour weeks. I always used to tell myself that I’d get around to it once the next deadline was done, or in my (lacking) free time, which I also then used to fill with other activities to block out and numb the emotional signals.
I know the price of blocking out emotions (and trauma) first hand. I’d always have some “random” health issue going on no matter what I was doing or how good I told myself I was. I’d get sick all the time. I’d have aura migraines often. I barely slept and wouldn’t be able to sleep at all without “sleep aids”. After a prolonged period of this I began to burn out on all fronts. At the time I was working 3 different post-doctoral jobs, and the juggling of all of these workloads started to become more and more difficult (which later became the basis of wisdom for my first book “Working Wisely”).
Eventually my chaotic internal state bled out into my work, and I kept dropping things more and more often. I was grouchy for “no reason” a lot, which put a huge strain on my relationships at that time. I always felt utterly exhausted. I thought that if I could push through and just get my work done, I’d feel better and all of the symptoms would just miraculously go away. Spoiler: they did not (luckily I can laugh at this now). Instead I made a series of huge life decisions which I hoped would change my lifestyle and my life, just to get away from the emotional energies that I was ignoring from within.
I decided to emigrate from the UK to Canada, and leave everything that I had known behind. Talk about adding more emotional energy to the proverbial burning trash pile. Primarily it was because I didn’t agree with the politics that was unfolding at the time in leaving Europe, but subconsciously it was also another act of ignoring and blocking out what was really happening within. Once I arrived in Canada the COVID19 pandemic happened, and the entire world changed; again adding more energy to the burning trash pile. And that’s when my body finally broke.
I became life threateningly sick for 3 months and could barely move for most of that. It was my body’s last ditch attempt at making me stop everything and take a real hard look at what I was truly ignoring. That time really forced me to confront the myriad of emotions within: I had no choice. It was that or give up. So I did the work. And it was painful and exhausting, but also wildly enlightening and freeing. I wished that I hadn’t blocked it out so long: it would have been so much easier to deal with things on a daily basis when they had originally come up. But, at the time, I didn’t have the tools or the understanding of how to do that. These are the tools that I now share and explain in my writing and work.
During that period I had to learn how to witness and process those years of emotional denial. I had to learn about all of this, how emotions really worked, what they are, and what we can learn from them. I learned the most effective methods and tools for getting to the root of them. And most importantly I learned how to do this kind of emotional mastery processing on a day to day basis, without separating it out from any other elements of my life. My emotional balance doesn’t come from not having emotions (I am in fact a very emotional person), it comes from learning and mastering the wisdom of witnessing, and the wisdom of knowing that this makes my work better and stronger than ever before.
In the next article I’m excited to share with you the most effective techniques and methods that have gotten me to the point of being more emotionally balanced than ever before, whilst also having the best work-life balance than ever before. Practicing these genuinely changed my life. And through years of dedication in unraveling the energetic layers, I now see emotional energy as a gift that can teach us so much about ourselves. I had to learn these the hard way. And I mean the really hard way. So I sincerely hope that they can be of the best use to you before you ever have to get to the same point.
In the next article (part 2) I’ll break down the exact methods I use to stabilize and work with these internal states in real time. You’ll learn about:
- The emotional witnessing exercise (also published in my first book “Working Wisely”)
- The daily morning check-in protocol I do before I begin any kind of work
- The emotional intervention method I use whenever I feel an energetic wave while working, which stops any blocking and/or spiralling in real-time
- More insights and wisdom from my journey and from others, so you can master your emotions and use them to enhance your work as well as your general life balance
If you want access to “Part 2: The Practical Methods to Improve How You Work and Operate Daily”, and future tools like this, join the email list here: http://eepurl.com/jAxJhE
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