Welcome to the new manager podcast. I'm your host, Kim nickel. Hello and welcome. I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well. I wanted to start today by sharing celebration, one of my clients, finished her work with me and she sent me an e-mail to say the timing of our work together was perfect. The old stories, don't bind me anymore. They creep back in sometimes, but then I remember, oh yes, I can do what I want. That kind of Permissive feeling
of, I can do, what? And with whom I want for as long or as short, as I want is being reflected in measurable ways in my daily life. And now showing up in ways, I never could have imagined and I just felt so good. Reading her message because that's often what it's about. It really is about understanding. The story is that are driving, our behaviors and our experiences and learning how to see them clearly. And then unhook yourself from them.
It doesn't necessarily mean that you eliminate them altogether but they're no longer binding you. They're no longer holding you back or kind of keeping you from other options and choices and this ties in with the main topic. I wanted to share with you today, which is about working with emotions, and in the course of your human life, this comes up a lot.
But in the context of work and managing people both in terms of managing up, so managing your manager and the folks above you managing your team and being able to work with the emotions of the people on your team? It will come up a lot.
And if you are doing anything, client-facing, if you are working with clients, then you already know how important It is to know how to effectively manage the emotions that are happening with your clients and honestly, what ic2 is the better you get at that, the better, your personal work life becomes and the more effective you can be.
And this will play into everything from being able to establish, highly functional client relationships, where you have boundaries and clear Ways of working and then as a manager, you can also start to coach your team on how to work effectively with the emotions of clients.
So, for example, one of my clients has a team and her team is pretty young and she has this one client that is a little bit volatile, let's just say, and so because she understands that she's able to do a couple of things. Number one, Has been able to communicate with the client in a way that contains Andy escalates, the volatility in part. Because she understands when this person feels overwhelmed, they tend to get very urgent and they kind of stopped reading things clearly.
And so they end up missing a lot of information. And she's learned that when she sees that happening, she can adjust her communication style and a way that helps to ground and anchor that Aunt. And then with her team she's found that she can simply prep them and say, okay, now remember when we're meeting with this client, there's a likelihood, they'll be very volatile if they're feeling overwhelmed. And so, what we're going to do is we're going to approach them
in this way. We're going to organize our presentation, or we're going to organize our meeting in this way to allow for that, which makes a better experience for everyone. And it's kind of this high level skill because it's invisible. And Non obvious. But the effect of it is so beneficial because one of the things I want to really highlight and point out for you is that emotion takes energy.
And I mean that in a couple of ways one is that like when we're feeling anxious or worried or angry or resentful or distracted that will drain your energy but but also when you are feeling motivated and purposeful and proud and capable and confident that takes energy in the sense that like it gives and generates energy and relationships, there's always an emotional element and emotional context, even if it's something as straightforward or simple as trust.
So, if you trust the person that you are in a relationship that Ends up having a very different energetic and emotional component to it. Then if you are in a relationship with someone where the trust has been broken or is
not established yet. And so when we start to think about why it's valuable to understand and work with emotion, I want to shine a light on the energy of it and I think one of the ways that we tend to overlooked and devalue emotion is because it's so often presented as a negative or as something that is valued less than the intellect. So for example, if you say this person is very intellectual that
often is a compliment. If you say this person is very emotional, that often has a very different tone to it and it's often not spoken of In a positive way and so we can Overlook the value of emotion and because we work and live in a culture that tends to really prize and reward and recognize the intellectual reasoning part of our humanity and tends to cast aside and look down upon the emotional part of our Humanity. When in fact, Act, the emotion
is where all of the energy is so when you think about being motivated, we hear this a lot in the workplace, we want our team. We want our people to be highly motivated. Motivated is an emotion. I feel motivated and the reason you know this is because, you know, we are at the beginning of the year, a lot of a lot of us set intentions for the year.
But if you are only setting that intention from an intellectual place, And there is no emotional energy behind it, then the intellect it's just words it's just the words of the intention. We want to have some emotion, to make it feel alive and meaningful and purposeful. So that we feel motivated. Even if it's not like, I'm super excited to do this intention or this goal every day, but we can still move towards it.
If we have activated that emotional part of ourselves and myself, one of the things I realized many years ago was that when I had big emotions, I would think of myself as oh, I'm being so emotional. That's not good. I need to get a handle on that. And what I realized, I made this small shift and instead, I thought, you know, emotions are very powerful. So whenever I felt a strong emotion, especially ones that To be looked at as - like feeling
frustrated or angry or sad. Instead of saying I feel emotional, I'd say, you know, I feel so powerful right now. My anger is so activated, it is so powerful and it allowed me to be in the presence of my own emotion experience, without putting on a layer of judgment and if you only take this away, just this A simple frame of emotions are powerful and we can experience them without the weight of judgment. It will help you so much in dealing with your own emotional
experience. As well as the emotions of others. Because here's what I know. From so much of the work that I do is that we are making decisions based on how we think the other People will feel we get avoidant and we hold back from having difficult conversations because we feel uncomfortable about that or we worry. How will this other person feel? Will they blow up? Will they shut down? Will they attack me in some way? Will they talk to someone else about this? Instead of me?
We get really wrapped up. In how we imagine other people will feel the emotional outcome of whatever we're imagining is going to happen. And so, when we're not aware of how much emotion is, affecting us in the decisions that we make, it becomes really difficult to make strategic choices. It becomes difficult to
sometimes. Do the hard thing that we have to do, which might simply be to give Feedback to someone on our team about something that we feel, they might have, you know, a reaction to. So, we want to understand and work with emotions. Here are some other ways that emotions, show up that I see a lot with my clients when they come to work with me, they don't feel confident or they are in avoidance, they know they're not being direct or they are no. They are avoiding difficult conversations.
They'll often say, I feel So uncertain. So I'm not sure what to do. I feel anxious and then some other ones that often come up in the life coaching work that I do. People will say that they feel misunderstood, they feel disrespected, they feel worried, they feel pressured and so emotions. Play a very important role in your life, both at work and in your personal life as well. The more you learn how to understand and work with your own Emotions and the emotions of
others. The easier it is for you to create satisfying relationships, create great outcomes, at work and deal with other humans which you know, they have emotions to and often the most rewarding part is when we feel safe and connected and confident and capable in how we are in relationship with Those humans both at work and you know,
everywhere else. So the cool thing is that when you learn to work with emotions in one area of your life, you learn how to work with them in every other area of life. So there's a whole lot of benefit that you get from learning more about how you work with them and how to be intentional with them in the workplace and as a manager. So, that is what I wanted to share with you today.
Some ideas and inspiration, and ways to Think about emotion, especially with respect to the energetic component, notice where your energy feels drained, where it feels activated. Just begin to get curious about how emotion functions in your own life and if you want to do more of this work with me and get a real handle on this aspect of your leadership and work this year, then go into the show notes book, a consult and let's
talk. The other thing I want to invite you to is to get onto my mailing list just for managers and Leadership. Go to my website. Kim nickel.com and then go to the new manager page.
You'll see the link to join that specific list because there is a lot that I want to offer to you, especially at the beginning of this year, got plans for some classes and webinars coming up, and I want to make sure that you know about them, As soon as they are available to you, all right thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you next time. Hey before you go if you like this podcast please leave a review. Tell me why you listen and what has helped you?
Thanks so much. I'll see you next time.