Your Emotional Vocabulary

Today I felt crappy.

How about you?

For too many leaders the answer to “How are you?” is always more or less the same:

“I’m good/okay/fine…”. Maybe if someone they know well asks they might say “I’m busy/tired/hanging in there…”. Often they’ll add the word “kinda” as a softener to reduce the intensity of the feeling.

I get it. Leadership is demanding and often involves having connections with a large number of people, most of whom start every conversation with some variation of “How are you?”.

Being fully honest isn’t expected, and might not even be appreciated. Too much vulnerability is inappropriate. We mostly want to get past the ritual of “How are you?” and into the conversation we came to have.

The problem is that many leaders always skip the real “How are you?’. We rarely really notice or consider how we’re feeling. We have too much stuff to do to be whining (or that wonderful British slang “whingeing”) about our feelings.

Many of our leadership examples come from past generations when men (and official leadership was all too often limited to only men) were expected to be stoic and strong. If any emotion was revealed it was most likely anger. The legacy of those expectations has more impact today than we may like to admit on leaders of all genders.

But we are learning. As we deepen our understanding of emotional intelligence and reject the idea of leaders as superheroes we are becoming more fully human.

For many leaders an important part of this learning is to expand our emotional vocabulary.

The brilliant social scientist Brené Brown has done powerful work to help us in this process. Among her excellent books, Atlas of the Heart, focuses on expanding beyond angry, sad, and happy into more nuanced and multi-faceted expressions of emotion. It’s a valuable lesson.

Becoming curious about our own emotional lives, expanding our vocabulary, is healthy for us; it also enables us to be more compassionate, empathic, and supportive of others.

So yeah, I felt crappy today. And by acknowledging it, naming it, and not burying it I am a lot more likely to feel better tomorrow. Kinda.

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