Emotions Are Not Data

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Emotions happen. We don’t control them. We experience them. Emotions provide us with information about our internal state and our interpretation of our external environment, but they are not data.

In certain circumstances, it makes sense to act in response to an emotion. For example, if you’re walking alone in a dark alley and you feel fear, trust it and choose to leave the dark alley in favor of walking on a populated, brightly lit street. 

It’s important to recognize, however, tha

t our brain can fool us. It can use negative emotionsto erroneously warn us thatwe are in danger of becoming prey or being ostracized, two things humans evolutionarily avoid. In its effort to protect us from death bypredators and from loss of a support system, the brain has developed a negativity bias. We are thus sensitive to and very aware of ournegative emotions and allow them to influence our decisions, our personal boundaries, and our relationships.

Karen, a recent client, came to coachingwanting to improve her work-life balance. One of the challenges she identified was her inability to set boundaries around her work day. When she transitioned from working in an office to remote work, this became especially difficult. Through our sessions together, she determined that she wanted to clearly define her work hours for herself and for her colleagues and upper management. As a result, she began declining meetings outside of her defined work hours.

In a follow-up session, I checked in with Karen on how holding this boundary around her work hours was impacting her goal of improved work-life balance. Her face dropped, and she lamented, “It isn’t working.”

I probed, “What part of the strategy isn’t working?”

She said, “It isn’t workingbecause I feel bad about declining meetings.” She wanted to drop the whole strategy and try to findsome other way to “feel like” she had work-life balance.

As we explored this deeper, she acknowledged that she in fact was enjoying more time with her family and keeping up better with household tasks as a result of setting boundaries around her work hours. She reported that tension between her and her husband over her work had also decreased. Furthermore, she could not name any concrete negative repercussions at work. Nonetheless, Karen was using her negative emotion as the sole criteria for judging the effectiveness of her strategy.

Do you recognize yourself in this account? Do you make critical life decisions based on emotional feedback? How can these negative emotions be processed in a meaningful way? What’s a better way to get at useful data points for determining whether what you’re doing is working?


 

First, take some steps to evaluate and manage the emotion itself:

  1. Pause –
    Pausing provides time for your emotional brain to cool down and your logical brain to heat up.
  2. Reflect – Create self-awareness by objectively considering how the emotion influences your physical state, your cognitive state, and your behavioral state. It may enhance your self-awareness to journal your observations.
  3. Name It – Naming an emotion can tame it. Naming it takes away its power over you.
  4. Respond – Choose your response with intention. You can choose to do something in response or to do nothing in response. Choosing is the action in both cases. 

Next, ask yourself two questions about your strategy to collect information beyond your emotion:

  1. Did I do the behavior I committedto?
  2. What observable outcomes did I get as a result?

Together, Karen and I employed these tools to take a 360-degree view of her strategy for improving her work-life balance. She ultimately chose to stick with her boundaries around work hours. She says that she sometimes still feels bad when declining a meeting outside of her work hours, but she uses her new tools to slow down, examine her emotion, and gather accurate data. 

How can you use these tools to achieve your goals?

Curiosity: You Are NOT the Cat

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My grandmother frequently admonished me throughout my early years by saying, “Curiosity killed the cat.” This reprimand usually coincided with actual or contemplated mischief, so I heard it a lot from my grandmother’s lips. She used the quip to keep me in line. 

I notice people stating this idiom to their children, to other adults, and to themselves. Clients will even say it to me as an excuse for not considering their range of possibilities.

Repetition of  phrases like this, said as statements of fact, causes us to internalize them. They become a guiding rule for our behavior, acting on us below the level of  our conscious awareness. Adhering to the notion that curiosity killed the cat, therefore it will kill us, keeps us locked in our safety zone. When we stay locked in our safety zone, we sacrifice growth and development in exchange for the comfort of what we already know.

By doing this, we become vulnerable to the pitfalls of failing to exercise curiosity in a world teeming with places, things, and ideas to explore. We become susceptible to problems like:

  1. Group Think
  2. Functional Fixedness
  3. Stagnate Learning
  4. Decline in Neural Networks
  5. Poor Problem-Solving
  6. Failed Relationships

People caution others not to express curiosity as a subtle cue to not rock the boat, to walk the straight and narrow, to maintain the status quo. The message hints that if we ask questions such as, “How does this work?” or “What are my other options?” or “Why is this way the right way and that way the wrong way?” we will be ostracized from the in-group and cast into the out-group.

This conviction activates the limbic system within the brain, where emotions and the flight or fight response are governed. The brain’s sole purpose is to keep us alive. It operates on the prehistoric principle that to be kicked out of the clan means certain death by exposure to the elements, illness, starvation, or predator. Your brain truly believes that curiosity killed the cat and that curiosity will kill you, as well. Thus, it creates a feeling of fear in order to discourage curiosity and regain a sense of safety.

I can 100% guarantee you that you are not the cat. In most cases, curiosity poses no hazards to you. In fact, it expands your worldview. It connects you in deeper and more meaningful ways to the people around you. It profoundly transforms your ability to overcome challenges. And it leads to greater creativity, happiness, and life satisfaction.

 

Your brain is an incredible organ. Though charged with surveying the environment for danger and triggering a response to it, the brain can also be taught that what it once perceived as dangerous is not. It has this marvelous plasticity that allows it to change based on the environment and how you interact with the environment. By indulging in curiosity, even in small ways, you begin to mold your brain to not only embrace curiosity, but to crave it even more.

 

To Be Liked or To Be Likable, That Is the Question

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The 9th-grade English teacher, after receiving the call over the intercom to come to the office, gave the class a writing assignment

and excused himself from the classroom. He trusted his students to diligently pursue excellence in his absence.

Silence encapsulated the room as students put pen to paper. Then the door clicked closed. Relief washed over the students, anxious to release their pent up need for socializing. Friendly chatter erupted. Laughter followed. Students ventured out of their desks across the room to visit their friends.

For one young man, this brief reprieve from the constraints of classroom decorum was not enough. Not only did he engage in chatter, and laughter, and wandering around the room, but he climbed atop a desk and began traversing from one side of the room to the other by athletically leaping from obstacle to obstacle and loudly calling attention to his feat. 

All eyes turned to him. Loud cheers urged him on in his quest for the spotlight. The young man goaded students, who had managed to keep working despite the chaos he created, to join him in his fun. He felt energized and unstoppable. He was receiving exactly what he wanted: to be perceived as the cool kid that everyone yearned to be friends with.

The other students, more self-aware and less willing to be caught in non-compliance, kept a watch on the closed door. They saw the form of the teacher in the rectangular sliver of a window and heard the knob turn and felt the breeze from the hallway as the door opened. Immediately, they postured as if they had been writing the entire time. 

This left the blond, blue-eyed desk-leaper looking conspicuous in his mid-air lunge toward the teacher’s table. He landed in a stack of papers, sending them wafting upward and outward. The teacher’s eyes locked on the boy’s through the papers drifting to the floor.

The young man was awarded a trip to the office, detention, 25 bear crawls at baseball practice, and one phone call home to me, his mother, to explain the situation. In his misguided effort to be liked by his classmates, my son failed to forecast the potential  consequences.

By adulthood, most of us do not act out in quite so obvious ways. Nonetheless, we are still plagued with that age-old dilemma: to be liked or to be likeable? Have you considered the difference? What does it mean to be liked? What does it mean to be likeable? Which goal motivates you more, and how does motivation toward that end influence your behavior, your happiness, and your success?

My son’s sole purpose was to be liked by his peers. He confused being liked with being likeable. He quickly discovered, however, that although his classmates really, really liked him in the moment, they distanced themselves from him afterward. They liked his wildness and his disregard for conforming to expectations, but they didn’t find him to be likeable.

People who desire to be liked and place a premium on it tend to do three things:

  1. Blur their personal boundaries. They are reluctant to stand strong on their personal beliefs and values. When the goal is to be liked, people tend to mold themselves to the expectations of others. They forego what they would generally claim to be important to them. There is a fear that if they clearly demarcate their boundaries, others will view them as overbearing, wrong in what they believe, narrow-minded, hard-headed, unfriendly, shallow. So they bend to the whim and will of whoever they are with in order to be liked.
  2. Fail to ask for what they want. Again, this is out of fear. No one wants to be seen as needy or demanding. People driven to be liked are especially sensitive to the impression they feel others have of them. Thus, they never make their own needs, wants, or desires known to others. They believe they are more likeable if they never come right out and ask for what they want.
  3. Act on impulse. See the above story about my son as an example. When we are motivated by the goal of being liked, we do things we ordinarily would not. We act out of character. Perhaps we tell an off-color joke to get a laugh or we do something potentially dangerous to grab admiration.

People motivated by the goal of being likeable tend to do three things:

  1. Behave consistently. We like them because we know that our perception of who they are and how they will behave is accurate. People who are likeable are predictable and dependable. They demonstrate self-awareness which translates into confidence. They like themselves, so we like them, too.
  2. Honor other people’s boundaries. They listen to others in order to learn about them. They accept others as they are for what they value and believe. Though people who operate from a stance of being likeable may challenge someone to leave her comfort zone, they won’t ask her to act against strongly held values and beliefs. There will always be respect for the other person. 
  3. Express empathy. Likeable people generally have high emotional intelligence. They’re able to recognize and identify emotions in themselves and others and to respond appropriately. They don’t discount the feelings of another person, nor do they try to tell others how they should feel. Because they are able to lean into us (empathize), they pull us toward them (being likeable).

Fortunately, my son, too, has come a long way from the 9th-grade version of himself. Now in his 20s, he has a deep and wide network of friends. He attracts people to him, not by impulsive antics, but by authenticity. Although he got there the hard way, he has become an incredibly likeable person.

How do you think being liked versus being likeable affects a person’s success? Where do you fall on the spectrum between the two? What can you work on to become more likeable?

 

Coaching Minute: What Is Fear?

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