Emotional Intelligence At Work
How a man went from thinking the real heroes could punch their way out of any problem, to discovering a new dimension of himself. An article by Sean Handley.
Engineers, by stereotype, are often seen as creatures of pure logic, rarely influenced by their emotions. When I had the pleasure of working alongside Sean, I believed this stereotype to be true, but Sean defied this mold. Sean wasn't just brilliant; he was a master of psychological safety, a truly exceptional listener, and a remarkably transparent and intentional leader. He taught me a lot about team management and how we could all be more attuned to our own emotional landscape and the nuanced dynamics within our team. This is why I invited him to share his personal story and tell us how we came to learn about these concepts that were so foreign to the world he grew up in.
- Camille
For a long time I didn’t grasp the power of engaging with and valuing my emotions. A decade later and I can’t imagine my life in any other way.
By learning about and accepting this part of myself, I began to engage with my friends, family and colleagues in a richer and deeper way and my life took on a joy and energy that I continue to be grateful for.
The year 10 BE (Before Emotions)
How do you feel?
It’s a simple enough question on the surface, right? But behind it there’s a whole symphony of instruments and the number of tunes they may be playing at a given moment is staggering.
As a British male growing up in the nineties, the culture around me gravitated towards stoicism, machismo, and understatement. “I’m fine! How are you?” “I’m also fine” “...” “...”. “Ok, enough small talk - let’s get into the business end of things!” Our heroes were 80s muscle men who could punch their way out of any problem and laugh at anyone along the way who was weak enough to feel things.
Naturally, as a teenager, I felt a lot of things. Angst, mostly. But also the usual anger, rebellion, heartbreak, betrayal, mania, obsession and joy.
So as I went through education and into the world of work, I found myself focusing almost entirely on facts, processes, reading, and doing. I was deep in the well of “hard skills” and the amount of time I spent thinking about my emotions (or those of others) was almost nil. As that young man, “feelings” almost seemed like a TV drama series - I knew it existed, and that a lot of people cared about it, but it seemed frivolous and irrelevant to me. I’d got all my emotions out as a teenager and was far too grown up and sophisticated for such petty indulgences.
However, at various points in my youth, confusing things would happen. People I’d been close to were suddenly absent. Someone would get frustrated and I wouldn’t really get why it had anything to do with me. Friendships and relationships drifted, and sometimes exploded. But I remained deep in the well, never really looking up to the distant circle of light above me.
Anno Motus - In The Year of our Emotions
As a junior manager, I was incredibly lucky to experience an awakening that pulled me out of my well and into the light of the emotional landscape around me. We’d come to Paris for a two-day workshop as part of our Foundation Program. The goal was simple - to understand the pillars of emotional intelligence and how they act as a foundation for everything we do as humans, whether as colleagues, friends, neighbours or partners.
Honestly, I had some initial scepticism when reading the agenda for the day. Surely we’d be better off learning about management processes, employment law, compensation, performance management etc etc - those hard skills I’d come to revere so highly. But no - we’d be starting by discussing our own feelings.
Huh. Feelings. I suppose I have feelings, but do I even know what they are…? And should I be bringing them to work with me?
We began by sitting together in silence for two minutes, mindfully breathing and being aware of our surroundings. How we felt sitting in the chair, the sounds and smells from the street outside, the sensation of sun pouring through the open window…
Our facilitator was incredible*. Over the two days she made us all feel incredibly comfortable and safe. She gradually drew out from us more about our experiences, showing us how rich our emotional lives actually are and how much we all have in common. We worked in pairs and spoke about memories of different events in our lives, one telling and the other listening actively for five minutes and then switching. We did an emotional wheel exercise to label our emotions and give them a more nuanced meaning. We collaborated in groups on specific situations and how we might interpret them.
By the end of the course, the light bulb was blazingly bright in my mind - I’d been dismissing a whole dimension of my existence, and of those around me, and those days were now squarely in the past.
*Thank you, Alexandra Brun, for the Foundation Program!
The Four Pillars
Let’s explore what we mean when we say “Emotional Intelligence”. The four pillars are: Self Awareness, Self Management, Awareness of Others’ Emotions, and Relationship Management.
Self Awareness
It all begins with your inner self.
As somewhat-evolved ape-like creatures, we have a two-tier brain that convinces itself that it’s far more highly evolved than it really is. The capacity for disparity is huge between the cerebral cortex’s logical, ordered world and the primal gruntings and growlings of the amygdala.
So how do you feel? Well, it depends! Cultivating awareness of our own emotions seems like something we should all just intuitively do all of the time, and it’s true for the big emotions for sure. We know when we’re furious, terrified, or delighted - these are huge feelings that become all encompassing for the time we experience them.
But most of the time, do we really know how we’re feeling? Or why we feel that way? Chances are we’re too busy thinking about something else to really sit and explore that subtle, just-beneath-the-surface feeling. Why am I low-energy today? Why don’t I feel particularly sociable? My shoulders are tense - why is that?
A lot has been written about mindfulness, to the point where it may appear, at best, like some mystical sorcery and, at worst, like some new-age snake oil designed to sell books. However, the core idea is absolutely simple: you sit and check-in with yourself, not judging, not controlling, just observing your thoughts rising like smoke and inspecting them with curiosity. No pre-living the future, or re-living the past, just observing the stream of your inner landscape thoughtfully.
This is a powerful idea, and a wonderful one, because your emotional self is not under the full control of your rational self. Chip and Dan Heath talk about “the elephant and the rider” in their wonderful book, “The Switch”. Your rider is your rational higher cortex, planning and strategizing and consulting the map, deciding where to go, when, and for what purpose. The elephant is your amygdala, spooked by unexpected noises, curious about unfamiliar smells, motivated by the immediacy of your environment and always wary of danger. The elephant trusts the rider, but the rider would do well to pay attention to how the elephant is doing - good luck steering the poor thing if it’s worried about the path ahead.
Our emotional landscape is much like this, and we’d do well to accept that our emotions are powerful forces which we ignore at our peril.
Self Management
Let’s say you’re in the habit of being aware of how you feel. Given any point in the day you can name that emotion with pinpoint accuracy. Wonderful - you know your elephant well. Now what?
Well, you can spot patterns emerging. What are your stressors? What sets you off? Is it a person? A place? Maybe something you eat or drink? Maybe a noise or a smell or an ugly ornament you really don’t like.
Noticing what points on the path set your elephant off, and re-routing, is the essence of emotionally intelligent self management. You won’t avoid every stressor all the time, but you’ll develop regular routes that take those aspects into account.
Maybe you’ll skip that fourth cup of coffee, avoid the market on a busy Saturday, make time to sit and read quietly on a Sunday morning, or quietly regift that hideous porcelain circus clown. Whatever soothes the elephant!
Awareness of Others’ Emotions
Empathy is the outward-looking equivalent of self-awareness. When you cultivate a sense of your own thoughts and feelings then it can help you to notice similar patterns and behaviours in the other people in your life. Typically, when you know someone well, you’ll spot changes to their normal patterns. Jill seems unusually quiet today, Bob seems restless and can’t sit still, what might be going on here?
The key here is to be accepting of others emotional states, and to observe them without judgment. The “fundamental attribution fallacy” is well worth understanding here - there is a cognitive bias where a person may judge another’s behaviour as morally deficient i.e. rude, lazy, careless rather than wonder what might be driving that behaviour. This tends to also be accompanied by a hypocritical tendency to forgive those behaviours in ourselves as having genuinely valid reasons.
For example, if someone isn’t contributing in a work meeting it might be easy to assume they’re bored by the subject or that they’re lazy and want the others to do the bulk of the work. Or it might be that they were up all night with a sick relative while they endure an agonising wait for a blood test result.
Don’t be quick to judge. You don’t always know the back story.
Also, and crucially, you need to tend to your own emotions regularly to have the bandwidth to detect and respond to those of others. As the flight safety card says - put your own oxygen mask on before attempting to assist others.
Relationship Management
The final piece is about how you act on what you know about your own emotional state for the benefit of others, and how you respond to the emotional states of others.
If you’re aware you’re having a bad day, give people a heads-up. Tell them “I slept terribly, so I’m sorry if I’m not my best today - I’m really interested in the topic you’re presenting and I will absolutely engage further over the coming week”. This emotional signposting is very helpful for others navigating how they perceive you and your behaviour.
If someone else seems like they may be having some emotional issues, you can manage this gently and without judgment by discreetely saying “I notice you seem quieter than usual today. Is everything ok?” and whatever response comes, listen actively and with acceptance. If someone shares an issue with you then acknowledge it - it’s very real and nontrivial for that person and it should be accepted as their lived and valid experience!
Don’t jump to offering solutions if someone confides in you (unless they ask!), but do make yourself available. “Is there anything I can do to help?” is a good way to go. A bad way to go could be “This happened to me!” (making it about you, rather than them), or “I see what the problem is! You should…” (leaping to conclusions, and overlooking the emotional discomfort as the more pressing issue).
Tying it all together
Since awakening to the nature of the emotional world, I feel like an invisible harness has been removed from me. I move with a new ease through the rooms and corridors of my life, accepting what I find along the way. I’ve connected more deeply with my family, rekindled old friendships, even started new ones.
As a leader, I’ve learned to appreciate the inner complexities of the lives of the folks on my team and to meet them where they are, rather than expecting them to present a certain front or choosing to ignore the truth of their emotional lives.
The key point here is that emotions are real, valid, powerful and underpin every aspect of our lives. They’re not weaknesses, they’re not trivial, and they’re certainly not to be ignored.
Emotional Intelligence (aka EQ) is a massive topic, and I’ve barely scratched the surface here. I hope my experience encourages you to learn more about the topic, to embrace your emotions, and to embrace the emotions of the people in your life.
May it become an indispensable compass to help you navigate life’s ever-changing waters.
About the author
I'm a technologist with a deep love and fascination for the power and the beauty of the written word. Growing up in the post-industrial north of England, but with a family from the Mediterranean, I've always felt like something of an explorer and an outsider. I developed an early fascination for language, writing, and stories. Being young in a place where education wasn't always valued, I would spend hours in my bedroom building games and websites purely for the joy of creation and for the delightful experience of creating things out of nothing but words.
Software to me is the power of the written word expressed through machinery. We breathe life into our creations through the blinking cursors on our screens and we nurture and guide them with care as they glide out of the workshops of our laptops and into the fabric of our digital lives. Writing poems and stories is much the same, but our words run in the machinery of the mind and through the software of the soul.
Further Reading on this topic
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A Song I love
Music is a huge part of my life so it's hard to choose! Right now, I'm feeling like Nick Drake's "Saturday Sun" is what I'd choose. I love it because it really hits on the fleeting nature of our emotional experiences. Comparing feelings to the weather is nothing new, but I love Nick's way of expressing it - "Saturday sun came without warning so no one knew what to do". My feelings take me by surprise regularly!
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A piece of advice
You can't decide your future but you can decide your habits, and your habits can decide your future for you. Choose your habits wisely.
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Thanks Sean for being so unapologetically your whole self, emotional and rational, brilliant and humble; and for accepting to be our first contributor writer.