1. Master Your Emotions, Transform Your Leadership: 3 Strategies for Success
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by your emotions at work? Are you unsure how to navigate difficult conversations or build trust with your colleagues? You're not alone. In my time in corporate and as a leadership and life coach, I've seen firsthand how emotional intelligence can make or break your success in the workplace.
The secret here is that, by learning to connect with your own emotions, actively listening to others, and leading with empathy, you can transform your relationships and achieve greater satisfaction in your career.
Tune in today to discover three practical strategies you can start using right now to boost your emotional intelligence and become a more effective leader. I dive into the neuroscience behind emotional reactions and give you real-life examples of emotional intelligence in action. Whether you're a seasoned executive or just starting out in your career, these strategies will help you bridge the gap between technical expertise and emotional intelligence, unlocking your full potential as a leader.
If you haven’t already, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review to let me know what you think. I'm creating this show just for you, so I want to know what you would like to hear about in the coming episodes. Find complete instructions here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
How to recognize and regulate your own emotions using the five primary emotions: fear, hurt, sadness, anger, and joy.
Why connecting with your emotions is the foundation for effective leadership and decision-making.
The importance of active listening in building trust and rapport with colleagues.
How to use empathy to resolve conflicts and strengthen relationships at work.
A real-time leadership challenge to help you assess your own emotional intelligence.
Actionable tips for staying grounded in your emotions while supporting others through challenging times.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
If you haven’t already, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review to let me know what you think. Find complete instructions here!
Full Episode Transcript:
Have you ever wondered why some leaders seem to effortlessly inspire their teams, while others struggle to connect? In today's episode, we're diving into emotional intelligence, the secret weapon that high-achieving women use to inspire, influence, and lead with confidence.
We'll break down simple-yet-powerful strategies to strengthen your emotional intelligence, helping you make smarter decisions, build stronger teams, lead with more empathy, and step into your leadership with more ease and impact. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hi everyone, welcome to my podcast. I am Yann Dang. I am a leadership and life coach. I'm also a second-generation immigrant and a former corporate executive. I spent over 20 years in the corporate world as a global finance leader and I use the skills that I learned in that corporate world to support women today to build lasting confidence and emotional wealth. And I'm excited to be here to share this podcast with you because I want to share the skills that I am teaching and what I've learned over my many years in the corporate world.
This podcast's mission is to support women leaders to bridge the gap between technical expertise and emotional intelligence. And today's episode is on three practical strategies to boost your emotional intelligence at work.
I'm going to kick off with the very first one, which is really about showing up for yourself. And what does it really mean to show up for yourself? In this strategy, we are really focusing on showing up for yourself as the foundation for emotional intelligence and leadership success.
So let's start talking about emotions. I want you to ask yourself, how do you show up with your emotions? How are you with your emotions? Are you the type of person who is really connected to how they feel? Are you the type of person who oftentimes shuts their feelings down to get things done? Are you the type of person who is scared of their emotions because you feel overwhelmed by them.
I coach clients that have all three of these factors, right? They're either not that in touch with them, they are somewhat in touch with them, but feel like they could use them more purposefully, or they feel overwhelmed by them. And so this is where I start with all of my clients, because emotions are how we learn to connect with ourselves, which in turn help us to connect with other people and lead other people.
And I often stress that, typically in our careers, when we're very young and junior, the focus is getting the job done. And so there's less need for emotional awareness at that point, because as long as you can get the job done, obviously it's important to show up well with your boss and your peers and to get along, but the emotional awareness piece is not as important until you start managing people, until you start managing managers, or until you start having much more difficult conversations that are more in the gray area with your peers or your leaders, which typically happen when you become more strategic and there's not as much transactional work that just needs to get done, right?
Transactional work that just needs to get done doesn't really require much emotional intelligence, but strategic decision-making requires a lot of emotional intelligence because you are connecting with other people, you are presenting a lot of nonverbal cues. And if you are not aware of how you are showing up emotionally and what those nonverbal cues are impacting in the way you communicate, then this could be a really big blind spot for you. And this is what I typically focus with my clients on.
A lot of my clients come to me and say, wow, I feel super angry after work. And I don't know why. And I drink and I am upset with myself. I beat myself up, I keep replaying what happened over and over. So typically what happens in this scenario is that you could be experiencing lots of different emotions and not knowing how to untangle yourself from it.
So oftentimes you might blame the other person and say this person has such an abrasive personality that I can't work with them, or this person makes me feel intimidated, or this person, I feel really scared when I'm with this person. That is actually that start of being emotionally aware of how you are showing up with your emotions in a particular situation.
And typically it's easier or feels easier to blame another person than to actually deal with your emotions and dig in to see what's actually happening inside. But I will tell you that there's a lot of growth and leadership if you are willing to connect with your own emotions and understand how those emotions are impacting how you show up with other people. So it really starts with you.
I want to give you a scenario to think through that might be happening to you right now or happened to you in the past. I have a client who talks about every time she has to present the financial information to her boss, she feels super scared. And what ends up happening is when she feels super scared, she talks super-fast. She is also much more shaky in her tone of voice, and she's not very clear when she answers questions.
And so what happens is she comes into the meeting prepared with her things, but she's so emotionally overwhelmed that she shows up with these different emotions. And she doesn't understand how to help herself because what happens is her boss actually gets upset, asks even more questions, she feels even more stirred up, and she usually just leaves the meeting feeling defeated.
If this feels familiar to you, then you're not alone. This has happened to me as well. This is actually part of why I became a coach because I was faced with this particular challenge myself. And what I can tell you is that by showing up and understanding your emotions, you can actually change the situation for yourself.
So let me just tell you what happens from a neuroscience standpoint. When we are feeling like we're really scared and under attack, we start using our survival brain. And our survival brain is really focused on getting out of whatever situation in the safest way possible, right? And so there's a lot of automatic reactions that we have. So it's important to notice for yourself, what are those automatic reactions that sometimes happen to you that don't feel intentional or purposeful?
So in this situation with my client, she noticed I talk really fast, I'm really fidgety, and I'm not clear when I answer their question. And overall, I don't feel confident, right? So she knew this is what typically happens. And so really what we worked on is understanding her emotions. First of all, naming that this makes sense, right? You feel scared. And she had also shared that this happened a lot in her family system where her dad would question her and she would start getting really shaky and sometimes even start crying, right, to get out of the situation. Obviously that's not a great strategy for work, right? Nobody wants to have the strategy of I'm so upset that I have to cry and leave the meeting. But we want to recognize that sometimes these emotional triggers happen because it is presenting a situation that feels so familiar to us.
So what we actually focused on was how to help her to have different emotions when she goes into this meeting and to create safety for herself. Number one, to realize that even though it feels really scary and she feels like she is under attack, that she's actually not, that this is just a meeting.
Number two, to remember that her job there, the purpose, was to show up confidently, firmly, and authoritatively as it related to what she was presenting. And so this really allowed her to have a focus. So when she went into the meetings, instead of just going into the autopilot, oh my gosh, person is abrasive and scary and reminds me of my father. That whole pattern wasn't playing out anymore where she felt scared and did all of those things. Instead, she centered herself, reminded herself that she is safe in that moment, that yes, she does feel fear, but she also feels angry because she wants to make sure she's heard.
This emotion of anger is one that I teach a lot of my female clients on because it helps you to create more confidence in yourself and groundedness in yourself and intentionality. That anger can really be channeled into intentional action and impactful conversations.
So instead of letting the fear override her and going into that same pattern and loop that she had been experiencing as a child with her father, instead, she redirected her thoughts to I, want to be heard. And the emotion of anger was showing up for her because of that intentionality. Like she wasn't angry at her boss per se, because we're not really in the business of blaming other people for how we feel. It's more that she wanted to show up and use anger intentionally to be heard.
So she showed up more with anger and also some fear, but more regulated because she knew she was safe. And what actually ended up happening was her tone of voice changed. She was much more firm and authoritative in her voice. She was much more clear in her thinking, so she answered questions better. And the way that her boss reacted to this was actually he became calmer, right? He actually felt more calm with her because she was more calm with herself. Oftentimes, we don't realize that emotions and moods are contagious, right? When we have an emotion, when we show up a certain way, somebody is going to have a reaction to that.
And what I was explaining to her through my years of experience of working with so many different male leaders is that oftentimes, men and women leaders may show up with anger, but what's actually underneath it is fear or hurt, right?
So if she could put herself into her boss's shoes and understand that, wow, he's under a lot of pressure himself and he's relying on me to manage these financials and to be clear and confident in what I'm doing because I'm part of his team, Versus feeling like he's angry with me and I'm really scared of him. Those are two really different thought patterns that can create two very different reactions in the moment. If you can connect with your own emotions and notice right what you're your thinking and how you feel in your body, you can actually change the way that you show up, which can actually change the whole dynamic of situations.
So I want you to get from this is that the more you connect with your emotions, the more you can track yourself, the better able you are to actually interrupt the pattern. Interrupting the pattern is really where you gain emotional intelligence and leadership success, because you can navigate these difficult situations in a much more impactful, purposeful way.
So number one, slow down, notice your emotions. And the emotions I always start my clients on are the five primary emotions. Oftentimes we get bogged down in definitions. So I like to start with something really simple. And the five emotions start with fear. The purpose of fear is to get us into safety, out of danger's way, but we need to know what's an imagined fear versus what's a real fear, right? A car coming our way versus somebody yelling at us.
There's also sadness, and sadness is an important emotion because it helps us to get comfort and to validate how we're feeling. The next one is hurt. We feel hurt by something that's happened, and that could feel potentially in your body. You need to track what sensations you have. There's also anger, which I was sharing that typically underneath anger is fear and hurt.
Anger is an important emotion because it can help us shift ourselves from feeling unsafe to feeling safe, right? We get angry at somebody and we remove ourselves from the situation potentially, or we speak up or we do some sort of action, right? So anger is really an intentional emotion. And then of course there's joy, just pure joy, being able to express and embrace joy. This also, oddly enough, is one that's hard for a lot of women to truly feel joyful.
So these are the emotions. Learning how to track your emotions and how they show up, especially in these tense meetings where you're like, ooh, I don't know what happened there, right? By being able to go back and track, because likely you're going to have a similar scenario happen again. And you may have a similar person that represents something from your past that maybe is bringing up an emotional trigger.
Most of the time, the women that I meet know what it looks like or feels like to be with somebody that they start feeling not super confident in themselves. There's going to be attributes, there's going to be qualities. It might be an authority figure, it might be a big power dynamic. So we want to be onto ourselves about when this happens because we can connect with ourselves more deeply, get more clear on how we want to show up and interrupt that pattern that sometimes happens when we're not super conscious and we're overwhelmed with emotion.
So that is the first strategy, showing up for yourself by connecting with your emotions. These emotions are giving you important data and will help you to try out new ways of being, try out new emotions when you're in these situations and help you understand yourself more. It helps us to take more responsibility and accountability for our own satisfaction.
So we're not saying I need to work with somebody else. It's like, I can work with whoever I need to work with to get the job done because I am in control of my emotions and I can support myself and navigate myself through whatever leadership challenge comes my way. This is really the purpose of connecting and understanding your emotions.
All right, let's go on to the second strategy, which is showing up for others by actively listening. And like I said, these are foundational to each other. When we show up for ourselves and connect with our own emotions, we are better able to show up for other people and actively listen. It sounds simple to be actively listening, but it isn't, especially in our world where things are moving super-fast.
You're super busy. You have a long to-do list. You might not have time to have conversations, even if you want to, right? In our world and in our minds, we're jumping from one meeting to the next. And oftentimes, we are multitasking. This is one of the biggest things that get in the way of actually actively listening. We're multitasking, we're not super present, we're just trying. to get things done, and it can become a very transactional world.
This is actually more and more the case with some of the hybrid working because there's not as many water cooler conversations and connections and rapport isn't being made through just interacting with each other on the way to the bathroom, going to grab coffee, having lunch together, right?
I do want you to think about this skill of active listening as a way to build more trust and rapport with other people, but it starts with you showing up for yourself, understanding how you feel, and creating space for other people to share and to talk about what it is that's on their mind.
Active listening is really about understanding. It's not about managing the other person's position. It's not about trying to just get your way or get the job done. It's literally listening to understand and respond in a way that is showing that you're actually listening.
So I actually wanted to share an example in my own career of how I used active listening to actually create more trust and rapport with a sales leader that I was working with. I want to demonstrate how and why this is a simple skill, but it's not easy. And like I said, we're a fast-paced world. We always want to get things done.
So what was happening with me as a finance leader is I had to create quick budget cuts in our budget because we needed to load our budget. My CEO and I actually had agreed this is the process we're going to do. It's really transactional. It was very short term in nature, but that was just what we had agreed. So I sent an e-mail out to everybody and said, listen, this is what we're doing. I immediately got a call from the sales leader and part of my brain went to, I don't have time for this. I have other things to do. This person just needs to fall in line and get it done.
But luckily I took a pause, right? I connected with my own emotions and I realized I was feeling some fear. And I, instead of avoiding the fear and just allowing it to dissipate by avoiding the conversation and moving on to the next task. And this is why oftentimes we are not connected with our emotions is because we allow tasks to get in the way of our connection with ourselves. Which in turn, right, keep us from connecting with other people. Instead of using that fear and running away, I use that fear to give me courage. So I picked up the phone and actually listened to him, right, my brain kind of went to, I know what he's going to say already, but I kept bringing myself back to, let's actually listen to him, let's be curious.
And so with that curiosity, I said, what's going on? And he said, hey, I saw your e-mail and I'm finding it really difficult to not have these extra head counts that I need for the second-half of next year. And he explained the situation and it made sense. I could relate, I could connect with my own fears, and I could also feel sad that we couldn't move ahead with it.
And I also was able to ask him a question that I wouldn't have asked him if I didn't pick up the phone, which was oftentimes you have things in your budget that are unexpected and you need things, right? And typically me and the CEO figure out how to make it work for you because we also need you to make your targets, right?
So I know even if this is the budget, you also know that we are willing to make changes and reiterate as we go through. And he took a pause and he really thought about it. And he said, yeah, you're right. Every time I need something, even if it's in budget or not, you guys seem to make it happen. And it just seemed like everything was diffused. He understood. I got the sense that he felt more trust and connection. And he said, okay, let's move ahead. I understand now. Thanks for the conversation.
So it seems like pretty simple, right? To call and have that interaction. But oftentimes in our busy world and not wanting to feel our feelings or fear or get messy, we don't want to have that conversation, so we avoid it. We don't actively listen or understand. It creates more distance in our relationships with our peers or other senior leaders.
I just want to take a moment for you to inventory, is this something that happens to you? Do you avoid having phone conversations with people? Do you avoid conflict because you don't want to feel emotions? And how is this impacting your leadership? And I don't want you to beat yourself up. That's not the point of this. This is really an opportunity to connect with others in a deeper way and use your emotional intelligence to create more trust and rapport with others. So that is the second.
Let's move on to the third strategy, which is, again, bringing all of these steps together. Once you've shown up for yourself and others, you can lead with more empathy.
So leading with empathy and emotional intelligence requires you to create a safe space that's a supportive space for you and your team. So let's talk about how we can use empathy to resolve conflict and strengthen your relationships while staying grounded in your own emotions. So I wanted to share actually a coaching client that I have who was noticing her anger and upset every time her older male boss would refer to her as his daughter.
Like she would say things like, you know, Sarah is such a hard worker, she reminds me of my daughter. And she would get so irritated by this, and rightly so, right? When we really worked on her connecting with herself, she felt anger, she felt fear. The anger was feeling like her leadership and authority was undermined by what he was saying.
She also felt a lot of fear that other people would start looking at her as his daughter, and she is the CFO, right? So she doesn't want to be seen as some older guy's daughter. She's working on her leadership brand and presence and authority.
So she would be angry and she would try to correct him. She's done this a few times. She tried to correct him and said, hey, please don't say that. Please don't talk about me and your daughter. And that just never really landed with him because he kept doing it. It really took for her to get grounded in her emotions of that and to understand where he was coming from.
So I would ask her, do you think he was saying this in a way to dismiss you or to diminish you? Or do you think it's just something that he says because he actually feels that he cares about you and that he's endearing towards you? And it took her a bit because she had to get with her own emotions, but this helped her shift. And she said, I don't think he's doing it on purpose to undermine me. I think he does it because that's how it relates to him in his mind, and he cares about his daughter, and he cares about me.
And so that helped her connect with how he's looking at things. And having that data, how she feels, how he feels, she was able to have a conversation with him to resolve the conflict in an empathetic way using emotional intelligence.
And really how this conversation landed was not just her telling him what she didn't like, but first her validating where he was coming from. She said, listen, I know you mean well when you call me your daughter. I know it's an endearing term, but for me, I feel like I am trying to show up as a female leader in this very male-dominated space.
They're in construction. So she was like, I'm the only woman mostly in the room. I don't want to be referred to as your daughter because people will start thinking of me as a daughter and not a CFO. And as the business keeps growing and the intention of her boss is to actually step down from the role as a leader in the company, it would be better for the company if I showed up with our vendors, our customers, our banking relationship people as a CFO and not as somebody's daughter.
And he really got that. So she really slowed down in her communication style to lead with empathy and emotional intelligence and not just go to that gut reaction of, I don't like it when you call me your daughter, right? She really took it to, I understand why you're doing this and I'm sharing with you the impact it has on me and on the company longer term.
And he actually heard her this time. She's had this conversation with him multiple times, but because she was able to empathize with him, step into her own emotions and speak authentically from her emotional experience, he heard her. And now he doesn't do it anymore, right? He actually can understand that and she didn't make him wrong or bad for it, which oftentimes we do not on purpose, but because we haven't recognized our own emotions and we are an autopilot reacting to things, right?
It's sort of like in your teenage years when you just reactively yell at your parents because that's what you're doing and your brain is still being formed and you're figuring things out.
This emotional intelligence part in the working place is really about slowing down and noticing yourself and noticing other people. And I think sometimes people are scared that it's going to take them away from their technical expertise.
But the reality is learning and knowing these skills are just going to amplify your technical expertise even more because now you'll have relationships and rapport with other people that see you not just for your brain but for your emotions and trust you in a way that is going to open up more leadership opportunities for you.
All right, so those were the three skills. Number one, showing up for yourself by connecting with your emotions, show up for others by actively listening, and lastly, leading with empathy and emotional intelligence. I did want to give you a real-time example to use these three skills because I'm sure this circumstance or this scenario might have come up for you.
I was just talking to one of my clients last week and she was sharing about this. And we're in a time where a lot of our staff and people we are working with are experiencing a lot of difficult things in their personal life, right? There is a lot of unrest around the economy. There are hurricanes happening. I live in Florida, so it's scary. People a lot of times are dealing with medical issues, whether they're their own, their children, or their parents. So there's a lot going on. And there is space in our world, if your culture allows for it, for more people to be bringing their emotions to work.
In this scenario, it's your direct report comes to team meeting, and she shares that her mental health is not great, given many circumstances in her personal life. So you want to notice you as the leader, like, how do you react to this? Are you the type of person to jump in and rescue and solve the problem? Are you the type of leader to sit with it, connect with your own emotions? Are you the type of leader that wants to avoid this conversation at all costs because it feels heavy? So you might have a variation of that, but in this particular case try noticing your own emotions, right? How are you feeling in your body hearing this message, actively listening to the other person's concern, and choosing how to move forward in a way that fosters collaboration and resiliency.
I know sometimes we want to go to fixing the problem, especially if we're the manager, but many times there's not things that need fixing when we're working with other people who are still working through their own emotional world and want to just be able to express. So this is an opportunity to try this on.
It could look like you noticing yourself connecting with your own emotions of fear and sadness, actively listening to her and what her concerns are and what her circumstances are. And you saying to her, first of all, thank you for sharing about how you're feeling. It's important to me to understand that. Please let me and the team know if there's anything we can do. And that's it, right? It's not fixing things. It's not going into her head trying to be responsible for everything. It's letting her know that her emotions are okay. You're validating her experience that you hear her and care about her. And it's also giving her an option to take action and to get help if she needs that.
Oftentimes, if you're somebody who is overwhelmed by those emotions, you might feel annoyed that she's bringing so much emotion and you might feel that you're responsible for fixing it all or you might feel that, you know, this is too much, right? This whole situation is too much. You don't want to deal with it, right? So you might awkwardly move on. So you want to notice these situations because this is a chance for you to connect with yourself, connect with people around you, and lead with empathy.
So to summarize the key takeaways of this episode, number one, show up for yourself by recognizing your emotions. And again, the five primary emotions are fear, hurt, sadness, anger, and joy. And notice what those emotions are saying to you. What's the data in those emotions? Second, connect with other people through active listening. I know this one feels hard because we want to be multitasking when we join meetings and getting lots of things done, but I want you to try to take on not multitasking and actually listening to people.
If somebody asks you how you're doing, really take the time to share. And if you ask somebody how they're doing, really take the time to hear what they have to say. Transactional communication doesn't create trust and rapport. But if we actively listen to each other, this is really where connection and trust gets built.
And then lastly, lead with empathy and emotional intelligence, grounded in the knowledge that you're fully present to yourself and other people. This is a practice. And what I want to challenge you to do is pick one of these strategies, whether it's recognizing your emotions or listening more actively.
And then I want to hear your results. What is changing for you? What are you noticing about yourself? What are you noticing about your relationships? So I'd love to hear what you have come up with and how it's shifting you and how you feel about being connected with your emotions and the confidence that you feel in yourself.
All right. Well, that’s our podcast for today, but I am excited to teach you more skills, techniques, and strategies to help you to show up with more authority, presence, confidence, and of course to be more satisfied in your personal and professional life. Take care until next time.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
We'll break down simple-yet-powerful strategies to strengthen your emotional intelligence, helping you make smarter decisions, build stronger teams, lead with more empathy, and step into your leadership with more ease and impact. Let's dive in.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hi everyone, welcome to my podcast. I am Yann Dang. I am a leadership and life coach. I'm also a second-generation immigrant and a former corporate executive. I spent over 20 years in the corporate world as a global finance leader and I use the skills that I learned in that corporate world to support women today to build lasting confidence and emotional wealth. And I'm excited to be here to share this podcast with you because I want to share the skills that I am teaching and what I've learned over my many years in the corporate world.
This podcast's mission is to support women leaders to bridge the gap between technical expertise and emotional intelligence. And today's episode is on three practical strategies to boost your emotional intelligence at work.
I'm going to kick off with the very first one, which is really about showing up for yourself. And what does it really mean to show up for yourself? In this strategy, we are really focusing on showing up for yourself as the foundation for emotional intelligence and leadership success.
So let's start talking about emotions. I want you to ask yourself, how do you show up with your emotions? How are you with your emotions? Are you the type of person who is really connected to how they feel? Are you the type of person who oftentimes shuts their feelings down to get things done? Are you the type of person who is scared of their emotions because you feel overwhelmed by them.
I coach clients that have all three of these factors, right? They're either not that in touch with them, they are somewhat in touch with them, but feel like they could use them more purposefully, or they feel overwhelmed by them. And so this is where I start with all of my clients, because emotions are how we learn to connect with ourselves, which in turn help us to connect with other people and lead other people.
And I often stress that, typically in our careers, when we're very young and junior, the focus is getting the job done. And so there's less need for emotional awareness at that point, because as long as you can get the job done, obviously it's important to show up well with your boss and your peers and to get along, but the emotional awareness piece is not as important until you start managing people, until you start managing managers, or until you start having much more difficult conversations that are more in the gray area with your peers or your leaders, which typically happen when you become more strategic and there's not as much transactional work that just needs to get done, right?
Transactional work that just needs to get done doesn't really require much emotional intelligence, but strategic decision-making requires a lot of emotional intelligence because you are connecting with other people, you are presenting a lot of nonverbal cues. And if you are not aware of how you are showing up emotionally and what those nonverbal cues are impacting in the way you communicate, then this could be a really big blind spot for you. And this is what I typically focus with my clients on.
A lot of my clients come to me and say, wow, I feel super angry after work. And I don't know why. And I drink and I am upset with myself. I beat myself up, I keep replaying what happened over and over. So typically what happens in this scenario is that you could be experiencing lots of different emotions and not knowing how to untangle yourself from it.
So oftentimes you might blame the other person and say this person has such an abrasive personality that I can't work with them, or this person makes me feel intimidated, or this person, I feel really scared when I'm with this person. That is actually that start of being emotionally aware of how you are showing up with your emotions in a particular situation.
And typically it's easier or feels easier to blame another person than to actually deal with your emotions and dig in to see what's actually happening inside. But I will tell you that there's a lot of growth and leadership if you are willing to connect with your own emotions and understand how those emotions are impacting how you show up with other people. So it really starts with you.
I want to give you a scenario to think through that might be happening to you right now or happened to you in the past. I have a client who talks about every time she has to present the financial information to her boss, she feels super scared. And what ends up happening is when she feels super scared, she talks super-fast. She is also much more shaky in her tone of voice, and she's not very clear when she answers questions.
And so what happens is she comes into the meeting prepared with her things, but she's so emotionally overwhelmed that she shows up with these different emotions. And she doesn't understand how to help herself because what happens is her boss actually gets upset, asks even more questions, she feels even more stirred up, and she usually just leaves the meeting feeling defeated.
If this feels familiar to you, then you're not alone. This has happened to me as well. This is actually part of why I became a coach because I was faced with this particular challenge myself. And what I can tell you is that by showing up and understanding your emotions, you can actually change the situation for yourself.
So let me just tell you what happens from a neuroscience standpoint. When we are feeling like we're really scared and under attack, we start using our survival brain. And our survival brain is really focused on getting out of whatever situation in the safest way possible, right? And so there's a lot of automatic reactions that we have. So it's important to notice for yourself, what are those automatic reactions that sometimes happen to you that don't feel intentional or purposeful?
So in this situation with my client, she noticed I talk really fast, I'm really fidgety, and I'm not clear when I answer their question. And overall, I don't feel confident, right? So she knew this is what typically happens. And so really what we worked on is understanding her emotions. First of all, naming that this makes sense, right? You feel scared. And she had also shared that this happened a lot in her family system where her dad would question her and she would start getting really shaky and sometimes even start crying, right, to get out of the situation. Obviously that's not a great strategy for work, right? Nobody wants to have the strategy of I'm so upset that I have to cry and leave the meeting. But we want to recognize that sometimes these emotional triggers happen because it is presenting a situation that feels so familiar to us.
So what we actually focused on was how to help her to have different emotions when she goes into this meeting and to create safety for herself. Number one, to realize that even though it feels really scary and she feels like she is under attack, that she's actually not, that this is just a meeting.
Number two, to remember that her job there, the purpose, was to show up confidently, firmly, and authoritatively as it related to what she was presenting. And so this really allowed her to have a focus. So when she went into the meetings, instead of just going into the autopilot, oh my gosh, person is abrasive and scary and reminds me of my father. That whole pattern wasn't playing out anymore where she felt scared and did all of those things. Instead, she centered herself, reminded herself that she is safe in that moment, that yes, she does feel fear, but she also feels angry because she wants to make sure she's heard.
This emotion of anger is one that I teach a lot of my female clients on because it helps you to create more confidence in yourself and groundedness in yourself and intentionality. That anger can really be channeled into intentional action and impactful conversations.
So instead of letting the fear override her and going into that same pattern and loop that she had been experiencing as a child with her father, instead, she redirected her thoughts to I, want to be heard. And the emotion of anger was showing up for her because of that intentionality. Like she wasn't angry at her boss per se, because we're not really in the business of blaming other people for how we feel. It's more that she wanted to show up and use anger intentionally to be heard.
So she showed up more with anger and also some fear, but more regulated because she knew she was safe. And what actually ended up happening was her tone of voice changed. She was much more firm and authoritative in her voice. She was much more clear in her thinking, so she answered questions better. And the way that her boss reacted to this was actually he became calmer, right? He actually felt more calm with her because she was more calm with herself. Oftentimes, we don't realize that emotions and moods are contagious, right? When we have an emotion, when we show up a certain way, somebody is going to have a reaction to that.
And what I was explaining to her through my years of experience of working with so many different male leaders is that oftentimes, men and women leaders may show up with anger, but what's actually underneath it is fear or hurt, right?
So if she could put herself into her boss's shoes and understand that, wow, he's under a lot of pressure himself and he's relying on me to manage these financials and to be clear and confident in what I'm doing because I'm part of his team, Versus feeling like he's angry with me and I'm really scared of him. Those are two really different thought patterns that can create two very different reactions in the moment. If you can connect with your own emotions and notice right what you're your thinking and how you feel in your body, you can actually change the way that you show up, which can actually change the whole dynamic of situations.
So I want you to get from this is that the more you connect with your emotions, the more you can track yourself, the better able you are to actually interrupt the pattern. Interrupting the pattern is really where you gain emotional intelligence and leadership success, because you can navigate these difficult situations in a much more impactful, purposeful way.
So number one, slow down, notice your emotions. And the emotions I always start my clients on are the five primary emotions. Oftentimes we get bogged down in definitions. So I like to start with something really simple. And the five emotions start with fear. The purpose of fear is to get us into safety, out of danger's way, but we need to know what's an imagined fear versus what's a real fear, right? A car coming our way versus somebody yelling at us.
There's also sadness, and sadness is an important emotion because it helps us to get comfort and to validate how we're feeling. The next one is hurt. We feel hurt by something that's happened, and that could feel potentially in your body. You need to track what sensations you have. There's also anger, which I was sharing that typically underneath anger is fear and hurt.
Anger is an important emotion because it can help us shift ourselves from feeling unsafe to feeling safe, right? We get angry at somebody and we remove ourselves from the situation potentially, or we speak up or we do some sort of action, right? So anger is really an intentional emotion. And then of course there's joy, just pure joy, being able to express and embrace joy. This also, oddly enough, is one that's hard for a lot of women to truly feel joyful.
So these are the emotions. Learning how to track your emotions and how they show up, especially in these tense meetings where you're like, ooh, I don't know what happened there, right? By being able to go back and track, because likely you're going to have a similar scenario happen again. And you may have a similar person that represents something from your past that maybe is bringing up an emotional trigger.
Most of the time, the women that I meet know what it looks like or feels like to be with somebody that they start feeling not super confident in themselves. There's going to be attributes, there's going to be qualities. It might be an authority figure, it might be a big power dynamic. So we want to be onto ourselves about when this happens because we can connect with ourselves more deeply, get more clear on how we want to show up and interrupt that pattern that sometimes happens when we're not super conscious and we're overwhelmed with emotion.
So that is the first strategy, showing up for yourself by connecting with your emotions. These emotions are giving you important data and will help you to try out new ways of being, try out new emotions when you're in these situations and help you understand yourself more. It helps us to take more responsibility and accountability for our own satisfaction.
So we're not saying I need to work with somebody else. It's like, I can work with whoever I need to work with to get the job done because I am in control of my emotions and I can support myself and navigate myself through whatever leadership challenge comes my way. This is really the purpose of connecting and understanding your emotions.
All right, let's go on to the second strategy, which is showing up for others by actively listening. And like I said, these are foundational to each other. When we show up for ourselves and connect with our own emotions, we are better able to show up for other people and actively listen. It sounds simple to be actively listening, but it isn't, especially in our world where things are moving super-fast.
You're super busy. You have a long to-do list. You might not have time to have conversations, even if you want to, right? In our world and in our minds, we're jumping from one meeting to the next. And oftentimes, we are multitasking. This is one of the biggest things that get in the way of actually actively listening. We're multitasking, we're not super present, we're just trying. to get things done, and it can become a very transactional world.
This is actually more and more the case with some of the hybrid working because there's not as many water cooler conversations and connections and rapport isn't being made through just interacting with each other on the way to the bathroom, going to grab coffee, having lunch together, right?
I do want you to think about this skill of active listening as a way to build more trust and rapport with other people, but it starts with you showing up for yourself, understanding how you feel, and creating space for other people to share and to talk about what it is that's on their mind.
Active listening is really about understanding. It's not about managing the other person's position. It's not about trying to just get your way or get the job done. It's literally listening to understand and respond in a way that is showing that you're actually listening.
So I actually wanted to share an example in my own career of how I used active listening to actually create more trust and rapport with a sales leader that I was working with. I want to demonstrate how and why this is a simple skill, but it's not easy. And like I said, we're a fast-paced world. We always want to get things done.
So what was happening with me as a finance leader is I had to create quick budget cuts in our budget because we needed to load our budget. My CEO and I actually had agreed this is the process we're going to do. It's really transactional. It was very short term in nature, but that was just what we had agreed. So I sent an e-mail out to everybody and said, listen, this is what we're doing. I immediately got a call from the sales leader and part of my brain went to, I don't have time for this. I have other things to do. This person just needs to fall in line and get it done.
But luckily I took a pause, right? I connected with my own emotions and I realized I was feeling some fear. And I, instead of avoiding the fear and just allowing it to dissipate by avoiding the conversation and moving on to the next task. And this is why oftentimes we are not connected with our emotions is because we allow tasks to get in the way of our connection with ourselves. Which in turn, right, keep us from connecting with other people. Instead of using that fear and running away, I use that fear to give me courage. So I picked up the phone and actually listened to him, right, my brain kind of went to, I know what he's going to say already, but I kept bringing myself back to, let's actually listen to him, let's be curious.
And so with that curiosity, I said, what's going on? And he said, hey, I saw your e-mail and I'm finding it really difficult to not have these extra head counts that I need for the second-half of next year. And he explained the situation and it made sense. I could relate, I could connect with my own fears, and I could also feel sad that we couldn't move ahead with it.
And I also was able to ask him a question that I wouldn't have asked him if I didn't pick up the phone, which was oftentimes you have things in your budget that are unexpected and you need things, right? And typically me and the CEO figure out how to make it work for you because we also need you to make your targets, right?
So I know even if this is the budget, you also know that we are willing to make changes and reiterate as we go through. And he took a pause and he really thought about it. And he said, yeah, you're right. Every time I need something, even if it's in budget or not, you guys seem to make it happen. And it just seemed like everything was diffused. He understood. I got the sense that he felt more trust and connection. And he said, okay, let's move ahead. I understand now. Thanks for the conversation.
So it seems like pretty simple, right? To call and have that interaction. But oftentimes in our busy world and not wanting to feel our feelings or fear or get messy, we don't want to have that conversation, so we avoid it. We don't actively listen or understand. It creates more distance in our relationships with our peers or other senior leaders.
I just want to take a moment for you to inventory, is this something that happens to you? Do you avoid having phone conversations with people? Do you avoid conflict because you don't want to feel emotions? And how is this impacting your leadership? And I don't want you to beat yourself up. That's not the point of this. This is really an opportunity to connect with others in a deeper way and use your emotional intelligence to create more trust and rapport with others. So that is the second.
Let's move on to the third strategy, which is, again, bringing all of these steps together. Once you've shown up for yourself and others, you can lead with more empathy.
So leading with empathy and emotional intelligence requires you to create a safe space that's a supportive space for you and your team. So let's talk about how we can use empathy to resolve conflict and strengthen your relationships while staying grounded in your own emotions. So I wanted to share actually a coaching client that I have who was noticing her anger and upset every time her older male boss would refer to her as his daughter.
Like she would say things like, you know, Sarah is such a hard worker, she reminds me of my daughter. And she would get so irritated by this, and rightly so, right? When we really worked on her connecting with herself, she felt anger, she felt fear. The anger was feeling like her leadership and authority was undermined by what he was saying.
She also felt a lot of fear that other people would start looking at her as his daughter, and she is the CFO, right? So she doesn't want to be seen as some older guy's daughter. She's working on her leadership brand and presence and authority.
So she would be angry and she would try to correct him. She's done this a few times. She tried to correct him and said, hey, please don't say that. Please don't talk about me and your daughter. And that just never really landed with him because he kept doing it. It really took for her to get grounded in her emotions of that and to understand where he was coming from.
So I would ask her, do you think he was saying this in a way to dismiss you or to diminish you? Or do you think it's just something that he says because he actually feels that he cares about you and that he's endearing towards you? And it took her a bit because she had to get with her own emotions, but this helped her shift. And she said, I don't think he's doing it on purpose to undermine me. I think he does it because that's how it relates to him in his mind, and he cares about his daughter, and he cares about me.
And so that helped her connect with how he's looking at things. And having that data, how she feels, how he feels, she was able to have a conversation with him to resolve the conflict in an empathetic way using emotional intelligence.
And really how this conversation landed was not just her telling him what she didn't like, but first her validating where he was coming from. She said, listen, I know you mean well when you call me your daughter. I know it's an endearing term, but for me, I feel like I am trying to show up as a female leader in this very male-dominated space.
They're in construction. So she was like, I'm the only woman mostly in the room. I don't want to be referred to as your daughter because people will start thinking of me as a daughter and not a CFO. And as the business keeps growing and the intention of her boss is to actually step down from the role as a leader in the company, it would be better for the company if I showed up with our vendors, our customers, our banking relationship people as a CFO and not as somebody's daughter.
And he really got that. So she really slowed down in her communication style to lead with empathy and emotional intelligence and not just go to that gut reaction of, I don't like it when you call me your daughter, right? She really took it to, I understand why you're doing this and I'm sharing with you the impact it has on me and on the company longer term.
And he actually heard her this time. She's had this conversation with him multiple times, but because she was able to empathize with him, step into her own emotions and speak authentically from her emotional experience, he heard her. And now he doesn't do it anymore, right? He actually can understand that and she didn't make him wrong or bad for it, which oftentimes we do not on purpose, but because we haven't recognized our own emotions and we are an autopilot reacting to things, right?
It's sort of like in your teenage years when you just reactively yell at your parents because that's what you're doing and your brain is still being formed and you're figuring things out.
This emotional intelligence part in the working place is really about slowing down and noticing yourself and noticing other people. And I think sometimes people are scared that it's going to take them away from their technical expertise.
But the reality is learning and knowing these skills are just going to amplify your technical expertise even more because now you'll have relationships and rapport with other people that see you not just for your brain but for your emotions and trust you in a way that is going to open up more leadership opportunities for you.
All right, so those were the three skills. Number one, showing up for yourself by connecting with your emotions, show up for others by actively listening, and lastly, leading with empathy and emotional intelligence. I did want to give you a real-time example to use these three skills because I'm sure this circumstance or this scenario might have come up for you.
I was just talking to one of my clients last week and she was sharing about this. And we're in a time where a lot of our staff and people we are working with are experiencing a lot of difficult things in their personal life, right? There is a lot of unrest around the economy. There are hurricanes happening. I live in Florida, so it's scary. People a lot of times are dealing with medical issues, whether they're their own, their children, or their parents. So there's a lot going on. And there is space in our world, if your culture allows for it, for more people to be bringing their emotions to work.
In this scenario, it's your direct report comes to team meeting, and she shares that her mental health is not great, given many circumstances in her personal life. So you want to notice you as the leader, like, how do you react to this? Are you the type of person to jump in and rescue and solve the problem? Are you the type of leader to sit with it, connect with your own emotions? Are you the type of leader that wants to avoid this conversation at all costs because it feels heavy? So you might have a variation of that, but in this particular case try noticing your own emotions, right? How are you feeling in your body hearing this message, actively listening to the other person's concern, and choosing how to move forward in a way that fosters collaboration and resiliency.
I know sometimes we want to go to fixing the problem, especially if we're the manager, but many times there's not things that need fixing when we're working with other people who are still working through their own emotional world and want to just be able to express. So this is an opportunity to try this on.
It could look like you noticing yourself connecting with your own emotions of fear and sadness, actively listening to her and what her concerns are and what her circumstances are. And you saying to her, first of all, thank you for sharing about how you're feeling. It's important to me to understand that. Please let me and the team know if there's anything we can do. And that's it, right? It's not fixing things. It's not going into her head trying to be responsible for everything. It's letting her know that her emotions are okay. You're validating her experience that you hear her and care about her. And it's also giving her an option to take action and to get help if she needs that.
Oftentimes, if you're somebody who is overwhelmed by those emotions, you might feel annoyed that she's bringing so much emotion and you might feel that you're responsible for fixing it all or you might feel that, you know, this is too much, right? This whole situation is too much. You don't want to deal with it, right? So you might awkwardly move on. So you want to notice these situations because this is a chance for you to connect with yourself, connect with people around you, and lead with empathy.
So to summarize the key takeaways of this episode, number one, show up for yourself by recognizing your emotions. And again, the five primary emotions are fear, hurt, sadness, anger, and joy. And notice what those emotions are saying to you. What's the data in those emotions? Second, connect with other people through active listening. I know this one feels hard because we want to be multitasking when we join meetings and getting lots of things done, but I want you to try to take on not multitasking and actually listening to people.
If somebody asks you how you're doing, really take the time to share. And if you ask somebody how they're doing, really take the time to hear what they have to say. Transactional communication doesn't create trust and rapport. But if we actively listen to each other, this is really where connection and trust gets built.
And then lastly, lead with empathy and emotional intelligence, grounded in the knowledge that you're fully present to yourself and other people. This is a practice. And what I want to challenge you to do is pick one of these strategies, whether it's recognizing your emotions or listening more actively.
And then I want to hear your results. What is changing for you? What are you noticing about yourself? What are you noticing about your relationships? So I'd love to hear what you have come up with and how it's shifting you and how you feel about being connected with your emotions and the confidence that you feel in yourself.
All right. Well, that’s our podcast for today, but I am excited to teach you more skills, techniques, and strategies to help you to show up with more authority, presence, confidence, and of course to be more satisfied in your personal and professional life. Take care until next time.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, RSS, or wherever you listen to podcasts!
