Managing Emotional Health:
One of the essential parameters for team performance is ability to deal with emotional balance in the office environment.
What is emotion?
An emotion is a brief conscious experience that is identified by profound mental activity.
Emotions can generate thoughts that can make you physically feel something in your body, and emotions can make your body make you feel something in your mind by influencing the thoughts that you could have.
A feeling that results in physical and psychological changes that influence our behavior.
Feeling bad does not mean that things are bad, and feeling good does not mean that everything is wonderful. It is a translation of a feeling.
Negative emotions in the workplace can emerge because employees perceive that their opinions and ideas are not being picked up and acknowledged.
Emotions should not control your thinking, your thinking should control your emotions. Emotions are feelings, and feelings are not a definitive measurement of what is good, bad, right or wrong, because feelings are emotions, and emotions are not one of the individual senses, so they are not a mechanism that can be used to determine reality.
Emotions can motivate us to respond to situations. Our emotions may instruct us about our circumstances and the environment we are in, which supports us respond accordingly.
Emotions can convey significant messages to those around us. They may explain to others how we are feeling and what we require in a given situation.
If we look sad, for example, we are telling others that we require assistance.
If we are angry, we are signaling to others that they have crossed our boundaries.
Understanding another individual’s emotions involves much more than just listening to their uttered messages.
It involves being attentive to the non-verbal emotional messages being conveyed.
Think of a situation where you had to speak to someone who was distressed. Describe the situation.
What verbal messages (words) did the person convey?
Empathizing with employees – being able to establish yourself in their emotional ‘shoes’ – can be a significant step toward finding out.
A fundamental component of empathy is the ability to mirror others nonverbally. We can teach ourselves to become more empathetic by mirroring the body positions, posture, tone, volume, gestures, and facial expressions of others.
Because every individual has distinct needs and views, negative emotions in the workplace can never be averted totally.
Effective listening can aid managers in better problem-solve and generate solutions that come closer to meeting everyone’s needs.
When you acknowledge a worker’s perspective, it can deliver an effective signal that although you may or may not agree, and may or may not take action subsequently, you have heard the viewpoint and are taking it into consideration.
Practice acknowledging workers’ ideas and requests.
Workers may not be comfortable providing feedback unless called for it.
Even then, many may hesitate, suspecting that the call for feedback may not be fully genuine and that they may anger managers by speaking out. One approach to avoiding negative emotions in the workplace is to safeguard that workers feel that their feedback is valued and respected. Offering and accepting feedback can help establish effective relationships between managers and workers. This makes it effective for managers to actively elicit feedback whenever opportunities present themselves.
Make a point of touching base with each individual who works under your supervision. Ask them if there is anything you could do that could be helpful to them or improve the way they are able to do their job.
The way we feel about or react to individuals in the workplace is impacted by our explanations of their behavior.
When it comes to ourselves, we are much more likely to find external explanations for negative behavior and internal explanations for positive behavior.
We engage in listening to understand when we genuinely seek to figure out not just what individuals say, but also what they actually mean. When workers are distressed or dealing with mental health issues, it is not unusual for them to say things that do not really reflect what they truly mean.
Giving someone the safety and the space to express and then clarify or amend what they express can give you a much better chance of understanding their perspective.
Asking open-ended questions to solicit additional information and refraining from interrupting can promote communication better.
Communication and interaction in the workplace are complex and demanding, and it requires substantial energy to maintain a standard that reflects our goals. It can take place that in our minds we have the best intentions, but our behavior is not quite able to keep up.
When we interact with a distressed employee, it is natural to try to understand what is motivating their negative emotions and reactions. We can often be quite accurate when ascertaining the causes of and contributors to other people’s positive emotional states. One of the traps we may fall into, however, when dealing with negative emotions in the workplace, is making simplistic and judgmental interpretations.
Judgmental interpretations are generally inaccurate, and practically always completely useless. Taking the time to develop a non-judgmental understanding of workers, their behaviors, and their reactions to situations are pivotal to dealing with them adequately.
Reflective (or active) listening can be an effective communication method that involves the following two elements:
1. Listening to and understanding what workers are saying, thinking, and feeling.
2. Reflecting and paraphrasing the feelings, thoughts, and opinions we hear back to the other person in our own words, to make sure we have understood their message correctly.
In order to more precisely understand employees’ messages, it helps managers to not only pay attention to what a worker is expressing but also to read non-verbal signals.
Reflective listening can be fundamental for effective communication and effective workplace relationships:
- It can help establish rapport and respect.
- It can encourage understanding between individuals.
- It can demonstrate recognition and acknowledgment, which may prompt others to continue communicating and share their experiences, problems, and feelings more candidly.
- It can provide reassurance that someone is willing to support and to view things from another perspective.
- It can help avoid conflicts and misunderstandings.
- It can help reduce defensiveness, resentments, and false assumptions that occur through misunderstanding.
When we observe a worker who is distressed (e.g., owing to personal problems, mental health difficulties, coworker conflicts, performance issues), we may encounter a diversity of emotions ourselves: fear, anger, frustration, guilt, pity, or helplessness.
It is absolutely reasonable to have these emotional reactions, but they can interfere with our ability to effectively respond to a distressed worker.
Our own emotions can have an influential impact on our attention, perception, thoughts, and behavior. Emotions can be the motivating force behind our actions and can determine whether we respond effectively (by providing assistance or support) or less effectively (by avoiding a situation).
All these whatever describe above we can try and mature ourselves as a team member to deal with an emotional state as a manager or as an employee at a workplace. It takes a lot of practice over a period of time to strengthen emotional dealing.
