Liz Fosslien wants to give you permission to start feeling your feelings at work to improve your professional relationships. She also shares how to talk about your feelings at work without using the word “feelings”.
To be successful, she once felt like she could never share her emotions at work.
She recently co-wrote a book, No Hard Feelings with Mollie West Duffy, to explore the various ways we can express our emotions and feelings in the workplace, so we feel more understood.
Lot of great lessons in our conversation including:
- When you don’t feel your emotions, you don’t get to be your true self.
- What you can learn from studying your emotions like envy.
- To encourage a safe environment for sharing emotions at work, start projects by sharing potential concerns and communication preferences.
- How to enable introverts to feel more comfortable to contribute during meetings.
- How the role of emotions change when you work remotely versus working in an office.
Life Skills That Matter In This Episode
- Practice self-awareness
- Reframe your mindset
- Manage your energy
- Start feeling your feelings
How Liz Works and Thinks
- Wake up time: Around 8:00 am
- Ideal emotional work environment: In a quieter space with natural lighting and pleasant art or photos on the walls, as well as having user manuals on each person to communicate the best ways to work with them;)
- Regains focus by: Exercising or just putting something down on paper to get started.
Inspirational Quotes
“Any good decision maker doesn’t completely shut emotion out of the equation.”
“It just smooths your relationships, both professional and personal, so much if you have that self-awareness and can just communicate what you need and what you’re feeling in that moment.”
Coaching Advice
To manage your fears more effectively, Liz offers these suggestions:
1) Use fear to prioritize your to-do list by examining the fear of not getting what you really want.
2) Understand that if something evokes a lot of fear, it’s often because it’s something you really want.
3) Ask yourself what you’re afraid of and what you would regret.
To start better managing your feelings at work, Liz shared these suggestions:
1) Begin observing what’s going on when you have a strong, emotional reaction and try to pinpoint what you’re feeling. For example, are you frustrated or irritable?
2) Trace the timeline of when and why you started feeling that way.
3) Realize that emotional reactions are based on assumptions that aren’t always correct, so take time to explore both your emotions and your assumptions.
Resources + Bonus Materials
No Hard Feelings by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy
The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin
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