Ep #12: Anger + Allowing Strong Emotions with Vivien Yang

Emily
Welcome to Emotional Leadership, the podcast for high achieving leaders. Because healthier emotional lives means stronger leadership, thriving teams and much bigger results.

Welcome leaders! Today we are going to talk about allowing strong emotions and we’re going to do it while talking about the emotion of anger.

So, I know we’ve spent an episode earlier talking about the idea of allowing emotions in general, and then we spent another talking about choosing our response and choosing to allow emotion. But I think it’s important for you to also spend some time paying attention to the emotions that stretch the edge of your comfort zone when it comes to dealing with big emotions. So, what are a few of the ones for you where it just feels like it’s too strong?

For me, one of those has been anger for a long time. Anger is not an emotion I am super comfortable feeling. I’ve become much more comfortable in the last few years, but it’s meant overriding my limbic system programming that it’s unsafe. One of my parents does not like the feeling of anger and especially doesn’t like seeing it in other people around them. I remember growing up hearing about the number of folks that I thought they were pretty good friends with, until at some point it was, “they have anger issues” or “she just got so angry”.

And of course, I didn’t really start recognizing that until I was in my early twenties. I remember really vividly being out on a date with someone. I’m pretty sure it was a third date. And we’d gone out to dinner, we’d had a lovely time and we got back to his car and there was a parking ticket on it and he displayed some anger over it.

I think that was my first real wake up call that I was so much less tolerant of anger in myself or other people around me than most folks were. And in fact I’m really tolerant of strong emotions like sadness or grief in the people around me and I display a lot bigger joy and excitement and enthusiasm than a lot of people that I know and I love people who do the same. But anger, just the tiniest bit of anger in me or somebody else, was not something I was even vaguely comfortable with.

I like the analogy that Gaye Hendricks uses in his book, The Big Leap. He talks about it as a thermostat and basically that there is a setting on it and that we have trouble feeling certain emotions beyond that setting. You can also just think of it as a comfort zone. We can feel certain emotions really big, and there’s other emotions that we have trouble feeling more than just the little glimmering of them deep inside somewhere and we get very uncomfortable and we try to run right away.

So what I want to walk with you through today is identifying like you did a minute ago, what some of those emotions are for you. And then learning to increase that tolerance for them. And increasing this tolerance is really important because I think our lives are only as big and as broad as the emotion we’re least willing to feel. So let’s take some of those emotions that you’re least willing to feel and make them a lot more comfortable for you.

So I want you to start by picking one of the emotions that you named for yourself at the beginning of the episode. What emotion do you have a lot of trouble tolerating in yourself, right now, that shows up for you a lot at work? Or that you think might show up for you a lot at work? Or might amazingly show up for you a lot more at work, right? Maybe this is confidence. It doesn’t have to be a negative emotion, even though my particular example right now is. So what’s that emotion that you have trouble being willing to allow, that you have trouble tolerating at all, that would make a huge difference for you at work?

And now, why do you tell yourself that feeling this emotion is a problem? For me, I noticed that I have to feel justified in my anger towards someone else. I don’t just get to feel it because sometimes you feel anger and that’s okay. For me, I have to have a reason. That could be a great way to notice an emotion that you have trouble allowing, which is, when you feel like you’ve got to have a really good reason for it to be okay to feel that emotion.

That’s especially a good way to notice positive emotions that you have trouble feeling too, right? Do you hold off on pride? Do you hold off on accomplishment? Because “I still haven’t completed the full project and it’s really not worth it yet.” Right? So for the emotion you chose, why do you tell yourself that it’s not really that okay to feel it?

Alright. Now I’m so excited to share with you my conversation on anger with my guest, Vivien Yang from Eventbrite.

Begin Guest Segment

Emily
Welcome. It’s so awesome to have you here this afternoon. I’m really excited.

Vivien
It’s great to be here.

Emily
So I was hoping you could start off just by telling our audience a little bit about you and who you are.

Vivien
So I’m Vivien Yang. I work over at Eventbrite, I’m an engineering manager there. I’ve been there for a bit over five years now, and before I had started as an IC, so I’ve been with this company for a while.

I usually really enjoy things like art outside of work. It’s really refreshing to hear a totally different perspective on life, especially since we live in, you know, Silicon Valley and so forth. And so listening to, say, the director of SF MoMA, talk about the challenges she goes through, it’s super interesting and it’s a different perspective and not only that…you kind of practice meditating and thinking about things in a different sort of metaphorical way when you’re painting. So, yeah.

Emily
That’s awesome. The other intro question I love to ask folks is, what do you love about management and leadership?

Vivien
Ooh. So I really love that with management and leadership, it’s kind of like creative problem-solving with people. Before within the code, its very technical solving. So I sometimes like to parallel it to carpentry, you know, you have these techniques, you know how to build the table and so forth. With management, it’s like you get some insight into the way people are thinking about things and you help them grow as people or you help them solve their problems. So it’s almost like you’re coaching someone on how to build the table and how to think of better ways to build a table more efficiently or to make a more beautiful decorative table.

Emily
That’s awesome. Alright, so today the emotion we’re talking about is Anger. This one’s really fun and one of the reasons I say it’s really fun is I think it’s one that so many people can resonate with running away from.

Vivien
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I feel as if the reason why a lot of people run away from is that it’s very taboo in the workplace. And so you kind of shut yourself down because you compartmentalize and you think, Oh, I can’t feel this at work. It’ll get me in trouble. The things that I might want to do when I feel this way are not okay. So, we run away and sometimes when we run away, we also check out at work. So you’ll start seeing people being less and less engaged and eventually, you know, they’ll start looking for another job. They’ll start talking to other people and whatever else is more wonderful and shiny outside, they’ll just go for that. So in some ways anger, or at least like not exploring the anger, can really hurt management.

Emily
Yeah. And one of the pieces that I love that you alluded to there is that when we try to shut off the emotions that we don’t want to feel, we shut off a lot of the emotions that maybe we would want to feel. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years really thinking about emotion and how it affects my life and how it affects my leadership and noticing for me, it’s exactly like what you described. When there is something that I’m feeling that I don’t want to feel, I check out from all of it. And for me that means I’m not a great leader either. For me, a lot of that comes through in the emotions of frustration or disappointment. If I feel it and I want to make it go away and I feel like I can’t, I pay more attention to the portions of my life that feel like they’re more in my control. And it means I engage less for sure. So I’m super curious, what are some moments where you’ve noticed yourself experience anger at work?

Vivien
Usually it starts with frustration and I feel as if anger is the end point of frustration, where you felt it for so long that you’ve kind of reached a breaking point. There’s also often anger that comes out of changes within a company and they’re often changes that are unexplained or changes that look like they’re directionless or often a things that don’t feel like they’re well strategized, that the company has done impulsively or perhaps even cruelly. And sometimes I do feel as if there is mixed messaging that is happening, which will make people feel this way. Or in the very worst case wherein I myself have felt quite a bit of frustration and anger, is when you actually question people at the top and you realize, Oh, there, there wasn’t a plan at all and they didn’t expect all these terrible things to happen and you’re just really blows your mind and you’re like, why didn’t you think of these things? Like, if you understood the people who are working for you or the situation, if you thought it through, like you would’ve thought, surely, we know this will happen. So those are areas when I often feeling anger.

Emily
Nice. So I’m super curious. Why maybe would folks feel anger is taboo?

Vivien
I feel as if often the taboo feeling comes with the hostility behind anger. Like you sometimes want to yell, there’s an edge in your voice. In meetings, I know, I’ve certainly heard it in some meetings wherein an engineer had gotten so mad about a situation and it was a situation they had seen happen over and over at the company maybe for like the last seven years or something. And just getting so angry about it in a very public forum and you know, you can tell that it was taboo because quite a number of managers and ICs reached out later and some of them were like, Hey, why did you have to do that so publicly? Or like, can’t we just talk this out beforehand or after this?

Emily
I think that’s a fun distinction. I think for so many folks, it’s that it’s inappropriate or unacceptable to feel anger. Like the group says it’s not okay for me to feel this. Like I understand why I do and I feel justified, but I also know it’s not okay. And you were kind of talking about that some of that sense of, well, this isn’t appropriate coming from because of how people think they’ll act when they’re acting from a place of anger. One of the things that I base my coaching and my life around is this idea of the Self Coaching Model, where we talk about emotions coming from our thoughts and emotions being vibrations that happen in our body. I like to talk about it as an arrangement of chemicals or an arrangement of muscles, right? Cause I think lots of people here are like “vibration in my body” and it feels very woo to them but when I’m like, it’s literally how your chemicals and your muscles are moving right now, they’re like, Oh, that stuff happens all day, that’s normal. It’s like, yes, exactly right. You’re also always feeling some kind of emotion or feeling, that’s just how our bodies are. They’re just always arranged in some state. There’s nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing better or worse about certain ones. But there is this idea that like our brain notices what we’re feeling and then it does one of four things, right? It reacts to it, which is kind of what you’re talking about with anger. It’s where we acted out. Like toddlers act out every emotion all the time. Adults act out very few of them. But when we throw a plate at the wall, we’re acting out anger. And when we scream in someone’s face, we’re acting out anger and there are kind of these three other ways that we can respond to emotions that we’re feeling. But often with something like this one, the reason we think it’s not okay is because we think if we feel it, that we have to react to it.

Vivien
Absolutely. And I think perhaps part of why it also feels taboo is we suddenly realize, Oh, if I express my anger either physically or through my tone of voice, you see fear on the other side and then you think yourself, Oh, I didn’t want to cause that. I just wanted to be effective. And then you realize that the way most people express anger isn’t effective in getting what they want.

Emily
Right. And I think that that fear that you see reflected on the other side is so interesting because when I hear you say that, I’m like, right, of course I hate it when I see an emotion I don’t want on someone else’s face cause it makes me feel like I might no longer belong in that group. And the primitive parts of our brain are so hardwired to believe that if we don’t belong, we might literally die. Cause there were places millennia ago, and there’s still places in the world, where if you’re not part of a healthy community, you don’t have the resources you need to survive.

Vivien
It’s not just that. Like in engineering, I’ve seen this with, say, architects, that maybe are frustrated with the way engineering works and they start getting angry, possibly in lots of meetings. And what I started seeing happening was that the engineers stopped reaching out to them for advice to figure out architecture and they would go to someone else and that someone else, this other architect, would just get totally overwhelmed with this onslaught of requests. Whereas this guy, just, no one would talk to him anymore. He felt like he wasn’t useful anymore. And basically through that he essentially realized, Oh, I’m not useful at this company anymore. And he left. So just realizing his anger had turned into something that impeded on his own career at the company.

Emily
So why is it a problem when we avoid our anger?

Vivien
Because we’re not actually dealing with the situation, that we want to be elsewhere. We’re thinking about other things, but the really important and hard lessons to learn is in that moment in the anger, trying to find the source of what it is that is actually making us really angry. Because the thing is we often aren’t the only ones feeling this anger towards the situation. Maybe lots of people are feeling it and they also feel like they can’t speak up, they can’t act. And often the things that will push people to this much anger are very deep rooted problems in the company and they’re really worth solving and they could be really high impact things that can make the company better.

Emily
Yeah, I love that idea you were just mentioning, that when we feel so strongly about something, if we try to run away from that emotion, it’s like we can’t turn our face towards the topic at all. I think that speaks so much to what you were saying at the beginning, that folks who are experiencing an emotion that they don’t like tend to check out from work. Cause you know, it starts with they feel anger about this one decision they saw or this one interaction they had someone and they dislike experiencing that anger so much for whatever reason, you stop looking in that situation. But then at some point, it colors how you’re thinking about work in general, because you haven’t dealt with whatever the situation is and it’s festering under the surface of how you think about work. And at some point you don’t even want to look at work, because it makes you think about this thing and you haven’t figured out how to not feel this overwhelming emotion when you think about that. And so you just kind of check out further and further.

Vivien
Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve definitely felt this way quite a few times, in the past, when I was much younger earlier and in my career, I have definitely left companies because the anger became really overwhelming and I didn’t know how to deal with it anymore. So I hope that at this point I’ve come to kind of recognize it and realize that, Hey, I do have a way of dealing with these feelings and going about enacting change that will actually make things better.

Emily
So those are two great lead-ins and we’re definitely going to follow them both. How do you recognize it?

Vivien
Ooh…I recognize it when I’m very raw. And when I say raw, it’s just that whenever I think about it, I will almost want to just like start crying. So, it’s kind of funny, I’m a rage crier. Like in such a feeling of being angry, I will start just tearing up. So I have to go hide for some of the day and just think through the situation before I calm down. And so it’s just working through the emotion.

Emily
Yeah. So that was going to be my next question, which is how do you deal with it?

Vivien
Oh, okay. So, it is working through why I felt this way and then usually the why is like, Oh someone messaged a certain way or someone was extremely hostile or the company made this decision. And usually the initial reaction is just the raw emotion and you don’t have that much context. So what I usually do is at some point kind of calm down a bit and then just figure out, okay, I need to know more. And so I’ll start talking to people. I’ll start having one-on-ones with leadership, just to see what’s going on and see what was their vision or strategy. Sometimes though this can really go down a hairy rabbit hole–I won’t always find the answers that I like and I could actually become more angry. But it is still worth going after and exploring, because it is all part of my learning as a manager to try to understand, how do organizations work and think. Because the thing is, we all mean well, but somehow as an organization, we sometimes do things that are not good for us or the company because as a collective maybe we don’t always make the right choices.

Emily
Yeah. So I love one of the techniques you were highlighting there. Our emotions come from our thoughts–really, well, what if I go find some different thoughts? And what if I go learn something new that makes it easy to think a different thought, right? Cause you could of course sit there and say like, well, given all the information that I know already, I can just choose to think differently. And sometimes that’s easy and sometimes that’s hard. And in this moment you were like, well I know what makes it easier to think a new thought, finding new information. And that’s awesome. For me, an example of that, I remember one night I was out with a friend and they told a really bad joke, like not an unfunny joke, like a that’s not an appropriate thing to say out loud, kind of bad joke. And I was just so upset. And this person must’ve been able to tell cause they came up to me afterwards and said, I’m so sorry, I think I crossed the line. When I get really anxious sometimes I tell inappropriate jokes.

Vivien
Fascinating.

Emily
And do you know I have never once gotten upset with them about it since? Because now every time, when I hear them starting to say something that feels like it’s crossing a line all that pops into my head is, well, if this person is maybe feeling a little nervous here, what’s happening in the room?

And instead of pulling it in myself and feeling self righteous and feeling annoyed and feeling maybe insulted, I instead extend what I’m thinking to everything around me and I start getting curious. And I just love the way I am able to swap those thoughts from “this person is inappropriate and maybe I didn’t want them as my friend” to just a few minutes later, “Oh what a great indicator to know when there’s something shifting in the room.”

Vivien
Yeah, absolutely. And I think organizations are often this way! And it’s also interesting too because once you’re, as a manager or a leader, once your mindset changes about the situation, you also come off as being really different too. So when there’s organizational change and you’re angry and the ICs are angry but you find the answer, you know the context and it’s actually isn’t that bad, you also start coming off as better, as more confident. Like when you say like, don’t worry actually everything is okay. I know this is a bumpy part but you’re all okay, we’re all safe. You might not be able to promise all of that but just even coming off that way. I’ve definitely noticed that in one-on-ones, people’s behavior and attitude also changes, because when you’re scared they’re scared too.

Emily
Your thoughts are creating your feelings and your feelings are prompting all of your actions. And the actions you’re taking when you’re angry about this and you’re right there in the pool with everyone on your team that this is awful and how could they have done this…You show up totally differently than when you’re showing up from a place of “I know it’s fine” and confidence. So how do you show up with your team when you’re angry and right there in the pool with them?

Vivien
Ooh. I still actually have to work on this cause when I haven’t found the answer yet, I know I’m angry too. And usually I actually try not to say too much, to try to hold myself back. I’ll let them just run with the entire one-on-one, just let them vent and just try to help them through venting. And that’s okay cause I want to hear how they feel too. I try not to put in too much of myself cause I don’t want this to become a spiraling situation. Cause when they’re angry and you feed into their anger, it just really can get out of hand.

Emily
There’s the inaction form of action. Just don’t do anything, because whatever the options are for doing something would all be wrong.

Vivien
Absolutely.

Emily
I love it. That’s so much fun. And now I have to ask, what are the results for you when you’re not taking action? When you’re in that inaction?

Vivien
Ooh. Often the results are a bit wait-and-see. It’s not like there is a result, it’s more of a wait-and-see sort of situation. Like I’m still exploring and finding answers on the side. But I’m also just kind of absorbing everyone’s anger and trying to find a way to collect it and even just bring that feedback up back up through leadership and saying like, Hey, when you guys told the organization this, this is how they reacted. Is this how you actually want it to message to everyone? Because I have a feeling that you don’t actually want the organization to feel this way. So that in term hopefully helps more senior leadership to think about how they communicate.

Emily
Yeah. And so you’re able to kind of…so one of the ways that I parse the world is through this Self Coaching Model, right? And it’s the idea that we always have some of those cycles of how we think, how we feel, how we’re acting, the results that we’re producing. One of the things that’s been amazing for me in the past year is to realize that we can have a bunch of those going on at once. We can timeshare between them, right? Like CPUs can load things in and out really fast so that it looks like our computer is doing several things at once. I think our brain can do that too. And it can feel like we’re thinking and feeling several things at once and we can kind of act from several places at once and sometimes it’s hard to sort those out and so we end up…like it sounds like what happens for you is you’re like, okay, I feel anger. I think my thought, I feel my anger. None of the actions that would come straight from responding to that would be safe, so how do I switch over to some other way of thinking and feeling, which is like, well I can make it useful because I can collect their opinions and I can surface it.

Vivien
So usually there’s that aspect and then if I continue, like if I’ve found the information that I know is useful and I can dig into the core of, “I think this is the thing that is the source of what’s wrong,” I will often then switch from inaction to action and then go after it.

Emily
Right. Cause then it’s that sense of like, Oh there’s something I can do to make this stop.

Vivien
Which is awesome. You won’t always find the answer, but if there is a situation where you can, it just feels super powerful. You’re just like, I know this will have so much impact.

Emily
Yeah. I love that thought “this will have impact.” Right?

Vivien
Yeah.

Emily
Oh for most of us that thought is like a straight shot of like “I’m amazing!”.

Vivien
Yes. Just adrenaline for managers.

Emily
Yep. For me, that’s like straight to pride. Yup. Impact. It’s what I’m all about. So let’s talk the flip side of it. What happens when you take this concern and you surface it to whoever you think this was probably an unintended consequence and the answer you get is deeply unsatisfying?

Vivien
Ooh. I can often just continue feeling that anger. And the funny thing is when it is dissatisfying. So usually when I hear an answer that I don’t really like, I realize that the way I need to operate needs to change. I need to try something else. Because usually, the things that dissatisfy me it “it wasn’t planned, it was unintended.” Which means there’s things up in the air that need to be caught, because they’re not expecting the rest of the consequences that will appear. And so it’s also just trying to help them walk through and see like, Hey, like this is happening, do you know it’s happening? And what was the rest of your plan? Sometimes there is no, there was the rest of the plan. So it does just essentially change the way I’m thinking about acting. Sometimes the changes will have to be big things. And usually the ones I like aren’t necessarily huge, but the big things are, maybe I need to change departments or I need to actually jump in to a different team and just be the one to get the situation under control.

Emily
Yeah. I I love one of the ideas that you surfaced between that set of answers, which is the moment that the experience shifts for you is the moment you go talk with someone about it. And sometimes it shifts to like, well that was easy. Now I understand what’s actually going on and I can think happy, lovely thoughts and I can go back to my team with confidence and feel great and help them cross the same bridge and that’s going to feel like, sure it’s a bumpy spot but we know how to handle this. And sometimes you get there and you’re like, oh, that pit was a lot deeper than I thought. But you still move from that moment to thinking and feeling something different that’s then producing you taking action and deciding to solve the problem. And what I’m curious about is, in that second set where it’s like, Oh, okay, so I can not just go back and feel happy and shiny about this, something is deeply wrong. When that’s the conclusion that you come to, how does that shift the anger, right? Some new thing comes in where you decide like also.

Vivien
Mmm.

Emily
But how does that…does the anger stay around? What happens with it?

Vivien
Sometimes I will also feel resentment because sometimes the action does mean that I have make a sacrifice. And that might mean, if I’m switching teams, that means letting go of all these amazing people that I’ve been working with for so long and I really don’t want to leave the team and jump into this situation that’s actually very challenging and difficult. So there will be a hint of resentment for a bit that I had to make this decision. But at the same time you do come to the realization that there isn’t really any other answer, short of being so frustrated that I decided that to leave, which is also always another option I guess. But that is like what we mentioned earlier, which is running away from the situation.

Emily
Yeah. And I love the idea that our thoughts come with us no matter what and our thought patterns come with us no matter what. So whatever kinds of things are easy for us to think in this job are going to be easy for us to think in the next job.

Vivien
Absolutely.

Emily
And this is why you find so many folks who’ve just had like six bad managers in a row or whatever. Sometimes they had six bad managers in a row and sometimes they just had…it was really easy for their brain to notice one particular problem or think one particular way and they never stayed long enough. Like you see this in dating all the time, right, when it’s like, well, maybe the common denominator is you. Our friends are much more willing to tell us that about the people that we’re dating than they are to tell us that about our jobs and our managers. I think that in itself is fascinating. So as we’re stepping further into this, what are your tips for other folks? How can they recognize when they’re feeling anger and how can they show up as a better manager and a better leader?

Vivien
Just recognizing that your impulsion to go be confrontational is probably not the right move. And to think about like, let’s get some more answers first. And from that, you know, be able to develop, what do I do next? Because one thing that is also really not helpful is dwelling in your anger and just steeping in it because you’re kind of becoming really ineffective too. Cause the thing about anger that I’ve found has been helpful for me is that there’s energy behind it. There’s drive. Frustration is kind of not quite anger, that’s why I like to differentiate both frustration is kind of like steeping in your unhappiness. Anger has like, I’m gonna go do a thing because I have all this furious energy. Anger also has an edge of, I don’t give any more fucks. And that’s so powerful as a manager! It’s almost like I know when I’m about to do is the right thing. I know that there are some of you who will disagree, but I don’t care. You can fire me if you want to, but I should at least try. Because the thing about management where when you actually start to see it kind of going wrong is when managers don’t take those risks anymore. Because we’re essentially people that can take risks in the companies. So if we don’t use our ability to take risks, it’s totally wasted. So we should be taking that risk and just leaning into the anger and drive and just being like, we’re going to go do this thing. We have to change this.

Emily
I love that combination of two things, one of which is acting from anger and acting it out rarely gets us exactly what we want and maybe we should think about doing it in another way; and also that having that feeling can drive you. As I’ve been thinking a little bit as we were prepping for this about anger, it felt like it fell in a category of emotions for me that are the next best option. Anything I do from anger, I’d almost always rather do from another emotion. I would rather solve my company’s problems from curiosity or from love or from excitement. Inevitably that will produce a better outcome, but one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot this year is capacity. Just because we can put together the plan for how one would do this best does not mean we have the resources to execute on that in the timeline that we want and I think we recognize this, especially those of us who are feature leaders and we work with executional teams all day, like we get that there’s speed, quality and scope and choose two. We get that sometimes we have to change our approach if we want to hit a certain timeline. And I think that happens a lot with our emotions, which is like, sure, I’d rather come at this conversation from compassion or curiosity or whatever else it is. I am never getting to that feeling in the two days that I’m going to give myself to raise what’s clearly a big problem. And coming at it from frustration, I’m going to sit and I’m going to do nothing. Coming at it from acceptance or resignation isn’t going to work for me at all cause then I won’t take action. I can get myself to anger. And from anger I can take action and maybe it’s not the perfect version of it, but it’s the satisficing thing.

Vivien
It’s so funny too because we’re talking on a podcast mostly of managers who are technical leaders and used to be engineers and I’m sure most of us have experienced at some point being so angry and frustrated that you’re spite coding like you are powering through the whole weekend because someone told you you can’t do this and you’re like, Oh yeah, let me show you. And so this is almost like the manager equivalent of seeing this wall and you’re like, we’re going to bust through this right now and solve this problem.

Emily
And I always think those actions are really fun cause they come from a cocktail of emotions. And for me what’s been so much fun, it’s been sorting them out and pulling them apart over the last few years, and really saying if I could like really carefully curate the cocktail that I use to accomplish this action, which ones would I actually choose? And then being aware of the ones that’ll like work for me when I need to get there and I don’t really get to choose carefully, when I feel like I don’t have the luxury of that in this moment because I just need to make it happen.

Vivien
Yes, absolutely.

Emily
I know that I can spend plenty of time coaching myself and I can get to the place where I can choose any thought about any circumstance. Sometimes I’m realistic and I realize in two days I will not get there.

Vivien
And for some of us, it might not even be two days.

Emily
Sometimes it’s like two years, I’m maybe not going to get there.

Vivien
But we’re not machines. Really we’re still squishy humans with reactions that we have sometimes have difficulty controlling. And so it’s kind of like, how do I accept that I’m feeling this way and just find a way to work with it.

Emily
Yes and I think exactly what you said is just right. Like, we are not machines. And engineers really like to optimize. We’re pulling out every last bit of what’s wrong and inefficient. We’re paid to be good at! And as leaders, we’re definitely paid to make our systems more efficient. And most of us are also super highly ambitious, super high achieving folks who have lots of dreams and lots of goals. And so we want to make every moment count. And I think it can be really hard to be willing to accept a part of our day that feels like it’s not the most efficient way we can do something.

Vivien
Yeah.

Emily
And that’s part of why this is an emotion that I love because I love how clearly you describe it as like, it’s not my favorite experience, but I can use it really well when I need to.

Vivien
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Emily
Thank you so much. This was so much fun.

Vivien
Thank you. This was really fun for me too.

End Guest Segment

Emily
Thank you Vivien for a great conversation. I had the amazing privilege to coach Vivien as she started her management journey and I always loved the heart, thoughtfulness, and relentless action she brings to work.

So earlier on in this episode, you identified an emotion that you have trouble allowing yourself to feel, especially at work. This week’s Podcast Guide uses the specific emotion of anger as I’ve written up the exercise for you and as I’ll walk you through it right now. But I want you to also consider going back and doing the same exercise for the emotion that you chose for yourself earlier.

So there are a couple of very simple steps.

The first: what’s something that makes you angry?

Okay. Now bring that thought–you were probably starting to go down a story about why this thing’s a problem and why it’s bad. Really amp that up! Bring it into your body, play with it. See how strong you can make this feeling be.

Notice if you start to resist it. Notice if your chest starts getting to get tight or whatever it is you’ve identified over the last few weeks is what resistance feels like for you.

Notice as you allow more of this emotion into your body, because you’re intentionally creating it, that there’s nothing about it that’s wrong or bad. In fact, anger isn’t bad for us. There are no emotions that are bad for us to feel in our bodies. They may be uncomfortable, they may lead to us really needing a good shoulder massage because we held those shoulders tight all afternoon. But there are no emotions that can actually hurt you.

So, let’s take that next step. And keeping that anger in our body, by continuing to think about this topic that makes it really easy for us to feel anger, I want you to start moving your body in the way that anger feels. What does someone who is really angry do? We’ve talked over past episodes, we’ve mentioned yelling and screaming and throwing plates at the walls. What about pounding your hands on a table? What about jumping up and down? What about making really threatening body postures? Take a minute and act all of those things out, make it big, get really into it.

And now, I want you to take that same experience and do that for 10 minutes, each day, all week. In that 10 minutes of Growth time that you’ve set aside weekly on your work calendar, just go find somewhere quiet and embody anger that entire time.

You may find that you need to take a little bit of a break in the middle on the first day or two, right? But I think you’ll also notice your tolerance of it getting much, much better throughout the week and your familiarity with what anger looks and feels like.

I’ll challenge you to choose a different topic every day. Choose a different prompt, a different something in the world that makes you angry and at least twice in the week choose something that you think is a little trivial or a little unjustified. Choose somewhere where you don’t think maybe it’s okay for you to feel angry about that, but you do. And just get comfortable with thinking that way and feeling that anger in your body for that full 10 minutes.

It’s going to do so much to help you stop judging your own thoughts, help you stop judging your own feelings and to help you really increase your tolerance for feeling anger.

And as a quick reminder, why would we want to increase our tolerance for feeling anger? Well, you heard me and Vivien talk about plenty of good examples during our conversation. But the way I want to distill it down is this: the more we try to shut down our emotions, the less connected we are with what’s really happening in our experience at work and the less connected we are with what’s happening for everybody else around us. And, when we get to a place where our brain tells us something has gone wrong, that we’re feeling this way, it’s very easy for us to flip over into that fight or flight mode, in a way that actually shuts down that modern prefrontal cortex part of our brain, the thing that we need in order to make good long-term decisions every day. So the more you can increase your tolerance for emotions you find challenging, and especially increasing it in a work setting, the more you’ll be able to show up with your full brain and your full creative powers in any situation you encounter.

And one final note, I really do encourage you to practice this at work. Go find a room where there aren’t any windows and practice being angry on your company’s property. Or if you work from home, go into your office space and stand in front of your computer and, you know, leave the zoom meeting or the hangout off, but stand in front of your computer and practice being angry in your work setting. This doesn’t mean you should exhibit that anger with your coworkers. It doesn’t mean you should find more reasons to feel angry about your job, but it does mean that you can stay present in the moment during the execution of your job, even when you feel anger, because you are deprogramming that limbic system portion of your brain that tells you it’s unsafe.

Alright. Have an amazing week. Spend your week noticing what makes you angry and being totally fine with that. And I’ll see you next week.

If you loved this episode and want to dive deeper into improving your own emotional health so you can feel better and have bigger results at work, you have to join me for a one-on-one call. We’ll talk about where you are, where you want to be, and create a solid plan to get from here to there. Just visit go.exceptional.vision/call. See you there!