Focusing on position titles with an ever-widening span of responsibility and authority, however, only considers the cognitive aspects of career choice, while undermining equally important and commanding emotional competences we each possess.

Taking time out to develop an ability to attend to your own emotional literacy can greatly improve our career decision-making. Here, I am talking about applying the old adage, ‘Know Thyself’. The more we are aware of what makes us passionate and engaged, the more likely we are to settle on a career path or a job that is right for us.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence [EI] refers to a set of skills and an understanding of emotional self-mastery, initiative, self-confidence, optimism, adaptability, and creativity. Numerous research studies have repeatedly verified that individuals with high emotional intelligence tend to be more successful overall in both work and life than those with less emotional intelligence, regardless of their level of cognitive ability.

According to neuroscientists, EI develops from ‘gut feelings’ and resides in the primitive or ‘lizard brain’ suggesting it is part of the basis for survival. With sufficient attention to emotional intelligence, we can incorporate new ways of thinking about career directions and choices.

How you can use EI

Applying EI as a planning approach involves self-assessment along with looking at temperament, personality characteristics, and the ability to monitor your feelings. How can choices be made that reflect the best fit between the individual and the position, or the field of interest, or the best type of organisation to work in?

How do you respond to obstacles in your path? How good is your interpersonal literacy—the ability to read the minds of superiors and subordinates? Do you listen to your deepest sense of what feels right, or do you dismiss and ignore your emotional intelligence? All these things are to be considered.

He, she and EI

Men and women may differ on their use of emotional intelligence, but as Daniel Goleman, the author of several contemporary books on EI points out, women are no ‘smarter’ than men when it comes to applying the tools of emotional intelligence.

For example, a woman may be understanding and supportive of a subordinate who makes an error on a Power Point presentation, but not with herself in the same situation, while a guy may have the ability to handle personal stress effectively, but be inept when attempting to identify his personal motivation for professional development.

Some EI strategies for you

The ability to use emotional intelligence can grow stronger with practice and experience. Let me give you a few tips:

Develop self-awareness

Take a step back and slow down. Keep a journal; journaling is a way to let your thoughts and feelings flow unencumbered. What feelings are emerging about the opportunities that are presented?

Try a mindful meditation about your career. Focus on the level of anxiety you can tolerate. What is your degree of openness to feedback and criticism? How able are you to balance other aspects of life with work? Is this balancing act important to you, and if so, how important? Contrast that with how ambitious you are and the degree of importance it holds for your self-esteem.

Shape what is best for you

Identify your strengths and preferences. Denying divides our energy between trying to avoid what is actually true and continuing to pursue directions that are not right for us.

I encounter individuals who are doctors or lawyers. They are in these professions because their family expectations were too strong to resist. Now, they are unhappy, unfulfilled and depressed. Perhaps you or someone you know is in a career only because at some point a school counsellor determined it as the appropriate direction. Ask yourself, do I prefer competition or would I rather collaborate? Do I like to work alone or on a team?

Using existing measures such as the Myers-Briggs online emotional intelligence assessment survey and other career-oriented instruments can objectively help in shaping career choices. But you need to take these results and sit with how they feel.

Use colleagues, peers and mentors as resources to evaluate the goodness-of-fit between you and opportunities. Finally, investigate the culture of your dream work organisation to assess how it feels to you.

Stay resilient

Trusting your perceptions is key in knowing what makes you truly happy. Possessing optimism and flexibility, a desire to grow, a positive attitude about people, places and things offers a good starting point for making emotionally intelligent decisions about work.

Overcoming difficult challenges, communicating with others, and being willing to adapt to circumstances indicates how we manage ourselves in frustrating situations.

Recognising the degree to which we focus on creatively managing these obstacles demonstrates the application of emotionally intelligent workplace behaviour. Paying attention to the degree of self-regulation achieved in these situations can enlighten our awareness about career choices, decisions, and actions.

Use your social skills

The people we know generally help our career along. Building and sustaining relationships are the EI skills often associated with essential workplace success. They are equally necessary for career advancement.

Working on improving communication and conflict management allows you to cultivate the widest and most diverse group of friends and colleagues. The broader your circle, the more help you will be able to access as you advance your career.

Having the emotional intelligence to effectively cooperate, assess the political landscape and understand others, also strengthens the bonds that will allow others to provide you with suggestions, mentoring and career opportunities.

Cultivating these skills and abilities will help in directing you toward a rewarding career path. Try it.

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Women weep, men can’t

Women generally find that crying comes more easily, if often unexpectedly, particularly in the workplace. Societal norms and socialisation play a role in that women are generally given more breadth of emotion than men.

This freedom to express one’s feelings provides a release and therefore women also express more empathy and understanding.

Crying = vulnerable

Whether you are male or female, the workplace is not generally kind to those who cry. This expression of emotion is viewed as inappropriate. Crying can have a deleterious effect on performance evaluations, promotions, and your professionalism. For women, tears often make us look inept and result in feelings of incompetence. For men, tears often suggest an inability to ‘buck up’ and be strong.

Regardless of whether your organisation is viewed as cutting edge or traditional, we often mistake a humanistic corporate culture as tolerant of tearful displays. Women and men in leadership positions generally equate crying with vulnerability, and vulnerability is a negative attribution suggesting difficulty handling tough situations. These attitudes, values and beliefs are often reinforced in management training classes and MBA programmes.

Tears can be controlled

It is therefore necessary to un-learn and re-learn emotional and behavioural responses to events and interactions that trigger tears. Just as anger management workshops help individuals learn different and more appropriate responses to feelings of criticism, unfairness, disappointment and frustration, learning other approaches to feelings that often result in tears is also possible.

Developing alternatives to crying, even when tears are associated with positive outcomes, such as closing a big sale, or winning over a difficult client, requires necessary skills that broaden and strengthen our emotional and behavioural workplace repertoires.

Tips for controlling those tears

We must distinguish between our organisational behaviour that governs work, and our personal behaviour. Even with a significant personal event, the workplace always expects its staff to contain their emotions and soldier on. Let me give you a few guidelines on this regard:

Improve your self-awareness

To find an alternate response, you must first find out the cause of your tears. Sometimes it is anger; sometimes it is joy or relief. Time and energy is well spent on identifying your feelings as accurately as possible.

By distinguishing one feeling from another, you will start to express those feelings without tears. You will be less overwhelmed and more likely to develop alternative responses.

If, for example, you are avoiding anger, work on developing better assertiveness skills. If the feelings involve hurt, and you feel the sensation to start crying, take a few deep breaths. Try asking yourself, “What exactly is causing this hurt?” or “Will crying solve the problem?” Ask yourself, “What do I need to do to resolve this situation?” This thinking activity can help calm the emotions.

Anticipate situations

Emotionally-charged encounters can often be anticipated. It is extremely useful to spend time rehearsing various responses with someone else. Preparation can lessen the emotional intensity to various situations. Knowledge about a person or of a situation can be used to create likely scenarios.

Practise! Hearing yourself respond to what you think is likely to come your way will lessen your anxiety and defuse the fear, while increasing your confidence in responding effectively.

Have an optimistic outlook

We often cry when feeling overwhelmed with work, feel unrecognised, or anxious and fearful about our performance. If this is the case for you, remember crying will not resolve or improve any of these situations. First, recall something positive that has recently occurred in which you had a part.

Second, create a list of actual and perceived issues and problems contributing to your feelings. Third, contact a mentor, trusted friend, or business coach. Use them to assist in gaining a broader perspective. Optimism comes from having alternatives.

Few things in the workplace are life and death issues. Ask yourself, “What is the worst that can happen?” “Can I survive if this happens?” Most often things do work out.

Compartmentalise

If you find that your private life is causing overwhelming feelings and tears at work, consider your workplace a ‘safe space’; a diversion from issues causing the tears.

Compartmentalising your personal life from your business life, although artificial, can help provide a needed respite and a place to regain mastery and efficacy. We all need a break from sad, difficult and worrisome feelings that often result in uncontrolled emotions, so learning to create a space by focusing on other people or tasks at work helps restrain feelings that can lead to crying.

This is a skill men have perfected more readily than women. Remember, however, that being able to compartmentalise doesn’t mean you are unfeeling or uncaring. Rather, it means that you can have more control over your feelings leading to a sense of increased confidence.

Managing criticism

No one likes to be criticised. Both men and women are sensitive to what often feels like personal attacks from others at work. Although criticism is painful, crying doesn’t alleviate the sting. You can re-train your responses to criticism by learning ways to create a sense of calm. A good strategy is mindfulness. Practice basic breathing and relaxation techniques. This can slow down reactions to criticism, and help gain control over hurt feelings, and allow more clear thinking.

Redirecting your thoughts to the content instead of the criticism also helps manage hurt feelings. When your manager says, “This test should have been completed yesterday.” One possible response that focuses on the test and not the implied criticism might be, “I have already made sure that it will be completed by this morning.”

Recognise you’re human

Sometimes we just can’t help the tears. If it is unavoidable, say, “It is obvious I have strong feelings about this. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take this up later.” Or “As you can see, this is not a good time for me to address this issue. Give me a few minutes and we can continue our discussion.”

Go to a quiet place, collect yourself and employ one of the techniques recommended here. Do not judge yourself, as it only increases your sense of vulnerability.

Any one or a combination of these techniques will assist in effectively managing your tears in the workplace. Practising these suggestions will refine your ability to implement them when you feel like crying. Re-establishing your reputation as a composed, competent individual, occurs through accepting that we are all human.

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Whereas, a man’s angry reaction to the same event is attributed to circumstances outside of himself or beyond his control. In several studies, the relationship between anger, gender and status, both male and female evaluators conferred a lower status to angry women than to angry men. Men demonstrating expressions of anger over expressions of sadness are often perceived as more competent, but women demonstrating the same emotions encounter a negative reaction.

Dealing with prejudice

Anger is an emotional reaction to a real or perceived threat of some sort. It is a feeling accompanied by physiological changes in the body such as an increase in heart rate, flushing, headaches, or clenching our fists. It is our brain’s response to the threat of harm. Anger is ubiquitous in the workplace and gender-based perceptions due to socially prescribed norms, put working women in a difficult bind—they are often labelled as unreasonable, overly aggressive or out of control.

Workplace anger or disagreement does not include rage, but degrees of anger that develop out of ordinary interactions in the workplace. We can become mildly irritated over a fleeting annoyance or infuriated by a missed deadline. Even though anger is a common human emotion, we need to learn to manage it. Here’s what we can do.

Express, don’t suppress: Use assertive non-aggressive sentences to express disapproval. For example, “Joanne, I want you to stop making personal phone calls during work hours,” or “Kevin, I asked you to make arrangements for the meeting tomorrow, but I see that you have forgotten to reserve a room. This is the third time this month.”

Modulate your tone: Your tone of voice will have a lot to do with how someone hears your message. Being aware of how you sound—frustrated, distant, hostile, or mean—is important for a woman’s success at communicating anger.

Don’t under-react: Carefully balance tendencies to under react, which can result in coming across as completely unemotional or cold. To avoid the “angry woman phenomenon,” women have to offer a credible explanation for their anger. One very powerful tactic is to offer a couple of straightforward sentences about why you are angry. This mitigates the tendency on the part of others to fall prey to the stereotypical “character flaw” explanation for your anger.

Divert the energy: It is also helpful to use the energy generated by anger in a proactive way. When you are the recipient of a hostile customer, for instance, remain calm but do not condescend. Focus on solving the problem, not on giving in. Walk away or call for assistance when you feel the frustration rising. With others who annoy you, communicating by making eye contact, feeling as relaxed as possible, paying attention and keeping an open mind helps to channel your tension from anger productively.

Don’t be taken for granted: Businesswomen sometimes encounter situations where colleagues, particularly men, think they know what a woman is going to say. This can be upsetting and irritating. It can be quite effective in this type of situations to ask, “Would you like to have this conversation by yourself?” “Because I’m not feeling like you are interested in what I have to say.”

While rage is never acceptable at work, openly expressing anger or discontent in some situations is now viewed as preferable to repressing it.

Increasing your awareness of angry feelings helps you cope with them appropriately. Ask yourself what type of events trigger my anger? Is it a verbal attack, unfair treatment, impediments to reaching goals, or excessive demands?

Finally, redirect the energy produced by the angry feelings into some other activity. Dealing with anger productively also means having the ability to forgive and forget once you have dealt with your feelings and the situation that produced them.

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