On Monday, I wrote about Brene Brown’s masterful exploration of empathy and connection on TED (follow this link for a reminder).  Today I want to pick up on her assertion that, by numbing pain and other difficult emotions, we also numb – in equal measure – our capacity for joy.  Is this true?  And if so, what are the implications in the workplace?

Brown highlights in her talk that we numb our emotions as a strategy to protect ourselves from our feelings of vulnerability.  How do we do this?  Brown points to the experience of her fellow Americans, saying, “We are the most in debt, obese, addicted and medicated adult cohort in US history”.  And just to be clear, the picture that accompanied the word “addicted” highlighted alcohol rather than any other substance. Some might say, isn’t this a high price to pay for a bit of emotional pain relief?  Others might say – by their actions they do say – this is a price worth paying.  After all, isn’t society structured in a way that supports this?  But it doesn’t stop there.  As Brown points out, insofar as we numb our negative emotions (she cites vulnerability, grief, shame, disappointment) we also numb our capacity to experience the positive emotions (including joy, gratitude, happiness).  This is not a new discovery as Kahlil Gibran’s passage On Joy and Sorrow from The Prophet amply demonstrates.  Even so, it seems to be a discovery which is not widely known or understood.

I want to take a moment to touch in the implications for us in the workplace.  How many of us have experience of working in places where the expression of negative emotions (maybe positive emotions, too) is – implicitly or explicitly – discouraged?  It seems to me that our wokplaces are, increasingly, emotionally sanitised, so that oftentimes the response to emotion is to get someone out of the building (on “compassionate” grounds) as quickly as possible.  If we’re feeling angry because we didn’t get the promotion we hoped for we are left to find our way through or even expected to pull ourselves together.  If we are shocked by the way a customer has spoken to us on the phone we’re expected to meet our targets by picking up the next call.  If we feel nervous in our first meeting as a member of the Board we sure ain’t going to show it.

If Brown – and Gibran – are right, the corollary of this is that we lose touch with all positive emotions.  The satisfaction of recognising a piece of work well done is lost in the midst of our fear of criticism or even our own self-criticism.  The pay rise brings a temporary boost to our emotions before, quickly, becoming a new part of our every day reality.  The passions that motivated us to join our organisation become lost in the everyday experience of surpressing our emotions.

Last week I pointed to a posting by John Hepworth on DiscussHR about employee engagement.  He begins by saying:  According to Seijits and Crim (2006), a professor lecturing on leadership amused his audience by relating the following:  “A CEO was asked by a business journalist how many people work in his company.  ‘About half of them’, the CEO responded”.  It seems to me that Brown’s research points to a fundamental truth:  if organisations are serious about engaging the full commitment and contribution of their employees they need to get real about human emotion.  We all have emotions.  When we accept this as a fact of life we can begin to explore how these emotions serve us, to learn how we can recognise these emotions and even to learn how to manage and work with these emotions.  Only then can we begin to create the kind of culture and climate in which peole thrive.  This gives us a much greater chance of achieving what some call “employee engagement”.