Emotional Awareness: Key to Managing Workplace Conflicts and Relationships

In this episode of the Conflict Skills Podcast, host Simon Goode delves into the importance of developing emotional awareness in navigating workplace conflicts. He explains a structured approach encompassing four stages: self-awareness, self-regulation, awareness of others, and the ability to influence others. Simon also provides practical tips and coaching questions for both individuals and leaders to enhance emotional intelligence and improve workplace relationships.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome back to the Conflict Skills Podcast. I'm your host, professional mediator, Simon Good. I'm recording the video again for this episode of the podcast, So if you'd like to follow along on YouTube, you can check me out there as well. But if you're listening on the podcast on audio only, welcome. Today, I'm talking about the topic of navigating workplace conflict and challenging workplace relationships, I guess, with emotional awareness. So I'll be talking about the way that I think about emotional awareness, what the process looks like of developing more emotional awareness, like the stages that we go through. And I suppose I'm talking about some of these different resources or ideas, both in terms of, how you can apply it yourself. If your goal, for example, is to develop a little bit more resilience or differentiation when something happens, like you'd like to be able to have a bit more distance so that you don't take it as personally or maybe it's a bit more self control around your reactions, the words that you say and how you respond. That's one area. It's like, how can I improve myself? But I know a lot of people who listen to the podcast are also in management or team leader or small business owner kind of roles. And so you might also be interested in ways that you can support your team to develop emotional awareness too. So what does that process look like? Well, I suppose it's an interesting thing that I've noticed doing both mediations and conflict resolution training now for quite a long time, 6 or 7 years at least in both of the areas and, you know, various bits and pieces before that. And I've noticed that people use emotional intelligence and emotional and awareness in a similar way that they might use something like common sense. They assume that everybody has a common understanding of what's actually involved here. Whereas the reality is that when people use that phrase, like emotional awareness or emotional maturity or something, we've all got a slightly different idea in our head about what we're actually talking about there. So one of the challenges, at least at the outset, is to define, like, if you would like your coworker to act with more emotional awareness, like, what do you want them to do? And if you're trying to help one of your staff members develop emotional awareness, what kind of change are you looking for in their behavior? I think just coming back to that very basic definition helps us to navigate conversations around this particular topic. For me, though, and you might not actually have a definition of what emotional awareness is at the outset, I think about it as developing in in 4 stages, I guess. And there's 2 different tracks. 1 is the track that's for me and one is the track that's for the person that I'm dealing with. So the first two areas that's just for me on my track is self awareness and then that leads to self regulation. So if our goal is to develop a higher level of self awareness, what we need to do is to come up with the right processes that help us to elevate our awareness. So it's not so much that I'm aiming for a state of being aware. What I want and the way that we often develop emotional awareness in in conflict is that we follow the right kind of habits or the right kind of patterns or we use the right kind of steps that help us to gain regular awareness. It's not a finite thing that we have or we don't have. The reality of dealing with conflict and communication is that depending on our level of escalation, we might have more or less ability to think clearly or perceive what's going on around us. And as we become more escalated, we develop more tunnel vision, for example. So I could say that I have awareness of what happened in that argument with this difficult client. But in reality, I'm probably painting a little bit of a black and white story around what happened with all of the associated biases that come along with that. Like, my ego wants to protect itself and make me feel good. Like, I am a good person. Right? I am capable, aren't I? And so when I make a mistake or something goes wrong, I'm often looking for an explanation that blames something else external, like something that happened or something that somebody else did. And so as we develop self awareness, I think it's not so much that we're gaining it forever. It's that I want to develop the skill to pause and remind myself what's going on. Or I want to develop the habit that when somebody says something that triggers me or affects me, I can pause and sit back in my chair and take a moment and take a breath and let it out and then think before I respond, for example. So that self awareness for me, the result of it comes in 5 layers. I might be become I might be becoming more aware of my body, like my physical self, like when I need to go to the toilet or I'm hungry or my heart rate slightly increasing or I can feel a tension almost developing in my shoulders or my neck or something. Or it might be my thinking, becoming aware of the thinking patterns that I'm engaged in, the ruminating thoughts that might be happening, the assumptions that I'm making. I might become more aware of my emotional layer, the the emotions that are stirred up in me, which might also be connected to a physiological component too in my body. Like, I'm feeling stressed and I noticed that my stomach's tight and gurgling at the moment or something like that. I could become aware also of things like my perception, like, what am I focused on or what am I neglecting in my perception. Maybe I'm catastrophizing the possible problems that might come about if something happens, for example. So it's building in the regular triggers for yourself almost to engage in that self reflection, asking yourself right the right kind of questions. And for me, I find those 5 different buckets really helpful. What's going on for me at the moment in terms of my body, my thoughts, my feelings, my perception, and then my behaviors. Like, what do I feel like doing? What are the automatic reactions that I want to do? Like, I want to write to this person and correct them, send them back an email, or I'm finding it really difficult to sit still at the moment just noticing some of that. And I think that that first step, the self awareness, then leads to the self regulation. You might consider tools like breathing techniques, for example. If you decide to breathe in order to calm yourself down, there's particular ways that you can do it that make it more or less effective. It's better if you use your nose rather than your mouth. And the really important part of the breath is the breath out. So a really slow long exhale when we fully empty our lungs, it interrupts the automatic fight or flight type of response that we go into as we become more escalated. Our brain picks up on that, our heart rate slows, and we feel more calm and composed as a result. So using a nose at least 5 or 6 seconds on the breath in and the breath out. And a little trick that you can use is to pause halfway during the breath in. So breathe in and pause and then breathe in the rest of the way and then breathe out all of the way. You know, Andrew Huberman and other people have talked about similar kinds of techniques and some of the empirical evidence that's, being found as a way of in terms of the effectiveness of that of calming down our our nervous system. It really is self regulation, I guess. So it might be breathing. It might be taking a few deep breaths using your nose, letting it out, closing your eyes or something like that can be helpful for some people. You might consider an option like mindfulness, like paying attention to what's going on in your perception. What can you hear? What is there a sound of traffic outside the meeting room that you're in or the construction site that you're standing on? Wiggle your toes and feel the feeling of your socks in your boots? What position is your tongue in in your mouth? Can you taste anything from the last meal or the coffee that you've had? We constantly have all of this sensory information coming in, but our brain selectively decides what to pay attention to. And so when we can choose deliberately, like take deliberate control back of our perception, we're moving that from a subconscious process to conscious. And what it does is it deliberately slows down the thinking pattern that our brain is using. When we're escalated, when there's a dangerous situation, we don't care about the detail. We just need to make a quick decision. Like, it doesn't matter what species of lion this is. There's a lion we need to escape. Whereas when we focus on things like the detail, like, what other sounds can I hear aside from traffic? Is there, you know, a construction drill or something or the air conditioning were or something like that? There's no other magic that's needed. You don't need to sit cross legged on the floor chanting om or something like that in the traditional meditation type of pose. When I use that word mindfulness, I think sometimes people have a little bit of a woo woo connotation, but I'm really just talking about paying attention to your senses. In terms of self regulation, you could also do things like adjusting your posture, sitting up straight, lowering your shoulders, putting your shoulders low and back, opening up your chest, puffing your chest out a little bit and lifting your chin up. So shoulders down and back, chest open, chin up. When we do this for a couple of minutes, it often helps us to feel very differently. Psychologists have noticed changes in the different chemical balance in our brain, etcetera. Or it might be things like figuring out what does your body need, like maybe it is having something to eat, maybe it's having some time out if you've been concentrating for a long period of time, maybe it's being aware of your need for rest, all of these kind of things. But I think we need the self awareness if we're going to be able to achieve the effective self regulation. If I don't know what's going on for me, it's very unlikely that I'll be able to engage in effective self care. So those are the 2 first steps I think of developing emotional awareness. It's self awareness and self regulation. Now if you're in a leadership position, the way that you would often approach this with your team is by asking the right kind of coaching questions. The types of questions that help for self awareness are often reality and goal kind of questions. Like what's important to you? What's the priority right now? You know, that person's done this. That makes sense why that would be frustrating. What do you need to let them know at the moment or which of those issues do you need to to deal with right now or over the next few days? So I'm helping them almost to triage what's the priority here because in the initial stages, especially when we're dealing with conflict in workplace relationships, it feels really overwhelming. So that's the first part of developing awareness is what do they actually want? Are they sure that they're responsible for this problem? Maybe that's something they can let let go through to the keeper. And then the other type of question that we could ask a reality coaching questions, like when you say that that conversation with the the other person was a real nightmare, what happened? How did it start? What did they say? What did you say? What was the expression on their face? How did the meeting begin? How did you raise that issue? What I'm aiming for there, it's it's not that I actually have a view of they've contributed or something. I'm coming at this issue in a way that's hopefully genuinely curious, And my goal is to increase the level of awareness that they have both for their contribution of how they contributed to the issue. Like, maybe they didn't schedule this meeting with the other person, so it makes sense where they're a little bit defensive when all of a sudden they were bombarded with a whole bunch of negative feedback, for example. So that might solve the problem. Maybe your staff member then becomes aware of the fact that they might need to consider other options. Maybe not, though. And this is where the step 3 and the step 4 of developing emotional awareness comes in. So the 3rd step is that we begin to develop an awareness of others. And then the 4th step is that we develop the skill or capacity to influence others. Sometimes people use words like managing other people's emotions. I don't necessarily like that. I think all we're really doing is responding to them and we we do influence them to some extent, I suppose. But we're not fully responsible for their reactions. And of course, we're not fully in control of them either. So awareness of others. What am I talking about there? I like the image that Dan Siegel presents of creating a mental map. You might, in your head, start to think about what's going on for the other person. What's important for them? What pressure points are there for them? What are their goals? How are they interpreting the situation? What possible ways are they avoiding taking responsibility themselves? What would their ego be doing, for example, and how come? And what can you offer them? What would resonate with them? What do you think would be the most effective way of presenting your view? If there was something that was going to motivate them to think differently, what might it be? So I start thinking about this in a very open ended way. In a sense, I think my goal isn't even necessarily to come up with the plan at the outset. What I want to engage in is a process of curious exploration, and that helps then to avoid making negative assumptions, etcetera. So I'm wanting to start to figure out what's going on for the other person. And then what this often results in in terms of communication is it's a hypothesis. I think this might be going on and I say to them, I wonder if this might be the the case of if I got that right or not. I think as long as you are actually genuine and you're genuinely trying to help the other person, they often don't mind if you come up with this. Like, it seems like this is what might be happening if I got that right. They'll correct you if you're wrong. And I think if you're right, it often really does create that sense of feeling heard. And then the 4th step is increasing or improving our ability to influence others. This might be things like I've talked about in previous episodes of the podcast on being assertive. In some situations, we just need to stand up to ourselves. Maybe we've become aware that the other person has unrealized expectations. And as I've gone through this process, I'm realizing that maybe I'm a little bit of a people pleaser. And for me, maybe my goal is that I need to hold the line a little bit more firmly. Maybe it's listening better and just giving a person a chance to vent and saying to them, you know, you don't seem like yourself at the moment. What's going on for you? Maybe that's the way that we can influence them because we're going to help them to feel understood. People don't often feel understood when you say things like I understand. It's often when you've asked them the right questions and explored the issues and then summarized what they've told you. When somebody plays back to you the main points and what's important to you in a way that really acknowledges, you know, your priorities and it presents it's in a way that's very valid. That that is an incredibly powerful, I think, point in a lot of workplace relationships where then we can turn the page and shift things forward. Whereas when people feel like you're not listening to them and you're not paying attention, and maybe rather than developing that mental map, you're you're thinking about your team in a very black and white kind of way, for example, that you're all the same and I can treat you all the same then in terms of my leadership approach. Well, that's not going to make people feel valued in the same way, and it's likely that you're not going to get to the same kind of positive outcome as if you were to take more of a flexible approach and focus on those steps that I've outlined there of how to develop your emotional awareness. So I hope that that's been helpful for you thinking about some of those, stages and the structure and process that we go through as we develop emotional professional development yourself or you're looking at some options for supporting the team and the other people around you. If you've got a question or feedback about the podcast, you can shoot me an email. It's podcast at simongood.com. Otherwise, thank you very much for listening. If it's been helpful, I'd be incredibly grateful if you would press like and consider following or subscribing to the channel. It makes a massive difference for tiny little podcasts and YouTube channels like this. So thank you in advance if that's something that you're prepared to do. But otherwise, hope to see you again in a future episode of the podcast. Bye for now.