
Our Emotions can Help Us Navigate Change
Emotions can give us a sense of control in a situation where we often spin out of control.

Emotions are part of who we are. They are part of being human.
Change is a part of life. As Heraclitus would say, “the only constant in life is change”. While it stays constant and we know it’s always bound to happen, we somehow always have a challenging time navigating through change.
Change in the workplace can be disruptive, both professionally and personally. At the same time, when we experience change in our personal life, it can also affect our performance at work.
According to Gagen MacDonald (2020), neglecting our emotions can prevent us from experiencing positive changes that these bring about. This is what I often see when I work with my clients.
When we go through change, our tendency is to create a checklist of things we need to do and focus on how we can power through the change. We try to be in control of everything.
We forget our emotions and neglect to even pay attention to how we're feeling… until it's too late and we reach a breaking point.
I discovered, through my own experiences and using this with clients, that the Emotional Culture Deck (ECD) gives us the "control" we can never seem to have when we're going through change. By "control", I mean that we are able to navigate better, or the way we want to, through change.
Here are the 3 ways we can use our emotions to navigate through change:
1) NAME YOUR EMOTIONS TO BETTER DEAL WITH THEM.
We often don't have the words to capture or describe our feelings. When we don't know what something is called, it tends to stay more abstract and becomes more challenging to deal with. A simple tool, like the ECD, shows a set of emotions and can be a great starting point to help us identify how we feel.
When we can name our emotions, we can understand ourselves better. This process helps us to understand what contributes to feeling that way and the impact these emotions have on us.
"I never bothered to pay attention to how I was feeling. I realized that it was driving a lot of my actions and decisions, and they weren't always helpful. I probably would have done things differently had I known I felt a lot of resentment going through something." ~ ECD Exploring Change Workshop Participant, Freelance Writer
This awareness can help us choose how we want to act and navigate the world as we move forward through change.
2) PREPARE FOR THE FEELINGS WE DON'T WANT TO FEEL (but might from time-to-time).
On top of not having the vocabulary to describe how we feel, we also seem to be wired to avoid the emotions we don’t want to feel.
Instead of putting all our effort on not feeling these emotions, we can prepare for these feelings and get ahead of them. During an ECD Exploring Change Workshop I conducted, participants were asked to identify emotions they might have as they go through the organizational change that was about to be implemented.
For example, a participant said he doesn’t want to feel “hesitant”. He shared with his group what “hesitant” looked like for him and why he doesn’t want to feel that way. He was able to articulate how feeling “hesitant” would get in the way of helping his colleagues and contributing to the team.
At the end of this process, I asked the participants to identify two things: a) what they can do to help themselves when they are feeling that emotion; and b) make a request from their teammates on how they can help them when they notice they are feeling that way.
The participant who said “hesitant” identified that he can write down what was contributing to making him hesitate. He also mentioned that he would write down what he would do if he wasn’t hesitant. The request he made of his teammates was to explicitly ask him for his input. He explained that if he felt “hesitant”, he was likely to not ask questions or share his ideas. If his teammates helped him out by asking for his input, it would remind him that it was a safe space to share his thoughts and questions.
3) CHOOSE HOW WE WANT TO FEEL.
My favorite thing about ECD is the process where we choose how we want to feel, may it be through change, at work, or even with friends and family.
When I go through this part of the ECD conversation, with coaching clients and workshop participants, it’s always something people find very helpful.
Thinking of how we want to feel as we go through any situation gives us a sense of control. As humans, we like feeling in control (at the very least in control of ourselves). When we choose to feel “connected” through change, it affects how we go about that change. It allows us to think of the things we want to be doing so that we can stay “connected” with others, even when the change is overwhelming.
A workshop participant shared that for him to stay “connected”, he was going to do 3 things: a) schedule check-in conversations with his direct reports; b) spend Saturday afternoons playing with his 2 kids; and c) walk around the park on Sunday mornings.
His 3 answers were very different from each other, but it shows what feeling “connected” means for him. It wasn’t just about “connected” at work, which is where the change was happening.
Our emotions have a huge impact on our lives, especially when we go through change. Instead of avoiding and neglecting them, we can use these to create a better experience for ourselves, and others, as we go through change. While change can make us feel out of control, our emotions can give us back some sense of control as we decide how we want to navigate the world around us.
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REFERENCES
Gagen MacDonald. (2020, February 27). Gagen MacDonald. Retrieved July 14, 2023, from https://www.gagenmacdonald.com/blog/the-power-of-emotional-culture-bringing-your-whole-self-to-work