Last week I wrote a little bit about how I make decisions and interpret the world, I am much more comfortable picking up feelings, both internally and what is happening around me. I struggle to with creating and interrogating logical structures. I am fine if someone provides me with a structure that is not overly complicated, in fact I rely on structures and processes provided by others. What I am able to do with ease is read the emotional temperature of a team or room. Relationships and the developing and maintaining of them as you may have guessed is always my focus. This is why I love coaching people so much I love to listen to people and understand their world. What I do suffer from is an urge to help and get overly involved in the solutions of the problems people face. This is the other side of emotional intelligence for me, I am motivated by the need to be useful and to maintain harmony, and when it is unchecked can cause my problems. Unregulated I have an overwhelming urge to help, which turns into problem solving and advising which is never helpful. Let me explain where that comes from for me.
As mentioned above harmony is a strong motivator for me. This comes from my childhood. My Mum always wanted us all to be happy and for everyone to get on. Any disagreements no matter how small were to be stopped and avoided at all costs. I learned to read emotions and please people to maintain harmony. Which in our society is a very agreeable way to be. A lot of people like me because of this. On the whole caring for people and helping them paid off, and feeling of being useful was so powerful that it became an important part of my personality from childhood onwards. In fact I have based my career on this, it is the secret of my success. It does however come with a price. It takes an emotional toll, tuning into people’s emotions requires you to be empathetic. To be able to understand and articulate the emotions of others you have to connect with the emotion you are witnessing to emotions that you have experience of, which can result in you feeling that emotion. For instance if when listening to someone they sound as if they are feeling anxious about something, I will connect with a time when I felt anxious to understand what that feels like to me to be able to use that experience to be able to articulate what I am witnessing back to them. This means for a moment I feel that emotion. When I am feeling balanced and my bandwidth is wide enough that is fine, the emotion will pass quickly. If I am unbalanced, and my bandwidth is reduced it can be quite difficult to shift that feeling. When I am at my lowest this can be quite extreme, and my empathy can go wild. There have been times when I have heard a child crying and felt myself being so profoundly bereft that I have nearly cried. I once saw a lady sat on the bus that looked really tired and fed up, she looked beaten, as if the world that day had chewed her up and spat her out. I didn’t speak to her I just noticed her but for the whole journey and for the rest of the evening I felt despair. That was an extreme but it is something I have to notice and keep in check. Sometimes this unbalance comes from what is happening in my life, other times it comes from coaching and supporting people without having an outlet. The busyness of supporting people, and not seeking my own support is something that happens in cycles. For instance it is busy at the moment, there is a lot of upheaval and change in the world around, no matter who you are or what you do, and this results in people reaching out. I live in the same world so experience what they are experiencing, I get caught up in the work and do not find the time seek support. As a result my empathic response starts to become unregulated, this increases the urge to help by problem solving to reduce the emotional response for the person I am coaching and therefore reduce my emotional response. That rarely works, I would then start to feel unhappy with my approach as a coach and if I am not careful can spiral.
The reason why I decided to write about this today is after a conversation I was having on Friday with a group of Health Professionals who were on the Clinical Supervision training I was delivering. As we were practicing having restorative and developmental conversations with people, we explored how easy it is to fall into the trap of problem solving and helping, and how important it is to understand where this comes from and how to regulate ourselves.
When it comes to regulation and maintaining a balance, I don’t think there is one single approach. The most important is to have an outlet to talk with someone else. Which I must admit, I could be better at, and have more regular system. I have plenty of people to do this with, but it is something I need to sort out. Another approach is to write stuff down, which is what I am doing now. I also use mindfulness before and after coaching sessions, and at the end of every day. Mindful meditation just allows me to hold my thoughts and feelings more loosely and not hold onto to them to tightly, it stops me moving into problem solving mode and allows me to see unhelpful thoughts without judging them, so when I connect with emotions in the coaching sessions I can let them go quite quickly without hanging onto the feeling.
Connected Coaching 