Check your emotions at the door. You’re not professional if you show emotion at work. If you show emotion, you are weak. Keep your personal life separate from your work life. These are all pieces of professional advice you have likely been offered at some point or another in your career. Emotions get a bad rap, which is ironic, given that emotions are a fundamental piece of being human.
What if instead of giving into the negativity surrounding showing our emotions, we shifted the narrative to focus on how we can better ourselves by effectively utilizing our emotions to make us better?
“Effectively processing what you feel gives you the power to do more than bring your whole self to work: it enables you to bring your best self to work.” (Fosslein & West Duffy, p13). Liz Fosslien & Mollie West Duffy have created a space where you as the reader learn from their experiences and research, while also being given pieces to consider to add to your personal roadmap as you explore learning how to effectively process your emotions. No Hard Feelings is full of funny anecdotes, great graphics, and tons of great resources! Liz & Mollie help you to reframe how you might view emotions in the workplace, and help you consider how you can work to bring your best self to work.
What I love about Liz & Mollie’s style is their ability to make the reader feel like they’re sitting down over coffee with the authors discussing the topics in the book. They also incorporate fantastic visual graphics to help reinforce the points, but also give life to real scenarios we’ve all encountered. The graphics showcase a number of things throughout the book, but what I enjoyed most were the illustrations that highlighted the, “everyone was thinking this in their head but might not admit in out loud,” kind of scenarios. Many will make you laugh-out-loud and say to yourself, “Wow. That is so true.” The authors are honest while keeping the content light and fun.
To give you a peek into the book, each chapter is dedicated to one of the “7 New Rules of Emotion at Work” that Liz & Mollie created.
The 7 New Rules of Emotion at Work
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- Be less passionate about your job.
- Inspire yourself.
- Emotion is part of the equation.
- Psychological safety first.
- Your feelings aren’t facts.
- Emotional culture cascades from you.
- Be selectively vulnerable.
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Each chapter takes a deep dive into how these new rules can look in practice, while also giving the reader tips and tricks to apply to your personal circumstances. Each chapter ends with takeaways, which are helpful in highlighting the main points as you think about how each chapter applies to you and your personal situation.
This book is especially helpful if you are a supervisor or manager. Managing others is can be focused on the to do list and projects at hand, but more importantly, it’s helping your team grow and learn — and that comes with all the feelings. We are all human, so we all have emotions. We each manage and show emotions differently. It’s important for managers and supervisors help their team personally grow in how they manage their emotions in workplace situations. I believe that Liz & Mollie have created a work of art, full of tools to add to your personal toolbox that will help every single person in any given workplace.
As you head into the new year and look to challenge yourself to grow in new ways, add this book to your 2023 reading list. You won’t regret it!