Recalling the day when my therapist shared her observation that I was not in touch with my emotions, triggered the memory of Goldie Hawn’s character, Elise Eliot-Atchison in the First Wives Club when she learns of a similar observation about her emotions.
“You think that because I’m a movie star I don’t have feelings. Well, you’re wrong. I’m an actress. I’ve got all of them.”
– Elise Eliot-Atchison
I’m not a movie star. I am an actor. So to hear about yourself that “you’re not in touch with your emotions” is on par with learning poor acting skills. It’s a bit of a mountain to face and climb. Yet, I took on the task to scale that mountainside which soon revealed evidence that Indeed, I was not demonstrating being in touch with my emotions.
Instead, I seemed to hide my emotions in a nonchalant way I responded to important news, issues, and happenings in my environment. It wasn’t that I wasn’t in touch with my emotions. It was that I managed them to the point of often leaving others unsure just how aware I was that being diagnosed with prostate cancer is severe news. I took the news in stride and I shared the news with equal parts of concern and confidence. I also knew that should I choose to go to a very dark emotional place about having it, the severity increases in my mind and body. Then it can be a matter of time before I head down a rabbit hole each time dark news passes through my life.
It is one thing to have a choice in expressing emotion and to decide not to express yourself. It is quite a different matter to consciously choose to emote or not because it will help you cause or hurt it. I know that heightening my expressiveness with a fellow enthusiast regarding how much I love chocolate will most likely inspire a desirable conversation about the heavenly brown, silky substance. Raising that level of expressiveness to a fan of Hershey is an example of lacking care or knowledge of your audience.
It takes a deliberate mindset to steer emotions in such a way that they bring value to a communication interaction. Less effort can easily bring about miscommunication. Or at best, a communication that comes across as foggy and non-specific.
It’s at the level of specificity that effective leaders go beneath the surface to what we really mean when we say what we say to others. At the level of meaning, we profit from mindful choices of language from which all things are born. Therefore we are wise to give thought to what we say given our words will manifest in a tangible way. Put another way, once we speak and take action, there’s no taking it back.