Difficult Conversations: Affect Labeling
In This Episode
Have your emotions gotten the best of you during a difficult time? Learn how affect labeling can help you self-regulate and advocate for what you need.
Transcript
Vanessa Tanicien, narrating: Hello, and welcome to the leader lab, the podcast powered by LifeLabsLearning, where we study what exceptional leaders do differently. Each week, my lab mates and I, we'll distill our findings into powerful tipping point skills. The small changes that tip over to make the biggest impact in the shortest time. The result? You become a better leader, faster. I'm your host, Vanessa Tanicien, a leadership trainer at LifeLabsLearning.
Vanessa Tanicien: And currently we're exploring the art and science of managing difficult conversations. How to turn conflict into points of connection. This week, we have Massella Dukuly back with us. You might remember her from our "Two-Hander Episode", and if you haven't listened yet, go check it out with so much out of controlness happening in 2020, the "Two-Hander" has done wonders for my peace of mind. Massella is a coach and facilitator here at LifeLabs, and she's also the host of the "Keeping Score Podcast." And, as of last week, she is the proud owner of a new Peloton bike and she won't stop talking about it. Welcome back to the Lab, Massella. Happy to see you.
Massella Dukuly: Thanks for having me back V. I am very obsessed with my Peloton. Yes, I'm officially one of those people.
Vanessa Tanicien: I'll try not to hold it against you. No shade to all you Peloton lovers out there. So Massella, what difficult conversations technique have you brought for us to experiment with today?
Massella Dukuly: I'm so excited to talk about Affect Labeling today, which is essentially all about putting our feelings into words. For me, it's been immensely helpful, both at work and at home, which feels like my whole life because 2020, right?
Vanessa Tanicien: I feel that.
Massella Dukuly: Really helps me to stay calm, especially during conflict, especially during difficult conversations. Affect labeling is actually an emotion regulation tool. Researchers Jared B Torey and Matthew B Lieberman determined it to be an implicit emotion regulation tool, because it often doesn't even feel like a regulatory process.
Vanessa Tanicien: So I can get the benefits without feeling I'm doing the heavy lifting. Okay. Sign me up. How does this work?
Massella Dukuly: Yeah, I'm really glad that you asked. So essentially it will allow you to more clearly articulate what you need and what really matters, which in turn makes it much easier for us to overcome conflict and manage any difficult conversations that we might be a part of.
Vanessa Tanicien: That sounds like a dream.
Massella Dukuly: It can be your reality. And that's —
Vanessa Tanicien: So exciting. Tell me more.
Massella Dukuly: Yeah, let's talk about emotion expression. So there are four steps to emotion expression. The first is the situation. What's happened? This is the context. Second we think about attention. This is what we choose to focus on, which is interesting because each of us are going to have different types of biases that lead us in one direction or the next, the third step is appraisal, essentially what we tell ourselves about the situation. And the fourth and final step, which is what we'll focus on today. What we choose to do, this is our response.
Vanessa Tanicien: Got you. So step number four, response. What I know from being a human out in the world is that a lot of people try to mask their emotions when they're upset in one way or another. So I'm curious, what's up with that? And what does emotion regulation say about that?
Massella Dukuly: Yeah, it's super natural and human to think it's important to mask our emotions. I would say that we've been socialized this way, but emotion regulation is not about becoming a robot. The idea here isn't to have no emotions or to be in total control all the time. Not only can emotions actually help us when it comes to making decisions, but this is our way of connecting with other people. So when we allow ourselves, especially as leaders to be vulnerable and to show our true feelings, we actually end up building trust, and ultimately we feel healthier and happier.
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay. So bottom line, don't be a robot, but —
Massella Dukuly: Yep.
Vanessa Tanicien: We are understanding our emotions and somehow using them to be our best selves. Okay. Well that tracks, because what I know from research is that hiding one's feelings is physiologically taxing. It wears us out. And one for particular study, they showed films to two different groups of people. One group was told to suppress the reactions while the other group was just told to watch the film. And what was interesting is that for the suppression group physiologically, when they had to watch emotionally positive or negative films, they had an increased sympathetic activation of their cardiovascular system. That's a fancy way of saying that their heart was beating faster. They were in that flight or fight mode. So it's a pretty tricky thing.
Massella Dukuly: And I love that research. It's really easy for us to assume that focusing our emotion without trying to change them or problem solving, would just suck and not necessarily make us feel better. But on the contrary, research has found that labeling what we're feeling actually really curbs the way that our emotions are expressed, not only in our brains, in our body, but of course, in our behaviors.
Vanessa Tanicien: Well, that's pretty compelling this idea of simply by labeling the emotion, we can take away some of the power it generally has over us, and then puts our thinking brain back in the driver's seat.
Massella Dukuly: Precisely. The ability to accurately label what you are feeling is one of the biggest levers for self calming in any situation, more tangibly ethic labeling, which is what we're focused on today, deeply impacts how we communicate to others and how we might even reframe a situation prior to our response.
Vanessa Tanicien: So I'm curious, how does this play out in a difficult conversation at work? I can imagine that talking about emotions would put people on edge in the workplace.
Massella Dukuly: Yeah. I would say that's definitely something people might be concerned about, but let's think about it this way. Let's say that you were scheduled for an unexpected hour-long meeting, right before a huge presentation that you have coming up. I don't know about you, but I don't do well with that sort of thing.
Vanessa Tanicien: Neither do I.
Massella Dukuly: Yeah. And you were going to use that time to prepare and now it's gone. So without thinking, you immediately follow up with the person who scheduled the meeting and you say, what's this all about? This doesn't necessarily put this person in a position to even answer you productively. So instead with Affect Labeling, you would take time to pause and ask yourself, "Vanessa, what feeling are you really experiencing here?"
Vanessa Tanicien: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Massella Dukuly: And you realize that you're anxious about not being able to prepare for this huge presentation. It allows us to settle into the reality of that emotion and better communicate. And maybe instead you say something like, "Hey, is there any way for us to move this because I'm preparing for this huge presentation?"
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay. So I think it's time for us to try this out. What do you think?
Massella Dukuly: Definitely, let's do it. Listeners and Vanessa, I want you to imagine that you are on a call with a vendor. You realize that your team has sent over the wrong shipping dates and addresses. So a double whammy. You need this material and the customer service person that you are working with is less than helpful. Let's just say that. Your manager's disappointed. Your team is panicking. Yeah. It's pretty rough. You are about to have a status meeting with the team. How do you feel?
Vanessa Tanicien: Honestly, I would be so mad as a person with a little bit of customer service in my background, way back when customer service gets my goat, but also just annoyed that we got this wrong on two different planes. Like how do you get both the addresses and the dates wrong? It makes no sense. So a lot of negative self-talk and blaming would definitely be happening.
Massella Dukuly: Very normal, very human, negative self-talk, frustration, anger, all of those things. So let's actually put affect labeling into practice. Let's go a layer deeper beyond the frustration, beyond the negative self-talk, what is the feeling at the root of those emotions?
Vanessa Tanicien: Honestly, I would be wondering how this even happened. So if I had to label, I'd probably be deeply disappointed and definitely embarrassed.
Massella Dukuly: Yeah.
Vanessa Tanicien: And maybe a little sad that this presentation is just not going to go how I originally envisioned it.
Massella Dukuly: Yeah. Great.
Vanessa Tanicien: Is that great?
Massella Dukuly: Not that you're ashamed, but that you've labeled it. So the trick to this is that the label creates a distance from the feeling, we end up activating the neocortex versus our amygdala by realizing, okay, I'm upset. And knowing this, there's an opportunity for you to logically think about how to move forward productively.
Vanessa Tanicien: That does sound nice. So you're telling me, you can either live in that embarrassment or sadness or instead say, you know what? I won't have the materials needed, but here's how I'll communicate that to the team and ensure that we figure something out. It feels like affect labeling takes us from being stuck to making some progress.
Massella Dukuly: Yep. You got it V. That's it. Use your words to honor and express the emotions that you're experiencing. And when you're in difficult conversations, you want to make sure that you're using affect labeling to help you communicate where you stand and what you need more clearly. Basically you go from that mental hijack to using your thinking brain.
Vanessa Tanicien: Okay. So let's get into that leader hot seat. How would we be able to use affect labeling with our teams?
Massella Dukuly: Allow your team to express their emotions by labeling them. When you don't label, you put people in a position of potentially needing to mask their emotions. When we're masking our emotions, there's a great chance that we are coping in unhealthy ways. We're not expressing ourselves. And honestly, we end up solving all the wrong types of problems. So instead, the benefit here is for you to create an avenue for your team to be able to say, I'm upset by this thing, but let's take it another level deeper. Here's the emotion that's showing up for me in truth. Here's what I actually need.
Vanessa Tanicien: And that brings us to our leader lab experiment of the week. What should we have folks try out in their laboratory of life, Massella?
Massella Dukuly: This week my friends, when you are feeling a sense of annoyance, frustration, or really any other feeling, especially when having a difficult conversation, pause for a second and label it. What is it exactly? And then when you've done that, can you name what you need? Because having flexibility in terms of our emotions means that we can feel the full swing of life and have full decision power over how we want to act in response to that feeling.
Vanessa Tanicien: And that's a wrap of another episode of the LeaderLab. Make sure you subscribe so that you don't miss an episode and share so that we can all make tough conversations, easier for each other. Share insights and feedback with us on Twitter at LifeLabsLearn, or on LinkedIn at LifeLabslearning. And if you'd like to bring training to your team, head on over to LifeLabsLearning.com. See you in the lab next week.
