TLDR: Reflect on what a limited emotional range is doing to you as a professional. If you expand your emotional range, you expand the vibrance of your experience of the world -- the complexity and depth of the world, and also, your solutions and options, and through this, your potential for achieving all you desire.
Is your emotional range a few colors, or a magnificent rainbow palette?
I was recently struggling with a problem, a very difficult decision on which I had little opportunity to get input from others, and much to concern me on the outcome. It came to me that I was approaching it with a very limited emotional range and that this was part of the struggle and barrier I was experiencing. I had to agree with that insight.
That experience opened up today's topic, the value of having -- and in fact, developing -- a much broader emotional range.
We live in the age of limited emotion. Modern society with its 24/7 consumption of entertainment has shackled our primary experience to the narrow range of emotion expressed in movie and TV scripts. Think of the emotional range of your average favorite show. Reflect on how minimal it really us. Tune in to its level of manufactured drama and the repeated patterns of emotional reaction. All are fairly limited and of course, all framed to accommodate the template of resolution or cliffhanger within the hour or half-hour time slot. They are designed to manipulate your emotions accordingly, to ramp them up and then drop them down into a neat resolution (or next-episode promise) at the proper time. Now, magnify that effect by realizing just how many hours you've spent in thrall to entertainment, between childhood and now, and how that's framed to you what is possible or typical as an emotional range.
Yes, of course continue to enjoy your fave shows! Just realize that what they frame, is designed around specific emotional modulation. Your life IRL, has MUCH broader range of joy, potential, serendipity and more.
Your family of origin likely also suffered from the limited emotional range of the post-industrial era and transmitted that to you. Rather than a life filled with range, depth, and subtlety, you may have learned that there were "good" and "bad" emotions, and that only "good" emotions were permissible if you were to be judged a "good person". In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell brings up the difference in mindset between children raised in wealthy families, and those raised in middle-class or lower-class families, and how the former end up with a distinct advantage of an emotional range that also involves creating what they want out of the situation, while the latter end up just feeling they have to cope with whatever is given to them.
From my own work, these mindsets also reflect the emotional range you may have experienced as what is "OK" and "Not-OK" within your family structure. Whether it was the requirement of your repeated submission to a "my way or the highway" parental bullying, or an immediate family invalidation of sadness or any of the grief-level emotions ("you have no reason to be sad, dear, we are a happy family"), your family's approach to child-rearing, to work, and to life, may have built a toolkit with far fewer options than are really working for you today. As we know, family life translates directly to how you live, feel, and work in the workplace -- so pay attention to what went on in the past, to understand what's going on now.
Constant participation in social media also rewards only the short-phrase reaction or the momentary flash of happy, angry, or sad. The mini-info-bite, the emoji-reactions, and constantly flowing feed rarely support more complex reactions or deeper responses. It is designed to be an ongoing consumable, rather than a reflective experience.
Having a limited emotional range makes it difficult to heal from the heart. Opening up to understanding your own broad and complex emotional range is a key factor in healing as a wounded professional.
Opening up to understanding your own broad and complex emotional range is a key factor in healing as a wounded professional.
How Expansive Is Your Toolkit?
If you learned only a few emotional notes, that has left you with a limited toolkit. Happy. Sad. Angry. Scared. Like having only a child's primary colors to paint with, these limit your options and prevent you from understanding, feeling, and expressing the great richness of your own life.
This can also be preventing you from:
feeling a deep appreciation of the sacredness of your everyday life
developing complex and fruitful emotional responses to work and life problems
creating a much more amazing range of solutions that surprise and delight you
having the willingness to dive deeply into difficult and challenging issues that have the potential to lift you higher than you've ever gone before.
So let's change that.
Exercise - Increasing Your Emotional Range
Close your eyes and ask yourself to visualize your emotional range. You can see it as a musical instrument such as a piano, as a paint set (both are good metaphors for this exercise), or as any other metaphor that works for you. What do you see? How complex is it? How many choices are there? Which choices are "OK" or are habitual? Which are not? Is what you see a child's piano with a few plinky notes, or a grand piano with a full symphonic range? Is it a primary paint set with plain red, green, yellow and blue, or is it the deluxe kit of paint tubes that a Michelangelo or Monet would use?
Next, ask yourself how well this is serving you. When faced with a problem, what are your typical reactions? Do you immediately feel Angry? Fearful, run away? Defeated, quit before you start? Which tunes, notes, or colors do you reach for often, and how well does this work for you? What was the range of your family, and did it serve them? Can you find places where this limited set of reactions is in itself the barrier, rather than the thing you're feeling is a problem?
Finally, envision your range as being the full, rich, top of the line. Again, a symphony hall's grand piano, capable of expressing everything from the softest grieving note to the most complex, joyful jazz. Or a master's collection of paints and pigments. Be attentive to the subtleties and the combinations you can create with THESE choices, rather than the limited primary notes or colors. Feel deeply into this. What becomes different for you? Can you make the choice to work with THIS resonant emotional toolkit, rather than your previous limited one?
BONUS: Envision a workplace situation where you realize that a limited emotional range has kept you stuck in one of the simpler reactions (angry, sad, scared, defeated, etc.). With your new symphony of sound or color, what new reactions can you appreciate? Look at the situation with new eyes. What insights appear and how can you use these in strength and leadership to make this better?
Companions On The Road
Realize that others may not accept your new emotional range. If they are still bound to their primary paint colors, they may not even acknowledge that the richness and complexity even exists, or is permissible. I do know people for whom life is either, quite literally, "happy" or "sad" with no range in between. It is impossible to explain to them my deeper, more intense, or more complex feelings as they simply don't have the vocabulary or the awareness. They even deny that such richness exists, is valid, or is possible.
But realize, that you do have companions on this journey. Awaken to a more complex richness of emotional response, and you will find them.
A grand piano... a master's paint set... take these on and do good with these new tools!
Be well on your journey as you #healworklife.
Hi, I’m Katherine Lieber. I've walked the road of the Wounded Healer and the Wounded Professional, and now I help others to overcome their barriers as well. Formerly a Fortune 500 tech-guru, trainer and innovator, my mission is to assist other high performing professionals grow in leadership, self-care, strategic growth, and strength so they can give their true potential to the world.
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