By Laura Simpson, Executive Coach at Altura Coaching
‘Stop being emotional’ was a phrase flung my way more times than I like to remember throughout my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. I grew up in a very loving household, but one where stoicism was encouraged and displays of emotion were ‘not the done thing’. We all like to believe we are rational beings who occasionally feel, yet research shows time and time again that we’re emotional beings who occasionally think. Emotional literacy-the ability to recognise, understand and manage emotions in yourself, and perceive and influence them in others- can be traced back as far as Darwin’s work on the importance of emotional expression for survival. Asking someone to ‘stop being emotional’ is nonsensical because you’re asking them to deny their essence as a human being. What that sentence really means is ‘your expression of emotion is making me feel uncomfortable.’ I always knew that, contrary to warnings that emotions would lower my workplace credibility, being highly emotionally literate would be key to my success. I haven’t been proved wrong yet.
Law is a profession which rewards highly analytical, cognitive ability- and rightly so. Nevertheless, there is most definitely a place for EQ alongside IQ: lawyers who have both are the ones who shine the brightest.
The pandemic has few silver linings, but one is the increased conversation in law firms and wider business about wellbeing and mental health. Every firm worth their salt now offers subscriptions to mental health apps, a comprehensive EAP and free yoga classes. We want people to bring their full selves to work, we love talking about psychological safety and the importance of vulnerability and authenticity in transformational leadership. We are all familiar with the findings of Google’s Project Aristotle. However, the myth that professionalism and emotions should walk on opposite sides of the street still seeps into every corner of our workplaces. I’ll always remember a former colleague telling me the story of an associate who was going through a period of personal loss. When I asked said colleague how our associate was managing, she replied ‘she’s getting her head down and getting on with it, she’s brilliant’. If that’s what brilliant looks like, where is the space for employees to hold their hands up and ask for support? If the culture doesn’t reflect and embed the content of annual wellbeing and mental health programmes, what returns are firms getting on the thousands of pounds invested?
The science journalist and psychologist Daniel Goleman came up with the Emotional and Social Intelligence Model in the 1990s. The model sets out that the foundation of emotional literacy is self-awareness, which leads to increased regulation (self-management), which then leads to higher resilience and sustained focus on goals despite setbacks. It enables you to read people more easily (social management) and in turn, build better relationships (relationship management). Lawyers and law firms should care about emotional literacy from the perspectives of wellbeing and commercial success. Healthcare and liability costs are lower (think about the SRA’s recent Workplace Culture Thematic Review), and those who struggle to manage their emotions have fewer resources available to devote to chargeable hours. An American Bar Association article entitled ‘How emotional intelligence makes you a better lawyer’ references work by Harvard law professor Heidi Gardner. Gardner worked with a global firm to confirm statistically that those with the emotional literacy skills to collaborate successfully were the ones with the highest revenues.
Research by Marc Brackett, Founding Director of the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence, shows that emotional literacy is positively correlated with attention and learning, judgement and decision-making, relationship quality, physical and mental health, and creativity and performance. His globally-used ‘RULER’ framework outlines the 5 key skills of emotional literacy: recognising emotions, understanding them, labelling them, expressing emotions healthily and regulating them. In her recent book, ‘Atlas of the Heart’, emotions researcher Brené Brown shares that the average number of emotions recognised by more than 7000 US citizens surveyed was three: anger, sadness and joy. When pushed to define anger and sadness, many couldn’t. The issue with not being able to accurately label our emotions is that ‘misdiagnosing’ what we’re feeling is unlikely to signpost us towards what we need. As Susan David points out in her book ‘Emotional Agility’, emotions aren’t directives, they’re data. Data that, if accurate, can have a huge impact on our effectiveness, success and overall happiness in and out of work.
One of the cornerstones of ‘The O Shaped Lawyer’ model, about which much has been published recently as it makes its way into legal education, is the need to be open-minded. Legal education often reinforces a perfectionistic, ‘black and white’ way of thinking which is contrary to a growth mindset. Emotional literacy is fundamental to learning and growth; the more comfortable we feel with our emotions, the more we can move from a place of emotional rigidity to one of emotional agility. We start to look for reasons why we might be wrong as well as right; we review our embedded beliefs and update them based on new data.
We want our leaders and teammates to be open and vulnerable, and research shows that when we put down our armour, those around us are much more likely to trust us. However, a word to the wise: emotional literacy doesn’t mean we should become what author and speaker Liz Fosslein calls ‘an emotions firehose’. Oversharing and overemoting decreases trust and undermines credibility. Fosslien advises us to lean into ‘selective vulnerability’: expressing emotions to a healthy degree, one which humanises us and fosters relationship-building, without sharing every single detail of how we’re feeling and subsequently ruining others’ belief in our ability to be resourceful and resilient.
Laura Simpson is the Founder and Executive Coach of Altura Coaching. Laura has a 10-year HR career in Spain and the UK spanning FMCG, Finance and Law. She headed up Graduate and Lateral Recruitment & Development at Katten Muchin Rosenman UK LLP, and qualified as a coach in 2020. Laura supports lawyers and others working in high performance environments, and is committed to helping firms build workplaces where everyone can thrive.
For useful resources, please see LawCare’s ‘Fit for Law- Emotional Competence & Professional Resilience’ programme, and the Digital Conversations organised by ‘Advancing Wellness in Law’.
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