The Coach: Feelings and when it’s right to express them

I had an uncomfortable interaction with someone close to me recently when he calmly and articulately expressed how some of my behaviours had made him feel.

He observed that I hadn’t given him time or space to talk about something important to him and had, in fact, talked over him on more than one occasion.

I didn’t take it well. I am a professional listener – being an attentive listener is core to how I see myself and how I make my living. To be picked up on something that I feel I do well on a daily basis by someone so important to me went to the heart of how I see myself and how I see our relationship. There were tears.

There was also anger, and whilst I am not proud of it, I still don’t believe that some of this anger wasn’t justified.

I was angry that this person was very aware that I am dealing with some Big Life Stuff, and that being a good listener is so important to my sense of self that his comments were bound to touch a nerve.

If I am honest, I felt that he should’ve cut me some slack and kept his feelings to himself.

This made me think – when is it okay to express our feelings and when should we hold back? Does the ‘right to express our feelings’ come with a concomitant responsibility to consider the impact this may have on the other person, for example, someone we know may already be feeling a little shaky? Or does it somehow ‘trump’ it?

Of course, it depends to a large extent on the words we use when we do express our feelings. In the situation I’m talking about, the words were very well chosen and sensitive, but they did not soften the essential message, which was, as I saw it, that I had somehow failed them and was being called out on it.

On any other day, I might not have had the same reaction, but on this day it was just all too much, and I gave in to my hurt and anger. And therein lies the rub.

When we express our feelings, however carefully and sensitively, we have no way of knowing how they will be received by the person we are expressing them to – partly because we have no idea what is going on with them. This can have consequences that are potentially damaging to both parties and to their relationship.

Being in touch with our feelings is a good thing, but being overly in touch with them may explain why some people feel overwhelmed with anxiety and struggle to navigate relatively common situations at work, and perhaps in relationships too

This applies just as much in the workplace as it does at home. Take the example of someone who is disappointed when their salary expectations are not met. “I don’t feel valued” is how it makes them feel, but if they express this feeling to a harassed business owner, who is acutely aware of the financial uncertainty of the times we are living in, it may not go down too well.

By correlating the fact of the situation (they didn’t get the salary they asked for) with how it makes them feel (undervalued), and then articulating this to their boss, they are attaching an emotional value to the lack of a raise that may reveal more about them than they intended and that has nothing to do with how they are thought of in the workplace.

Another example is how we can jump to conclusions when someone doesn’t respond to our email within a day or two. We may tell ourselves a story about how carefully we crafted that email, how it’s about something very important to us. By not replying to it promptly, the recipient is telling us that we, or the issue we have written about, are not important to them. We are not a priority. Before we know it, we’ve created a whole narrative in which we are the lead player and the other person has just a supporting role – with no lines. We then enter into a difficult conversation with the person who didn’t reply to the email about how their actions (or lack of them) have made us feel, and, unsurprisingly, it may not go down too well.

Rather than just expressing those feelings, these situations – and many others like them – would have benefitted from a little more critical thinking.

Being in touch with our feelings is a good thing, but being overly in touch with them may explain why some people feel overwhelmed with anxiety and struggle to navigate relatively common situations at work, and perhaps in relationships too.

There is definitely a balance to be struck between, on the one hand, walking through the world open-hearted, sensitive to our own emotions and the importance of expressing them, and, on the other, accommodating the realities of that world – one of which is that there are times when it is good to speak, and others when it is better to hold our counsel. Deciding between the two is the challenge.