The Art of Empathy (44 page)

But thresholds may have effects on memory, so a word to the wise: if your workplace includes a lot of activity where people have to move from room to room to deliver information or complete their tasks, you might want to
reduce
the thresholds (for instance, by painting the doorways the same color as the walls),
so that your coworkers don't lose their flow and their focus every time they cross into a new area. If the thresholds at work can't be modified, and you're one of the people who has to walk through possibly forgetfulness-inducing gauntlets every day, you can support your brain by writing down everything you need to do
before
you move through those event boundaries. Just don't forget to bring your list with you!

The physical condition of your workplace can support you empathically as well as physically, because an organized, well-defined, and comfortable physical environment can help you tolerate the often-disorganized emotional environment at work. Physical and aesthetic comfort can help you feel grounded, focused, and resourced, and this calm, steady state can help you perform some of your most important (yet usually unpaid) work of all: emotion work.

REVISITING EMOTION WORK
⁵⁴

In
Chapter 7
, I introduced the concept of
emotion work,
which comes from sociologist Arlie Hochschild's groundbreaking 1983 book,
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling.
In the book, Hochschild writes about the emotion work of flight attendants who, no matter what perils or discomforts they face, are expected to continually offer a calm, helpful, and accommodating demeanor to passengers. Although these demeanor rules are not written out explicitly in job descriptions, they're an intrinsic part of what we've all learned to expect (and even demand) from flight attendants.

Hochschild's concept of emotion work really helps us look at the often-unwritten emotional rules and empathic behaviors that are expected from us in the workplace—that is, how we must manage our own emotions and the emotions of others in order to get our work done. For instance, if airline passengers are rude, a good flight attendant won't generally snap at them or ignore their requests, as he might if his friends or family treated him rudely. In fact, his normal human reactions would be frowned upon by the airline; therefore, part of his job description (stated or not) is to deal with rudeness and bad behavior in unusual or even counterproductive (to him) ways. This is emotion work, and in many cases, it's actually enforced empathizing. It's a part of our social contract with each other, and though it's not usually spoken of explicitly as a job skill (or written down explicitly in a job description), emotion work is possibly the most important job skill you possess.

As you go through your day, pay attention to the emotion work of the people who serve you and of the people you serve. You probably have very specific (yet unspoken) emotion work rules for the owners and employees of businesses you visit (especially restaurants and stores), even if you've never set eyes on anyone in the business before. One unspoken expectation is that people in service or retail positions
must
be empathic. They
must
appear to care about you and your latte, or your shoes, or your cat food—even if they're making minimum wage and you're wealthy—even if they're well-dressed, and you just got out of the gym with your hair still wet. It doesn't matter—your position as a customer (or even as a potential customer) entitles you to free empathy and respect. Expectations of emotion work and professionalized empathy are everywhere, such that you and I know how every person in a business is supposed to behave toward us, how we're supposed to behave toward them, and how other customers are supposed to behave toward both of us. Everyone has a specific part to play and a specific emotional and empathic performance that is required. Strangely, most of us have never been explicitly taught about any of this emotion work; we're just supposed to have picked it up through cultural osmosis.

At your own job, you have specific emotion work and empathy work expectations for yourself, your coworkers, your employees and contractors, and your managers or bosses. Yet even though we all
know
how everyone is supposed to behave, this knowledge is not made clear, and a great deal of the trouble I see in the workplace revolves around emotion work that either is not being performed (the
problem
employee) or is being performed but not valued (the put-upon or heading-for-burnout employee). In many cases, the rules of emotion work require that we behave inauthentically with each other and toward ourselves. The workplace can become really miserable when there is trouble in the sphere of emotion work.

OUR UNDERGROUND AWARENESS OF EMOTION WORK

As a younger woman, I was hilariously out of place in many jobs, because emotion work was so obvious to me that I didn't realize other people couldn't see it. I tended to get into trouble because I would say out loud, “Hey, why don't you tell your assistant the truth instead of doing his work for him?” or “That person is working
way
past her abilities, and she's bossy and snappy because of it,” or “This person is heading for burnout, and if you call yourself a manager, then
manage
the tension in this job and protect your
workers!” Empathically speaking, I saw poorly managed emotions, unjust emotion work, and enforced, inauthentic empathy as an integral part of the unprofitability and inefficiency of the workplace. However, until I discovered Hochschild's work, I had no vocabulary for it.

Because I had so many persistent questions about the emotionally detrimental atmosphere of the workplace, I decided to minor in the sociology of work and occupations (this is in addition to my BA in social science and my work as a researcher). I also became certified in career testing and guidance and in human resource administration, because I wanted to know what the experts say about this situation. But after four years of study, I found that the experts say almost nothing.

Career guidance and HR administration programs spend almost
no
time on emotion work and enforced empathy requirements. There are a few psychology courses here and there, but the focus is more about administrative organization first and how to deal with problem employees second. There's very little understanding of the nuances of emotion work and the ways that an unsupportive workplace can create an unproductive emotional atmosphere, which will then create problem employees! There's also very little awareness of
why
people burn out; in fact, a great deal of the burnout response and prevention I was taught focused on making job tasks more interesting or varied, but there was almost no awareness of the burnout potential of unsupported, unjust, or unreasonable emotion work and enforced empathy.

Sadly, unless they've done extracurricular study, the career guidance professionals whose job it is to help us find work and the HR professionals who oversee the workplace usually have no direct education in or understanding of emotion work, which is the central empathic skill that makes the workplace functional (or, more commonly, dysfunctional). There is a saying that “People don't quit their jobs; they quit their managers.” The fact is that very few people leave jobs because their daily tasks were too hard; instead, they often leave because the emotional and empathic environment was not managed effectively. It's an ongoing problem that the workplace as an entity does not have a handle on at all. As such, I didn't pursue career guidance or HR after I finished my certifications; however, I did discover precisely why emotion work problems in the workplace aren't being addressed. We have on-site specialists and processes for almost every other problem that exists in the workplace, but the HR professionals whose job it is to humanize the
workplace have not been reliably educated or trained to understand emotion work. Therefore, it's up to you and me.

BRINGING EMOTION WORK INTO THE OPEN

Empaths tend to act as emotion work janitors, in the workplace and in their personal relationships. We who are empathically sensitive tend to pick up on—and then address—the emotional troubles around us. However, because emotions and emotion work live in the shadows, we are often unaware that we're engaged in perpetual, unpaid emotion work. We tend to clean up the emotional troubles around us. We mediate between people who can't get along. We jolly the grumpy people in our lives. We translate emotions into easily digestible chunks for our emotionally unaware friends and family. We calm people who are unaccountably anxious. We always seem to sit next to the person who wants a confidante. People tend to bring us their troubles and their conflicts. And no matter what our stated job description is, we have a second full-time job: we're professional emotion workers and professional empaths. But because our work isn't identified
as
work, we tend to burn out.

All of the skills and practices in this book will help empaths and unpaid emotion workers learn what emotions are, how they work, and how to work with them. I developed these empathic skills specifically to make emotion work less taxing: the self-soothing skills address burnout directly; boundary setting and thresholding help empaths develop a sense of privacy, so that their emotion work can become intentional rather than reflexive; and Burning Contracts and Conscious Complaining help empaths address and unload the incredible amount of emotional baggage they carry for others. In addition, these two skills have another vital purpose. Since so many empathic activities occur in the unheralded, unnoticed, yet absolutely crucial area of emotion work, both of these imaginal skills help you bring these seemingly ephemeral empathic behaviors into visual, verbal, and tangible form so you can identify, separate from, and change those behaviors.

Conscious Complaining can help you get to the core of what's bothering you, and Burning Contracts can help you treat your emotion work as a choice rather than as your destiny. When you can visualize or make tangible the persona you've donned as an unpaid emotion worker, you can burn your contracts with that persona and make way for a new, more intentional, and
more comfortable approach. You can still do emotion work, and you can still be an empath, but your empathic mindfulness skills will help you do so on your own terms.

IDENTIFYING YOUR OWN EMOTION WORK

What kind of emotion work do you do? Is it stated as part of your job description? (Also, do your friends, mate, and family openly acknowledge your emotion work?) Are you doing any emotion work for a colleague, such as soothing tempers if your colleague blows up, translating for your colleague when others don't understand her behavior or her needs, or taking the lead if another colleague cannot speak up on his own? Are you mediating between family members, translating emotions for friends, or working hard to keep your mate happy, even though your own needs are going untended? What emotion work do you do? Is it being recognized? Is it working for you? And in the larger empathic sense, is it working for other people?

Specifically, how much emotion work are you doing in the area of happiness creation? Is it all right with you when other people feel angry, or do you often try to soothe anger away? Have you become a kind of portable rejuvenation and resourcing station for angry people? If so, could you be training people how
not
to set boundaries for themselves and how
not
to develop their own self-soothing skills?

Do you allow people to feel appropriate shame so that they can learn how to moderate their own behavior, or do you soothe shame away as well? Can you allow people to feel anxiety that may help them get their work done, or do you step in and help them complete the tasks they've been procrastinating about? Are
all
emotions safe in your presence, or are you actually helping people remain emotionally unskilled in the presence of difficult emotions?

As you examine your own emotion work, check in with any valencing you might be imposing upon the emotions of others. In the workplace, enforced empathy often means that you have to keep everyone calm and happy at all times—very few other emotions are welcome. This enforced reduction of emotional awareness has pretty troubling consequences for the workplace as an entity, but it also has troubling consequences for you and your coworkers.

As you observe and improve your physical workspace and your thresholding, think about creating protected areas, times, or practices (such as Conscious Complaining with a Partner) where you and your colleagues can be whole and skillful emotional beings, and not merely emotion work robots.
It's a gift to help people experience their real emotions—to feel the way they feel—and to support them in developing
their own
emotional skills. That's good emotion work, if you can get it!

HIERARCHIES, MERITOCRACIES, AND HIDDEN POWER STRUCTURES AT WORK

Empathically speaking, I love to observe the power differentials in the stated organizational structure of a business—from the owners or the board of directors at the top to the management at the middle to the workers at the bottom. On paper, the power structure is clearly hierarchical; and yet in the real world, you'll often find that the power structure actually exists in a
meritocracy
that the workers themselves create so that they can get their work done. A meritocracy is an organizational structure that places the most talented people in key positions because they
merit
those positions. They didn't get there through family connections, they didn't get promoted past their ability level, and they're actually awesomely good at their work and fully merit the position they have.
⁵⁵
Most businesses dream of being meritocracies, and most HR departments hope to create meritocracies through effective hiring practices and employee training initiatives. But as we've all seen, many things get in the way of those hopes and dreams.

However, meritocracies are necessary if you want to get anything done. In many dysfunctional workplaces, workers themselves will set up what I call a
shadow meritocracy
of the business. Shadow meritocracies are high-functioning but unacknowledged work groups that arise in response to a failing worker (who's often in a key position or in management), in reaction to an unjust hierarchy, or in reaction to a rigid bureaucratic structure that can't respond quickly to change. I don't use the word
shadow
to suggest that there's something shady going on; I use it because these underground meritocracies can't be seen in the light of day. They're not in the organizational chart, there are no job titles for their members, and you can't even identify them by the relative size of their members' offices or paychecks. You can only see them out of the corner of your eye—in nuances, undercurrents, interactions, whispered communications, and workflow. These meritocracies aren't out in the open because they
can't
be; they have to exist in the shadows because they're covering for, protecting, or working around a problem that cannot be remedied for some reason. Shadow meritocracies are an intrinsic feature of many workplaces, and they're an intrinsic part of emotion work.