BothAnd Thinking by Wendy Smith

Author:Wendy Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2022-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Putting Our Emotions to Work

In this chapter, we turn to another set of tools that help us navigate paradoxes—our emotions. Paradoxes trigger complex and conflicting emotional reactions. To open ourselves to tensions, we must move beyond focusing on our mindsets and thinking to be able to engage our heart. We need to use our emotions as an enabling resource, rather than crippling obstacle.

Einstein’s diaries offer insight into such complex emotions.3 Grappling with foundational principles of physics, he confronted the paradox of how an object could be in motion and at rest at the same time. The problem was both vexing and energizing. He felt uneasy knowing that his thinking would challenge core assumptions about how people understood the world, but also felt invigorated to discover new insights. In his diaries, Einstein described feeling as if the foundation beneath him was shaking, as if he was no longer standing on stable ground.

Professors Russ Vince and Michael Broussine examined conflicting and intense emotional reactions to a major change initiative in the UK’s National Health Service. Conducting workshops with doctors, nurses, and administrators, study participants explored the tensions they felt, surfacing underlying paradoxes of past and future, stability and change, and idealism and pragmatism. The researchers asked the participants to draw pictures to tap further into their feelings. Three participants drew images that conveyed excitement for new possibilities, such as an image of an ugly duckling turning into a swan. The other eighty-three participants drew pictures that suggested the uncertainty of change sparked deeper negative reactions—dark clouds, gravestones, a sick patient in bed, the sinking of the organizational ship. Vince and Broussine turned to psychoanalysis to categorize five defensive reactions expressed: repression, regression, projection, reaction formation, and denial.4

Uncertainty alone does not trigger a defensive reaction. Uncertainty can be beneficial or detrimental. It can spark curiosity and open-mindedness, but it can also lead to more defensive closed-mindedness. Ingrid Haas, professor at University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and William Cunningham, professor at University of Toronto, found that the different reactions to uncertainty depend on our level of threat.5 Greater threat drives us to respond to uncertainty with a more closed, narrow focus. We avoid the information or ideas that raised the uncertainty in the first place. That is, we turn to either/or thinking seeking to minimize the uncertainty, and thereby the threat.

The bigger problem is that once triggered, our defensive reaction can spiral into a vicious cycle. Uncertainty and threat together intensify anxiety, frustration, or even anger. Our brains then tell us that we shouldn’t feel this way. As we judge our own emotions, we start to pile on additional emotional responses. We might feel guilt or even shame. Brené Brown offers an important distinction between the two ideas. Guilt suggests that we did something bad. Shame is more personal and pervasive; it suggests that we ourselves are bad. Feelings of guilt and shame lead us to disconnect and hide from others, lest they discover all the reasons that we are bad, at the very moments when connection is most important.

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