The Elephant in the Room: Emotional Culture

Well… I’ve been keeping a secret. If you know me well, you know this is not out of the ordinary. Some of my dearest friends and clients say it adds to the “Mattison Mystique.” This moniker was coined by my late, great friend MaryBeth Smith, and I love it. And…I am great at keeping all kinds of secrets, it’s an occupational hazard.

The secret is for the last nine months, I have been enrolled in the “Riders and Elephants, Emotional Culture Deck Certified Consultant Course.” It has been quite a journey, now, it is finally time to share it with you.

In this post, I share the five biggest things I learned while training to become a Pro Elephant Rider.

Next month I will earn my Pro Elephant Rider Certified Constants Badge and become one of only three Pro Elephant riders in the United States!

Lesson 1: “Fine” is not an emotion.

People are quite bad at identifying how they really feel. I mean, might as well face it, identifying and owning our emotions has been parented, socialized, and educated out of us, so it is no wonder we are bad at it. Negative emotions are swept under the rug and overly positive ones put a target on our backs. Have you ever been super happy, and someone said to you, “What’s wrong with you, You’re too happy?” Of course, you have. Soon we learn to quell positive emotions, so we do not get our lights taken out, and suppress the negative ones, too. However, just because we are bad at identifying them, does not mean they are not impacting everything we think and do. Emotions are running the show, whether we realize it or not. Using the ECD to identify how I want to feel and not feel creates clarity – fast.

Lesson 2: Resistance is futile.

Most leaders do not want to deal with employees’ emotions but avoiding them only makes it worse. One of my favorite distinctions in human performance is “objects vs. humans”. When leaders suppress, deny, or ignore that humans work for them, and those humans have emotions, humans eventually feel like objects. No one likes to feel this way, and eventually, people do something to relieve that pain. Even the best talent and highest performers will only tolerate being treated like an object for so long. Denying, ignoring, or stepping over emotions is one of the fastest ways to send the message, you’re just an object to me and I don’t care about your humanity. I wrote a LinkedIn article about athletes as humans or objects – read it here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/object-athlete-human-mattison-grey-m-ed-mmc-cipp

Lesson 3: There are no good or bad emotions, only our stories and judgments about them.

It is not the negative emotions that we resist, it’s our judgment or story about those emotions. I should not be mad, or I should not be sad. Have you ever noticed how people apologize when they start to cry in public or in important situations? That is self-judgment or the fear of judgment, for having a God-given emotional reaction. It is inhuman that we feel compelled to apologize. As humans we are meant to have and feel all the emotions, the Creator would not put them in there if we were not meant to have them.

Lesson 4: You can ignore your emotional culture, but not outperform it. 

Emotional culture is always there. Sigal Barsade said, “Every organization has an emotional culture, even if it is one of suppression.” just like people cannot outperform their own self-image, “You can never outperform your own self-image.” – Maxwell Maltz People and cultures cannot outperform their emotional awareness or emotional culture. You can craft it, or it can run you. You choose.

Lesson 5: People want to talk about how they feel, but most need a tool or a support structure.

The ECD is the most elegant tool I have ever seen to facilitate these conversations. Even the toughest, most macho guys soften right into the conversation with the help of the cards. The ECD card deck creates a simple yet powerful, supportive yet agile road map for people to talk about their emotions and how they want to feel, and not feel, at work. How they want their stakeholders to feel, and not feel. What it might take to accomplish those intentions, and what might get in the way.

 Lesson 6: (Bonus Lesson) Nothing works without “Belonging.”

All the things we want in organizations: connection, trust, teamwork, equity, inclusion, results, ownership…require people to feel like they belong. There can be no true belonging without the discussion of emotions and/or crafting the emotional culture of the group. Ninety-nine percent of the time when organizations and teams use the word culture, they are talking about cognitive culture – thinking culture. Newsflash, it’s not the one that matters to humans.

Curious about the ECD for you or team? Let’s Chat https://calendly.com/mattisongrey/info-session