How are you feeling?

I studied with an improv teacher once who made us define how we were feeling to a granular level. “Good” and “bad” didn’t cut it. We had to dig down to “confidently relaxed” or “haunted by floating dread.” I found the exercise irritating, sorry, “meanderingly irrelevant”, mostly because I have never cared much about what something is called. I find labels reductive and deceiving. But she did leave me with a lasting gift. I am not lazy anymore about identifying how I’m feeling. In any class or workshop I run, I look for ways to get the participants to notice how they’re feeling. I don’t spend as much time on what they call it, but I suggest that this kind of self-awareness is a powerful tool for them to use in their personal and professional lives.

Participants at a Creative Corporate Training workshop after doing the “mirror” exercise.

One of the keys with this kind of work is that the facilitator has to engineer a change in feeling. We are much more likely to notice how we’re feeling when our feelings change. At Bright Invention, that initial feeling change is almost always joyful. Through our games and exercises participants move from nervous/bored/curious to playful/connected/ engaged. This awareness of feelings changing is the first doorway toward a kind of mindfulness called emotional intelligence.

There are two basic core competencies involved in emotional intelligence:

Personal Competence comprises your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behavior and tendencies.

• Self-awareness: how am I feeling? How do I know?

• Self-management: what do I do because of how am I feeling? What do I need to watch out for?

Social Competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills; social competence is your ability to understand other people's moods, behavior, and motives in order to respond effectively and improve the quality of your relationships.

• Social Awareness: how is he/she/they feeling? How can I tell?

• Relationship Management: what is the most humane and effective way to proceed knowing how he/she/they are feeling?

Members of the Bright Invention ensemble observe a rehearsal.

Hamza Mudassir, a lecturer in strategy at the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge, recently proposed that working with emotion is an essential part of strategic planning. “Strategy formulation—just like emotion—is also based on a set of forecasts. You are doing what you believe to be best for your company, based on whatever you’ve experienced before. This means that whenever you embark on a strategy development process, you are in effect embarking on an emotional journey as much as an intellectual one.”

We are living through an era of global stress and anxiety. It’s important that we feel it and notice it - because it’s extreme, and it is having an impact on our decision-making, relationships and general well-being. Indeed, the worst case scenario is that we adopt this ever-present anxiety as our default, and react to it without acknowledging it. We need to give ourselves experiences which return us to joy, relaxation, clarity, for only then will we remember: oh right, it’s possible to feel like this too. In fact, it’s what “normal” used to feel like.

One last thing. Noticing how I feel requires me to slow down. In our multi-taking hypercaffeinated lives slowing down is counter cultural. But I submit to you it is essential. We need to give ourselves pauses that allow us to assess how we’re doing . . . and what we’re feeling.