Now that you have filled up your car with fuel through healthy spiritual practices and you have one wheel of your car filled with air from your mental wellness practices, it is time to focus on emotional health. (To review the previous article of this life balance journey click here.) The National Institutes of Health describes emotional wellness as “the ability to successfully handle life’s stresses and adapt to change and difficult times” (NIH, 2018). Someone with healthy emotional health can identify their feelings and regulate their emotions.
Emotional Well-Being Leadership and Development
We are emotional beings, and God created us with this unique quality. Throughout the day, we experience a wide range of emotions; however, sometimes, we are unaware of how these feelings impact our leadership. Our ability to be emotionally self-aware significantly improves our Christian leadership and our influence on those around us.
To begin, we must become attuned to our bodies and emotions. Our mind and body are connected, like an alarm system telling us when something needs more attention; our body helps us identify our feelings. When we feel anxious, we may notice knots in our stomachs before we have the language to recognize the feeling. Or we may notice tension in our shoulders before we realize we are feeling stressed. Unfortunately, this lack of self-awareness about what our body communicates to us regarding our emotions can make us more reactive to emotions instead of proactive, hindering our leadership skills.
Let’s use cooking as an example. When I cook, the smoke alarm in our house frequently goes off, telling me to remove the food from the oven because it is burning. However, if I am reactive and do not take a moment to pause and recognize the purpose of the alarm, I may hear the alarm and start to run out of the house, thinking my house is on fire. As leaders, we can be reactive to a warning if we do not take the time to make space and recognize the feelings associated with the stressor we are experiencing. This reactivity negatively affects our employees and our leadership.
As we grow in our ability to make space and practice emotional wellness, we can engage in behaviors that help us process life's stressors as Christian leaders. As Viktor Frankl states, “Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
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Practices for Emotional Wellness
To continue the car analogy, sometimes we allow ourselves to sit in the passenger seat while our emotions sit in the driver’s seat and drive the car. We dislike this lack of power; however, we are unsure how to regain control of the vehicle. The first step to driving your own car of emotions again is to name your emotions. Brene Brown is known for saying, “Name it to tame it,” when she refers to our feelings. The truth is our emotions just want attention, and once we learn how to recognize what we are feeling, we can move them to the backseat and start driving the car on our own again.
Identifying our own emotions can help us grow in self-awareness. When we take time to pause and name our feelings, the feelings move in our brain from the Limbic System to the Prefrontal Cortex. This allows us to use problem-solving skills to process them and engage in activities that help us respond in a healthy manner.
A great way to become more aware of your emotions is to take time each day to identify your feelings. You can access a helpful resource for this exercise here. Start this practice by setting a consistent time each day to pause and name a few feelings you are experiencing on this feelings wheel. It will only take a few minutes but will tremendously help your emotional well-being.
Resources for Emotional Wellness:
To read more about emotional well-being, check out this book about identifying emotions.
To continue this journey on achieving life balance in your Christian leadership, click here for the next article.
