{ Recap } Rock the Boat: Navigating Emotions in the Workplace
JESS.
Earlier this February, I partnered with podcast Rock the Boat for a workshop on navigating emotions related to career/workplace. Rock the Boat highlights Asian Americans charting unconventional territories, and while they usually focus on career, Rock the Boat’s 3rd season focused on mental health in the Asian community. (I’m quite passionate about this. Here’s my overjoyed face talking about our collaboration on IGTV, lol)
Before the workshop, we asked folks to share what they carried related to their careers.
The most common themes were:
Re-evaluating direction and purpose
Self doubt / Imposter Syndrome
Expressing frustrations and anger earlier / in a healthy manner
Boundaries: Emotional, Work/life balance
The most common emotions they expressed regarding their careers were:
Apathy (and the guilt surrounding it)
Frustration, disappointment
Rage and resentment
Self-doubt & Imposter syndrome (this came up so many times!)
Overwhelm and anxiety.
The one thing we overlook with emotions.
When processing emotions, we often forget to return to one thing that drives our innermost impulses, motivations, and sense of belong and safety: Our core values. (I know, that’s not one thing, it’s multiple things)
When we are unhappy, most of the time it is because something is violating our core values.
Most people have 3-5 core values that remain fairly constant throughout our lifetime. However, unless we are asked or prompted to intentionally reflect on them, we can go our whole lives unaware of what they truly are.
Learn Your “Why.”
Learn your core values. Because once you have a firm grip on your core values, they will start to inform you of what you need to feel respected, what you need to feel heard, what kinds of activities or environments exhilarate you, which acts of service bring you joy.
Purpose: Core values help us understand WHY we feel driven to help others in specific ways. They help clarify WHY we feel accomplished when we do certain things, which bring us closer to understanding our purpose.
Self-worth: Core values help us understand WHY we need to feel seen and heard in specific ways. They also remind us of why we choose to invest time in certain areas, of the passions that drive us.
Clearer communication of emotions and boundaries. Once we have a strong sense of our core values, we can easier understand when to draw boundaries and why because we know which core values are being violated. We can communicate our values and ask others to respect them. (And if people or spaces consistently don’t, we can objectively understand when it is time to leave.)
How do you identify your core values?
Many online prompts will encourage you to look at a list of words and choose which words resonate with you the most. I’ve found this unhelpful and “surface-level.” Instead, I had to reflect deeply on what I found important in terms of love, safety, fulfillment, and belonging.
We discussed this at length in the Rock the Boat workshop, and plan a continuing series diving deeper into the topic. I’d like to share a screenshot of Dr. Daniel Tanh’s instagram post following the workshop, where he reflected on his core value around social justice.
I would love to share more about this process in future workshops!
Please let me know if you would be interested in workshops on navigating emotions and core values. Thanks for reading. Til next time!