Emotional wellness at work = healthy bottom lines

We all want to work in places where we feel at our best. From an employers’ viewpoint, people who feel at their best can perform at their best.

Everyone we encounter can impact our sense of wellness. Some encounters are quite nourishing, some toxic. The toxic ones are those that leave us upset – at the neural level. This means an amygdala hijack, where we are in the grip of distressing emotions. The prefrontal area is being driven by the agitated amygdala: we can’t focus on anything besides what’s upsetting. We remember best whatever is relevant to that upset, and we fall back on ways of thinking and acting from childhood. Not the best state to get work done in.

On the other hand, when we are at our absolute best – in flow – our brain is in a state of neural harmony and maximal cognitive efficiency. We feel great, and can apply whatever skills we may have at their peak.

Leadership has a great deal to do with which way our inner state goes. Emotions are contagious. And they flow most strongly from the most powerful person in a group outward. This gives leaders a great tool, and a great responsibility. A leader needs to manage her own emotional state well, so she can impact others in the direction of well being.

That impact is not so much in what a leader does, as what he sends in nonverbal – tone of voice, facial expression, all the emotional channels the brain has been wired to read and react to. So this happens best when those signals reflect the leader’s own state. Helping others get and stay in that state of well being begins with helping ourselves get there.