From the course: Skills to Build Stronger Work Relationships

Emotional push-ups

From the course: Skills to Build Stronger Work Relationships

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Emotional push-ups

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- In this course, we'll be learning how to flex our feels and break an emotional sweat, and we'll do that by practicing our emotional push-ups. But what is an emotional push-up? A physical push-up is a small physical exertion that helps us get stronger, and if we only do one, we're not going to see much progress. But if we do just a few more than we think we can every day, not only will we increase our physical strength, but we'll also boost our future physical health. An emotional push-up is the same idea. It's any small emotional exertion that puts you just a little outside of your comfort zone so you can grow. They help us get emotionally stronger now and also prevent emotional issues later. Now, what's a little out of one person's comfort zone might be way out of another person's, so you'll have to think a little bit about what your personal emotional workout routine should be. For example, if you're someone who says yes to everything that's asked of you, and then you end up feeling overwhelmed and resentful, an emotional push-up for you might be just saying a kind but firm no to one small thing today. Whereas if you tend to focus on yourself most of the time, an emotional push-up might be to offer to help someone else with a small task. Other examples of emotional push-ups are things like apologizing for a mistake, asking for feedback from a direct report, meditating for five minutes in the morning, letting yourself feel sad about a loss, celebrating a win, or putting your phone away after 10:00 p.m. and paying attention to how you feel. An important part of the process is the reflection of how the push-up makes you feel. It's not actually our experiences, but our reflection on our experiences that leads to change. I'll be suggesting emotional push-ups throughout this course and you can adjust them to your comfort level. After each one, pause and ask yourself, "Okay, how was that for me? "And if it was uncomfortable, why? "What might I have gotten out of it?" With that, let's jump into our first chapter.

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