How You Feel Versus Your Productivity
Your emotions can have a massive impact on your productivity. In this guest post Aymeric Gurat-Apellii looks at the 3 base emotions and how they can affect your producitivity and motivation
We may not always be aware of it, but irrespective of what task you are engaged into from answering a colleague’s mail to engaging in a tough negotiation with a supplier, each task elicits emotions. Excitement, pride, anger, uncertainty and boredom to name a few. Obvious it may sound but there is a direct correlation between how you feel and how productive you are at work. The reason behind this is that emotions have adaptive value, helping us cope and respond to the situation at hand. Even negatively perceived emotions like anxiety, are great tools for getting our minds energized and focused on the task ahead if dealt with the right mindset.
So here are 3 emotions that we encounter in our everyday life and which have a significant influence on our productivity and effectiveness at work.
1) The “Sad” or the “Grouchy” emotion
Being in a bad mood rarely leads to exceptional results. You may be dealing with relationship issues, financial struggles, poor health or you may simply be having a bad day with a million little things going wrong. At some point in time, we’ve all found ourselves in such a position. Since “the show must go on”, you’re forced to continue working in that terrible mood.
Goes without saying, but having a blanket of negativity cloud your mind will not just worsen your attention span but over the period of time it would hurt your productivity levels. This would ultimately end with inhibition of one”s ability to produce quality work.
So every time you’re under the influence of such emotions, time to take control. Surround yourself with positive people, watch your diet and take a break by taking a stroll in nature or getting into a comedy show. Watching inspirational and motivational movies tend to work wonders.
2) The “Anxiety” emotion
Anxiety and readiness are pretty synonymous mental states or physiologically almost the same. At some point in time every person in the world has felt anxious about an upcoming big challenge. However what many people don’t realize is that anxiety is a way of revving us up to be on high alert. It makes us ready to react to whatever may come our way. You may wish to do away with feeling of anxiety, but when you understand its benefits, you’ll feel grateful to it.
So it would be safe to say that a little bit of anxiety plays a pivotal role in boosting your productivity and getting the best out of you. Overdoing the same might just have the opposite effect. The next time you find yourself feeling nervous, remember to remind yourself that you”re not nervous, rather alert and ready to react to anything that comes along.
3) The “Anger” emotion
The feeling of anger is generally counterproductive in both professional and personal lives. It can lead to the mistreatment of juniors, co-workers or dear ones, or generate unproductive conflicts, and downward spirals of negative behavior.
Anger usually motivates a desire to get back at someone mostly to punish. This motivation can actually lead to positive outcomes when the energy from anger is tapped for the benefit of co-workers or the larger organization. For example, an employee who is frustrated with the conventional ways of working, typical work processes or is upset by regular obstacles caused by unnecessary red tape may come up with more effective or innovative ways to do business.
An employee may be upset after witnessing the mistreatment of fellow workers and this in fact could motivate you to speak up to correct the situation and prevent the same in future. Humans are capable of re-directing their anger, seeing obstacles as a challenge rather than as a roadblock. Anger or frustration can fuel passion for functional change if dealt with responsibility and the right mindset.
Conclusion
To wrap it up, emotions certainly have a great influence on our productivity levels and each of them can be tapped as areas to grow not just mentally but emotionally as well. It wouldn’t be wrong to conclude that the conventional wisdom of workplace emotions being always bad for an individual can be called outdated. The best course of action in such a scenario is to diagnose why at all are the employees feeling down and be understanding and supportive of the same. Doing so, it becomes possible to leverage these negative emotions to produce positive results.
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