When You’re Told You’re Too Emotional at Work
There are certain words that can follow us around at work long after the person who said them has moved on. Difficult. Sensitive. Intimidating. Emotional. They can be delivered as feedback, an observation or sometimes almost casually, but if they touch something we are already conscious of in ourselves, they can become much bigger than the original conversation.
I see this particularly with women who have been told that they are “too emotional” at work. Perhaps you cried in a meeting. Perhaps you showed frustration when something mattered to you. Perhaps you noticed the emotional temperature in a room when everyone else seemed determined to ignore it. Or perhaps, as my guest Hannah Wilson experienced, what somebody else called emotional was actually something rather different: emotional intelligence.
Hannah is a leadership development coach, trainer, former teacher and school leader, co-founder of #WomenEd and #DiverseEd, and author of Cultivating Belonging in Schools. When she joined me on A Thought I Kept, she brought with her a piece of advice she was given about 15 years ago, when she was the youngest and only woman on her senior leadership team. She had received criticism she thought was deeply unfair and went to see her line manager feeling, in her words, “really quite annoyed.”
His advice changed the way she thought about criticism. Becoming more senior and more visible, he told her, meant putting her “head above the parapet.” People were going to critique her. She couldn’t necessarily control that, but she did have a choice about what happened next: “You need to choose which bits you hear and which bits you leave or choose to reframe it, so it helps you.”
What if “too emotional” isn’t the whole story?
Hannah gives a brilliant example of what that reframing can look like. She was working within what she describes as quite an “alpha male leadership culture” and received criticism from male colleagues that she was emotional. Rather than simply absorbing that description as evidence of something she needed to change, she started questioning the premise.
“I don’t think I actually am emotional,” she remembers thinking. “I think I’m emotionally intelligent, and there’s a difference.”
That distinction matters. Because sometimes feedback can sound objective when it is actually tangled up with expectations about how we are supposed to behave at work, what leadership is supposed to look like, and which qualities we have collectively decided to value.
Hannah could see that the criticism she received was gendered. She could also see that some of her male colleagues who showed qualities perceived as more nurturing were criticised too. What was being presented as a weakness might actually have been a different way of leading.
As Hannah puts it, “We are emotional beings.” Being emotional isn’t automatically a weakness. Our emotions are part of our humanity, and centring that humanity can make us better leaders, colleagues and people.
You don’t have to accept every piece of feedback
I think this is where Hannah’s thought becomes particularly useful. “Choose which bits you hear” does not mean refusing criticism, surrounding yourself with people who agree with you or deciding that every uncomfortable piece of feedback is somebody else’s problem.
Hannah does almost the opposite. She talks about having a circle of supporters and “critical friends” who can hold a mirror up to her. She actively asks her team whether she has got something wrong. She describes herself as a work in progress and talks about responding to feedback and changing what she does when she needs to.
But she makes an important distinction between feedback offered within a relationship of trust and what she calls unsolicited critical feedback. Not every opinion deserves equal weight simply because somebody has decided to give it to us.
When criticism arrives, then, we might borrow Hannah’s approach and ask: Is there something useful here? Does this come from someone whose judgement I trust? Is this feedback about my behaviour, or an expectation of how someone like me should behave? What could I learn from it? And what might say more about the person giving it than it does about me?
The aim isn’t to become impervious. It’s to become more discerning.
What are you already doing well?
There is another side to this that I loved in my conversation with Hannah. If we are going to become more thoughtful about the criticism we accept, perhaps we also need to become better at accepting affirmation.
Hannah sees women brush compliments aside all the time. In her coaching, when someone immediately starts listing everything they’re getting wrong, she stops them. Before they talk about what needs work, she asks them to name three things they are doing well or three of their strengths.
There’s something wonderfully corrective about this. Many of us have become incredibly accomplished at noticing evidence for our supposed inadequacies while being strangely suspicious of evidence that suggests we might actually be doing rather well.
And perhaps that’s particularly important when someone has called you “too emotional.” Instead of immediately asking How do I become less emotional?, there are other questions available. What does my emotional awareness allow me to notice? How does it help me connect, communicate or lead? Is there something I need to work on here — or is there a strength that someone else has failed to see?
You can listen to my full conversation with Hannah Wilson on A Thought I Kept, where we talk about criticism, emotional intelligence, visibility, likability, belonging, courageous conversations and why Hannah would rather be “Marmite than vanilla.” Her thought — “Choose Which Bits You Hear” — feels like one worth keeping, particularly the next time someone else’s words threaten to become the story you tell yourself about who you are.
And if criticism at work has become tangled up with anxiety, overwhelm, confidence or how you feel about yourself, you don’t necessarily have to think your way through it on your own. In my 1:1 emotions coaching sessions, we can make some space for what you’re feeling, understand what it might be telling you, and work out what you want to carry forward — and, perhaps just as importantly, what you’re ready to leave behind.