Embracing Our Embodied Minds: Leveraging Emotional Assets is Key to Unlocking Workplace Learning and Performance
While we once believed that emotion and reasoning should be kept separate, research in cognitive neuroscience over the past few decades has solidly dispelled that myth. We now know that emotion is an essential aspect of how our embodied minds work and that it is integrated into effective thinking and reasoning. Cool, rational cognition has even been shown to be maladaptive in real world problem-solving! Findings from research by neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux have challenged the concept of mind/body separation and illustrate how emotions underlie our consciousness, thinking, and reasoning.
Here are a few examples: 1) Emotion can motivate engagement. It can fuel interest, inquiry and problem-solving investment; 2) Our emotional “body knowledge” can support heuristics and shortcuts that offer efficiency and support intuitive leaps (for instance, you might have a gut feeling that something isn’t quite right, even if you haven’t yet identified the cause); 3) Reflecting on our emotions can help us to discover and navigate the hidden role that past trauma can play in triggering certain reactions (for instance, a particular phrase might suddenly make you feel vigilant or trigger a fight-or-flight response); 4) Subtle background feelings can influence our choices whether we realize it or not and may leave us feeling enthusiastic or disinterested for reasons that we are unaware of.
Key Points:
Early views of cool rationality have been shown to be misguided. While there are certainly times when “setting emotion aside” can be helpful, in general, emotion is essential to effective thinking and problem-solving.
Understanding the ways in which emotion operates and how it impacts our minds and bodies supports our ability to benefit from our emotions and to mitigate the downsides.
Educating embodied learners is a different process than teaching to “just the brain”. As learners, we can seek out ways to engage our whole selves in learning even when work contexts don’t focus on integrated selves. As workforce developers or managers, we can develop ways to support embodied minds.
In past decades, there has been a lot of research on the teaching and development of skills to support “rational, higher-order thinking.” People commonly think that teaching good thinking is about teaching specific thinking moves that build upon what is known from this research. But what about our embodied emotional processes? Recognizing that we have embodied minds with emotion as a key driver that weaves through our thinking processes should change how we teach thinking and how we conceptualize it in the workplace.
What does the research suggest about teaching embodied thinking? And what, then, should we be doing to help learners develop their emotional assets, both in formal educational settings and in the flow of work? In other words, “How do we support emotional processes and how do we leverage emotional assets in the workplace?”
Researchers at the Next Level Lab (NLL) have been mining and conducting research on the key role of emotion and our embodied minds in effective learning and performance. This research points to key areas where we can build upon the findings to help employees better understand their minds and subsequently do their learning and thinking in the flow of work. Coincidentally, each of these also contributes to better understanding of oneself and thus, better quality of life more broadly. NLL team members Tina Grotzer, Lydia Cao, and Chenxu Gao have been developing sets of self-guided courses for learners in general, as well as specifically for those in the workforce, in workforce development, and in management to learn about these research findings on how embodied minds work and what it means for learning and work performance. The first course focuses specifically on Embodied Minds: Emotion, Cognition, and Body Knowledge and includes modules on how to understand, navigate, and leverage our emotional assets. Here is a summary of the main ideas of each:
1/ We can benefit from our background emotions.
We tend to think about emotions as explicit feelings of happiness, anger, or other feelings that we experience in noticeable bursts or events. We may only focus on our emotions in the workplace if they are dramatic and/or are obviously derailing our success. However, our background emotions contribute to our consciousness and well-being as part of our broader landscape of emotions. They operate as a backdrop whether we are aware of them or not. They can be what propels our work forward or what hinders it in terms of procrastination, anxiety, inapproachability, or low level of effort invested. The landscape of our background feelings varies from ones that we are aware of and can reflect upon to ones that are at the level of body regulation such that we may not be fully aware of them even if they are impacting us. Reflecting upon our background emotions and generating moves to manage them can support our best learning and performance. While we focus on subtle emotions less, they are with us more of the time and can have a big impact on our general well-being, happiness, and productivity.
2/ Concentration involves managing the balance between stimulation and calm.
Our body states can support or hinder good thinking. Finding the right balance of alertness and calm can be challenging. We have all had moments when we felt fidgety and others when drowsiness made it hard to attend to and make progress on the tasks before us. Finding and maintaining the right balance between being calm and energetic in the workplace and in learning can be challenging, but it is critical to productivity and success. In order to focus well, we need to balance vigilance, alertness, excitement, etc. to achieve what neuroscientists refer to as “potentiation” (the process in which we strengthen brain connections—our synapses—through repeated use). Good focus hinges on the right balance between excitement and calm. This is why many of us are productive with an imminent, but not immediate, deadline. The immediacy helps us to make the necessary mental push, but too close and it can lead to unproductive panic! A racing mind is not usually a productive one, so it is important to have moves that support calming and downloading of ideas. A racing body can make it hard to sit still and focus, so it is important to know ways to support physical calming. Techniques for managing internal focus can be learned and can have powerful payoffs.
3/ Our “finding out” or “epistemic emotions” can be powerful allies in motivating work performance.
Epistemic emotions are the emotions involved in the “finding out” process. They usually occur when there is a mismatch between new and existing knowledge or beliefs. They drive further exploration and help us generate alternative ways of thinking and advancing our current knowledge. Epistemic emotions such as interest and awe push us to learn and can be used as leverage to bypass other kinds of emotions that could stifle workplace learning, such as anxiety, and shame. In addition to pleasant epistemic emotions, such as curiosity and awe, there are less pleasant epistemic emotions, such as confusion and surprise. Even these are important because resolving them is productive for learning.
Epistemic emotions support workplace learning by facilitating transfer by helping us to make new connections, improving intrinsic motivation because we want to find out, and motivating conceptual change as we trade less developed ideas for more powerful ones. They can also help us feel a sense of purpose at work and improve our collaborative engagement with colleagues.
4/ Our amygdala spurs “shortcut reactions” that we need to understand and plan for so that they don’t hijack us.
Some parts of the brain never forget but remember in ways that we don’t have explicit awareness of. The memories have the potential to commandeer our emotions, cognition, and physical reactions. This has been referred to as the “amygdala hijack.” It matters for all of us and even more so for people who have experienced trauma.
The amygdala is a part of our brain involved in emotional processing. It is considered our lower-level brain and one of the oldest parts of the brain from the perspective of evolution. It is known for our fight or flight response and for tagging memories with emotional salience to enable very quick response. It acts on “emotional memories.” These are different from “memories of emotion” that have a reflective component in which we can recall being happy, sad, or some other emotion. A reaction driven by the amygdala can flood our bodies with adrenaline and trigger anxiety before we have a chance to know what is going on. This is especially so for anyone who has dealt with trauma. This reaction does not involve the higher-order portions of the brain, so we have little control over it. Emotional shortcuts can be a source of intuition that is helpful, but they can also reinforce limiting and maladaptive responses. We can, however, manage the consequences of our amygdala by: 1) recognizing the potential for amygdala hijack before it happens; 2) realizing instances when we have been hijacked and having “moves” that enable us to manage it; 3) adjusting our environments so that we are less likely to be triggered in a way that results in amygdala hijack. Forthcoming research by Next Level Lab researchers shows that teaching people about amygdala hijack and how to manage it, even in a brief intervention, results in greater awareness and ability to address it.
Each of these main ideas is represented in the course on Embodied Minds: Emotion, Cognition, and Body Knowledge in a separate self-guided module. These modules can be done individually, or they can provide the basis for group sessions and discussions. For those who are interested in participating in the modules, the course can be found on the Next Level Lab website.
In Summary…
It is a myth that emotion and cognition must be kept separate.
Emotion is key to effective thinking and reasoning.
We can leverage our emotional assets to learn and work at our best.
Developing our emotional assets can further our work and learning goals and improve our work performance.