“You, who are on the road, must have a code that you can live by; and, so become yourselves because the past is just a goodbye.” — Crosby, Stills and Nash Teach Your Children

Emotions in the workplace are natural, normal, expected and complex.

We are full of emotions every day at work.

What we’re going to do with those emotions at work is the big question and will have a huge impact on how we navigate as managers.

It can be a stormy, bumpy ride indeed until we shine a little light here.

We can easily swing from being the knee-jerk emotionally reactive manager to the sterile automaton lifeless manager.

We need something to smooth out the bumps and help us cut the middle ground.

This is what self-coaching does.

It allows us to accept our emotions as valid and worthy of exploration.

Exploration is the key here.

With self-coaching we can lay our thinking and emotions out before us and take a look at them.

Spin them around and look at them from different angles.

Make decisions and move forward.

The key is not to fight our emotions wishing they were not there or that we shouldn’t be having them.

It’s very real emotionally what we go through as managers and our emotions as well as our thoughts are all part of our experience.

But, we’re managers, so we are going to want to work on our self-awareness so we can sort some things out and get a clear perspective before we manage.

We only manage others as well as we manage ourselves.

Self-coaching really helps.