Loving-kindness and compassion.
The term “Compassion” refers to the attitude of being kind, benevolent, and understanding towards oneself and others.
This attitude is often not easy to put into practice. Indeed, we are frequently driven by our strong tendency to criticize ourselves and judge others, resulting in increased suffering, stress, and negative emotions, which hinder productivity and personal growth.
Developing loving-kindness and compassion means being open to one’s own and others’ suffering, without trying to avoid it or disconnect from it, allowing a feeling of understanding, kindness, and desire to alleviate and care for it to emerge.
Experimental evidence shows that specific training aimed at developing loving-kindness and compassion reduces self-criticism, shame, anxiety, and improves stress response (Pace, Negi and Adame, 2008; Gilbert and Procter, 2006). Cultivating compassion allows us to observe our own and others’ mistakes and weaknesses with awareness and understanding, enabling us to see them in the context of human fallibility, and to use them to enhance abilities and resources. Organizations are not as rational and orderly as we might think, and to understand what drives organizational life, but above all to open a path towards well-being within them, it is necessary to work through the recognition and use of emotions.
Organizational models are often dominated by organizational rationality, logic, and control, and leave no room for aggressiveness, anger, fear: phenomena of unconscious origin that are repressed through tools aimed at restoring the neutrality of things. Within organizations, desirable behaviors are all based on the ability to control one’s emotions. The emotional component is thus systematically excluded from all processes of change.
A change in perspective occurs when emotions are understood and managed within organizations, as this is the starting point for achieving a sense of well-being, both personal and collective.
Knowing emotions “in real time” is the key to our psychological well-being: becoming aware of our emotions when they arise gives us the opportunity to choose among possible actions and therefore to take more conscious, effective, and harmonious actions. Furthermore, understanding the relationship between our emotions and our reference values allows us to make choices in harmony with our way of being, leading us to new planning and a new appreciation of ourselves.
Awareness of one’s emotions and the consequent capacity for continuous improvement increases self-confidence, necessary for building a sense of personal efficacy understood as the perception of being able to control and successfully face possible situations.
Those who have a high sense of self-efficacy expect success; an expectation that in turn supports and motivates them to achieve good performance.
Social awareness, which is the ability to recognize others’ emotions and motivations, to be empathetic, is also fundamental for implementing syntonic strategies within the organizational context, strengthening organizational awareness.
When dealing with our unpleasant emotions, we often pay a higher cost in terms of time and energy than necessary in trying to manage them. Some energy and time is wasted in attempting to push away or avoid unpleasant thoughts and sensations. This attempt is futile because, paradoxically, the more we want to push away a thought or emotion, the more our mind brings it back, consequently feeding secondary emotions (e.g., anxiety, anger, sadness) linked to feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness from our ineffective attempts. Another portion of time and energy is spent managing the emotions generated by our judgments about what we’re feeling (“I shouldn’t be anxious, strong people don’t get anxious!”, “I’m weak because I cried in front of others”).
When we become aware of these dysfunctional mechanisms and manage to implement more effective strategies (acceptance, non-judgmental attitude), we reclaim our time and energy, now available for what truly matters to us.
Through understanding/sharing emotions, it’s possible to create synergies in working toward collective goals, resulting in a more complex vision of the problem or project. For this reason, teams with emotional competence have additional potential superior to that of the best individual group member.
From our perspective, emotional competence is the key to excellence in organizations.
