Episode 210
Recognizing Your Emotional Patterns at Work (Without Overanalyzing)
Today we're going to talk about recognizing your emotional patterns, and without turning it into another thing you have to fix about yourself.

Welcome to the mindset for life podcast. This podcast is for you. If you love, serve, teach, and lead others, and you want things to keep getting better. Not louder, not more frantic, better. It's for thoughtful educators and leaders who want encouragement, clarity and one grounded idea at a time to strengthen their life, their relationships or their work.

If you're looking for quick fixes or productivity hacks, this probably is not your space, but if you want to think more clearly, lead with emotional intelligence and work in ways that are sustainable, principled and deeply human, you are in the right place.

Here we talk about leadership as an inner discipline, about resilience shaped by purpose, about compassion that strengthens responsibility rather than replacing it.

I'm Bethanie Hansen. I help people take wise control of their current situations and build the capacity to do more of what matters now and in the future.

Welcome to mindset for life.
Understanding Emotional Patterns in the Workplace
The interesting thing about today's episode is, it's going to create a little new awareness that I hope you'll try out, and even this one new awareness can make a major difference in your life. So stick with me. It's going to get good.

If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably someone who loves, serves, teaches or leads others. Often you're doing more than one of those at the same time, you care about your work, you care about people, and you want things to keep getting better, not just externally, but internally as well.

And yet, even when things are objectively fine, you might notice that work feels heavier than it used to. You might even find yourself tired, more tired than you expect to be, maybe more reactive than you'd like, or carrying emotional weight that doesn't quite lift when the day is over. Today, I want to talk to you about recognizing your emotional patterns at work, not in a way that turns into overthinking or self criticism, but in a way that gives you a little more clarity, more steadiness and choice.

Let me start by saying something important right away. Having emotional patterns does not mean that you're doing something wrong, it just means you're human.

An emotional pattern is just something that recurs over and over again.

It's something that happens again and again. And we often think it's other people irritating us, or other people not doing things right. It might just be frustration, tension, self-doubt, urgency, it might even be withdrawal, but these patterns start to show up so consistently, we actually stop noticing them. We just experience them and the after effects.

And that's the problem.

That's where the problem starts, and it kind of grows from there. So when we have emotional patterns that we don't notice, they drain our energy over time. They shape our decisions. They influence how we interact with students, colleagues, family members, or even ourselves.

Have you ever had a job where you had certain emotional experiences at work, and maybe you left that job and got a different job, and over time, started to have those same experiences?

If you've ever had that happen, you might have been wondering, how can these people be as irritating as the people in my last job?

You might notice you're replaying conversations in your head after work. You're feeling tense in certain meetings or situations every single time, maybe you're losing patience more quickly than you used to, or more than you intend to, and maybe you're even feeling exhausted when the workload has not changed.

You might be thinking, I don't know why this bothers me so much, but it does.

That alone tells me we're dealing with an unseen pattern, not a personal failure.

Nothing's wrong with you.
Why Emotional Intelligence Matters for Leaders and Educators
And this matters, especially now, because so many of us are working in emotionally demanding roles, teaching, leading other people, caregiving, coaching. These are all professions where we serve people. People are the work, and people bring complexity and lots of unpredictability and emotion with them.

Unfortunately, that's not something we can get beyond. We have to face it and experience it and get good at it. If we don't recognize our own emotional patterns, we start spending enormous amounts of energy managing our reactions instead of making intentional choices.

So over time, that's going to add up for us, and it might make us want to leave our job. It might make us wonder if we should retire, change professions, or see if we can just change roles. Or maybe we think we weren't cut out for this career in the first place.

What starts out as mild irritation can turn into resentment.

What starts out as concern can turn into anxiety.
Recognizing Burnout: The Hidden Impact of Unprocessed Emotions
What starts out is dedication can quietly turn into burnout. Not because you stopped caring, but because you cared without enough awareness or support. Now here's something I've learned over so many years of teaching, coaching and leading other people. Most burnout is not caused by the workload.

It's caused by an unprocessed, emotional load. You know, when you love the work, you'll handle any workload, right? We'll handle heavy workloads when we love the work and we're having a lot of positive emotion, but when we have some negative emotions or challenging emotions, and we don't go through it or process it, we start to get a pattern. And we carry them everywhere we go.

Now I want to ground this talk today in something real and something I've read so it's well documented, and this is Viktor Frankl's work. He was a psychiatrist and a Holocaust survivor. He wrote about the space between stimulus and response, the space where choice lives. His work has been echoed again and again in modern emotional intelligence research. What the research and the lived experience tells us is this, when we can notice emotion without immediately reacting to it, we regain our agency.

Agency is our choice. To be able to act intentionally, instead of reacting to what's going on inside that we're not really seeing. Being intentional is everything.

It doesn't mean our emotions disappear. It just means they stop running the show. So noticing without reacting, that's the space in the middle. That's where we have all the control.

I've seen this in my own personal life. Had an experience fairly recently where I started to get really downhearted and frustrated about something, and I was thinking about a metaphor or a story I had read somewhere about being on a mountaintop, feeling really great about life and about the self and all of this, and then having someone whisper negative things in your ear. If that were to happen, it wouldn't feel like a wonderful mountaintop anymore. It would feel kind of downer. And in that kind of experience, it's easy to get sucked into the negative emotion, even if the beauty of the mountaintop is wonderful.

When I've had that experience like at work, I've noticed that I would leave certain meetings completely drained, far more than the content of the meeting should have allowed. So it was various times of day, so not a real pattern to that. These were always online meetings, and nothing really negative was happening in these meetings. People were being professional and polite. The agenda was pretty reasonable, but every time I walked out feeling, or left the online call I should say, leaving tense. Irritable and carrying it with me into the next day, and the next meeting and my family time, and all of that.

And when that happened, I first told myself I was just tired. I needed some time off.

Maybe I needed a little change in my work. Maybe the workload was too heavy. But when the pattern started to repeat over and over again, it seemed as though something else might be underneath it.
Coaching Strategies: The Pattern Snapshot for Self-Awareness
So instead of trying to push through it, I talked to a coach friend of mine who just asked me a lot of questions. And these are those questions that I was able to reflect on.

The first was: What emotion was it? And I hadn't realized it to that point, but it was defensiveness.

And then she asked me, When does this motion reliably appear? I noticed it showed up most often in those meetings where decisions were being discussed, but the expectations were not super clear, and I felt responsible for the outcomes, but I didn't have enough clarity to do anything. So I would sit there frustrated knowing I needed to take some action, but not sure what it should be.

That awareness alone changed everything. The meetings didn't change. The people didn't change, but I changed. I stopped bracing myself emotionally and having all that negativity swirling in my head. I stopped second guessing what other people were doing or saying, replaying those conversations in my mind, wondering what was going on. And I started preparing differently. I decided to control what I could control about me, and not worry about controlling anyone else.

I brought more thoughtful questions into those meetings. I asked about timelines, expectations, and I started to be able to respond more clearly and get more clarity to do my work. All of that emotional drain was very heavy, but it lifted because I was able to see what was happening with myself and focus on what I could control.

The work didn't change that. The work didn't get any easier. The people didn't change. But I was asking thoughtful questions, and I was taking total ownership for my own feelings and my own results.

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