How Women Can Separate Personal Emotions from Business

Naghilia Desravines

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Emotions help drive us, making them essential to us in our everyday life. However, there is a time and place for you dealing with your feelings. Your emotions can be a necessary tool as you grow your career, or they can hold you back, depending on how well you manage them.  

Why Personal Emotions Can Negatively Impact Your Career 

A coworker once seemed always to bring in those negative emotions into the workplace. When you work a lot with customers and other people, this can be very harmful to your career. She was good at her job, but sometimes she let her emotions get the best of her, which made working with her unpleasant. Customers left unhappy after dealing with her. Sometimes people didn’t understand why she would act like that, though sometimes it seems as though she brought some unpleasant emotion from an incident that happened at home into the workplace with her. 

When you disagree with someone outside of work, you can walk away and sulk about it, or you can fight back even more aggressively. The problem is that when you have this negative emotion in the workplace, it’s very frowned upon to get up and walk out on a meeting or when talking to your boss. This act is one that can get you fired from your job. In the case of the coworker, she never seemed to move up the ranks as she wanted to because her negative emotions got in the way of her performing her job functions at a high level, and she sometimes struggled to work with others.   

Separating Emotions from Business 

Women in the corporate world always seem to be held to a higher standard if they want to become a successful businesswoman. Those negative emotions can keep you back, but there are things that you can do that will help to separate your feelings from your business dealings. 

Every emotion requires its own approach to separate yourself from the emotion and overcome it. For instance, when you are feeling frustrated, you need to learn how to stop and take a step back to evaluate the situation. Think about why you are frustrated; then try to see something positive about the situation. As an example, say that your boss or client is late for a meeting for which you spent lots of time preparing. Instead of looking at it as a bad thing, think of it as more time to make sure that you nail it. If you are nervous about something, take some time to breathe and think about why it worries you. When you start feeling angry, try to cool yourself down before you show any signs of anger. 

One of the hardest things that people struggle with at work is how to deal with someone that they don’t like. You’re not going to like everyone at work, but how you deal with that unpleasant emotion will impact your success. You need to treat the other person still respectfully and courteously, but don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself if you need to. 

Whenever you feel as though you are overwhelmed with negative emotions, always remember that other women struggle with this as well. You’d be surprised at how much they are willing to help you through these emotions if you let them.