Anxiety, risks, blame, regret, entitlement, and value trade-offs

One of my big theories about work, since I began working, is that work wants you to be a creature of logic — hence why we root so much of work in repeatable processes (well, that and scale). The reality is that human beings are emotional creatures, and that creates a major work dichotomy. Within that dichotomy, you get into a lot of other issues, such as “Do managers really understand, or want to manage, human emotion?” (usually that answer is “no”) and “When we talk of burnout, are we also talking of emotional exhaustion?” (usually that answer is yes). We’re all emotional people, and emotions usually have next to no place at work — people who act emotional at work tend to have stagnated careers — and that creates a lot of coping mechanisms and other issues.

This article, which is ostensibly the 17th million article written since April about how to have “tough conversations” upon “returning to the office,” makes a few good points about emotions at work. I’ll bullet point a few of them:

• Anxiety (and its fully blossomed form, fear) is a response to the perceived threat of a cherished value.
• We unwittingly perpetuate our anxiety when we refuse to accept that these risks demand we make value trade-offs. And anxiety decreases the instant we make a priority decision between the two by…