Positive Emotions and How to Channel Them in the Workplace

While what qualifies as an emotion varies between professionals, researchers agree that emotions are responses or attitudes to someone or something, and are a state of feeling that cannot be produced willfully. It begins with assessing the meaning of an event—either consciously or unconsciously—and subsequently triggering a series of responses (e.g. facial expressions, cognitive processing, internal subjective experiences, etc.).

Understanding our emotions helps us make sense of our surroundings, and aids us in understanding others and ourselves.

What are Positive Emotions?

Positive emotions are multicomponent response tendencies that occur over a brief amount of time—-mental experiences that are both pleasurable and intense (Cabanac, 2002). They involve desirable situational responses that occur (and are often confused) with sensory pleasure (Fredrickson, 2012).

There are many forms of positive emotions, but the most prominent ones are joy, pride, interest, contentment, gratitude, and love. These serve as the tenets for which most positive emotions and experiences are derived from.

What are the Benefits of Positive Emotions?

More than just ‘feeling good’, positive emotions extend beyond little pleasures and act as the foundation for the most meaningful moments in our lives. They guide effective coping mechanisms, providing a level of safety against symptoms of depression (Dolphin, Steinhardt, & Cance, 2015). Taking a few moments to be mindful and indulging in positive emotions improve life satisfaction and overall well-being (Kiken, Lundberg, and Fredrickson, 2017).

In the office, individual positive emotions improve employee resilience, helping them bounce back from obstacles and difficulties at work. Resilience has been proven to improve general employee wellbeing, learning, teamwork, and innovation.

Positive emotions yield positive impacts to relationships as well, contributing to overall health, social interactions, community involvement, and income (Danner, Snowdon, & Friesen, 2001; Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005), which all impact an individual’s ability to work. Furthermore, positive emotions incentivizes organizational citizenship behaviors, or one’s willing and voluntary commitment to non-mandatory tasks that benefit one’s organization. This helps employees go beyond their usual comfort zones to improve both themselves and the overall workplace.

Alongside these, positive emotions also improve one’s sense of self-efficacy and job satisfaction (Schutte, 2014). Self-efficacy reduces employee stress and anxiety, improves resiliency, and motivates the pursuit and achievement of goals.

Channeling Positive Emotions

Being able to tap into one’s positive emotions is more than just bursting into a peak of inspiration and motivation. It is a steady and continuous process that manifests differently between people, and has rooted long-term effects.

Here are five positive emotions you can harness at work.

Joy

Joy creates the urge to play and be playful (Ellsworth & Smith, 1988). It’s the emotion that pushes one’s limits and aids their creativity. Children who embrace play and joy are able to engage in rough-and-tumble play, communicate well with peers, and can easily interact with objects in their environment.

Joy and play help build our physical, intellectual, and social skills. 

What you can do:

• Start/end meetings with playful questions to get everyone thinking outside of a mechanical mindset

• Gamify meetings and other platforms you use to bring out a sense of awe and excitement in the mundane

• Encourage cooperative play such as brainstorming and team-building exercises

Pride

Pride follows one’s personal achievements. A rush of pride is broadened when the urge to share news of such achievements with others is created. To foster pride, one must envision an even greater set of achievements in the future.

Pride allows for us to grow and fuel our self-esteem. Pride helps us feel motivated and dedicated to achievement.

What you can do:

• Give positive feedback: congratulate colleagues for successfully completed tasks or for achieved goals

• Create a supportive environment that encourages sharing of aspirations and goals, and allows for collaboration to reach them

• Recognize and reward those who have overcome difficulties or challenges at work, regardless of the magnitude of the obstacle

Interest

Interest is the emotion that shapes one’s need to explore and take in new information and experiences. It guides us to expand our horizons and to learn more about ourselves and what we are passionate about.

However, there will be times when we may ‘fall out’ of our interests. Things may appear mundane or rotary. Work will always involve doing activities or tasks that are not inherently interesting to us (Kashdan & Fincham, 2004). The challenge in honing interest is to see the wonder and awe in everything.

What you can do:

• Incorporate your interests into your work—aim for a project/role that keeps your interests and curiosity piqued

• Purposefully place yourself (and others) in areas aligned with your skills and interests

• Increase how meaningful an activity is perceived: help the team unpack and discover how everyone’s actions affect the organization as a whole

• Take a few moments everyday to reflect about how your tasks for the day are important, and how you plan to contribute to the growth of the organization today

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Contentment

Contentment prompts individuals to savor and relish in their current life circumstances. This emotion helps us integrate these pleasant views into a new perspective of ourselves and of the world that highlights both its positives and satisfactions.

Contentment helps one amass a sense of self-insight, and helps us look forward to maintaining such a lifestyle.

What you can do:

• Express yourself through gratitude. Give your appreciation to others, especially the people you work the closest with

• Finish each day by reflecting on one good thing that happened during work, and share it with your colleagues, peers, or loved ones

• When you feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed, pause for a few minutes and take a breather: allow yourself to relax, rest, and realize difficult moments like these, too, will pass

Love

Love explores, savors, and helps us enjoy life. Fostered by inspiring and uplifting interactions, love builds and strengthens social bonds and attachments. It helps us remain confident and assured of ourselves, and helps us hone a sense of trust in and longing for other people and experiences.

Love contains and overlaps with all the other positive emotions.

What you can do:

• Note down a list of people, things, and experiences you love most; have them around as a reminder for what makes your life colorful and beautiful

• Express not just your gratitude, but your sincerest emotions as well, to those around you, so they may feel and be a part of the love you have

• Before starting your day and just before you retire for the night, look at yourself, and try to come up with reasons as to why you are loved; this will help you build self-esteem and feel assured that you are indeed appreciated