Emotional Atyachar!

If you are called "emotional", what do you make of it? When someone calls us emotional, our first reaction is to either defend it or to get offended. In fact, in professional life, someone being called "emotional" is definitely not taken as a compliment. Why is there such a stigma attached to the word "emotional"? Why is it automatically viewed as a weakness?

Can there be a positive connotation when someone is called emotional? I guess not. For instance, when I perceive someone as "an emotional person" in the workplace, I tend to handle him with kid-gloves. If I ever have to give him negative feedback, I rehearse a couple of times, use politically correct adjectives and  sugar-coat the feedback. After all, I don't want him to make a scene, you see! Why do we assume that an emotional person will not be objective? On the other hand, if we perceive someone as "passionate" about his work, he quickly becomes our blue-eyed boy! How can someone be passionate about something if he is not emotionally attached to it? I mean, I am extremely attached to my work; so, I am passionate about my work and that's why I am so damn good at it. However, in our corporate world, we seem to want "passionate" people but not "emotional" ones! How can you take out emotions from a person and still expect him to be passionate? We are certainly a difficult lot to please!

Maybe through years of handling people and seeing others handle people, most managers like me start associating emotions with sensitivity and lack of objectivity. We wrongly associate a calm and composed personality with objectivity and efficiency. And, very often, we are proved wrong. However, these perceptions and assumptions are so deeply ingrained in our psyche that we are not able to alter them.

Maybe our conditioning since childhood is responsible for this. As children, we see our calm and somewhat distant fathers handling the finances of the family and taking the major decisions of the household. On the other hand, we see our mothers deeply involved with us, often crying when they see us in pain, but we don't see them making the important decisions. These early memories probably shape our future perceptions of personalities. Are these perceptions accurate? Definitely not. When we grow up and come into our own, we start realizing the emotional fragility of our fathers and the inner strength of our mothers. But, it's usually too late - by then, we grow too rigid in our beliefs and assumptions.