Alright, let’s talk about this thing people call “emotional presence.” Sounds like something you’d read in a fancy business book, right? For ages, I figured it meant I had to be, like, super tuned in all the time, nodding and smiling like a bobblehead, always knowing the right “empathetic” thing to say. Turns out, trying to do that just made me feel like a phony and, honestly, pretty exhausted.
So, what did I actually do?
Well, first, I had to ditch that idea of being some kind of emotional superhero. It just wasn’t working. My boss at this one gig kept going on about “connecting” and “being present” in our team meetings, especially when things got a bit heated. But nobody really knew what that meant. We’d all just sit there, a bit more stiffly, trying not to look like we were zoning out.
So, I started small. My own little experiments, you could say.
- I tried to actually listen. Sounds dead simple, I know. But I mean really listen. Not just waiting for my turn to talk, or thinking about what I was going to say next. I’d catch my mind drifting to my grocery list or that annoying email I still had to answer, and I’d just gently try to bring it back. It was surprisingly hard.
- I focused on breathing. Okay, this might sound a bit woo-woo, but sometimes, when I felt myself getting antsy or distracted in a conversation, I’d quickly focus on the other person’s breathing pattern for just a second, or even my own. It was like a little anchor. Kept me in the room, you know?
- I stopped trying to fix everything. This was a big one for me. Someone would share a problem, and my first instinct was to jump in with solutions. “Have you tried this? What about that?” But I realized that often, people don’t want a fixer. They just want to be heard. So, I practiced just acknowledging what they said. “Yeah, that sounds tough,” or “I can see why you’d feel that way.”
- I paid attention to the small stuff. Like, really noticed the other person. Were they fidgeting? Was their voice a bit shaky? Not in a creepy, analytical way, but just… noticing. It helped me get a better sense of where they were actually at, beyond the words they were saying.
It wasn’t about some grand performance. It was more about dialing down my own internal noise so I could actually be there with the other person. Some days I was good at it, other days, not so much. It’s not a switch you flip.
Why am I so hung up on this, you ask?
Well, there was this one project, a real pressure cooker. We were behind schedule, everyone was stressed, and tempers were short. Our team lead, bless his heart, was trying to be “emotionally present” by being overly positive all the time. You know the type. “Everything’s great! We can do this!” even when we were clearly sinking. It felt so disconnected from what we were all actually feeling. It was like he was in a different reality.
That’s when it clicked for me. Emotional presence wasn’t about faking positivity or having all the right answers. It was about being real. It was about acknowledging the stress, the frustration, even if it was uncomfortable. If he’d just said, “Look, I know this is a mess, and we’re all feeling the heat, but let’s figure out one small step,” it would have meant so much more. Instead, his attempts just made everyone feel more isolated, like our actual feelings weren’t valid.
So, yeah, I started working on just being genuinely there. Not trying to be a mind reader or a therapist. Just present. It meant sometimes I was quiet. Sometimes I just listened. Sometimes I admitted I didn’t have a clue what to do next, but I was there with them in the muddle. And funnily enough, that seemed to work a lot better than trying to be some perfect, always-on, emotionally intelligent robot. It’s still a work in progress, always will be, I reckon. But it feels a heck of a lot more honest.
