Shadow Works – The Missing Piece of Our Wellbeing Puzzle
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.” —Carl Jung
What is shadow?
A shadow is a dark area that is cast by our bodies. In this case, the shadow that we are referring to is the darkness that lives inside us.
Perhaps, we are aware of this darkness and try our best to hide, push and conceal it from others. Yet, some of that darkness has been repressed so deep that we have successfully hidden it from our sight.
Unfortunately, the fact we can’t see it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect us. On the contrary, it is now living in our unconsciousness.
The interesting thing about our unconscious is that it has power over us. Some of the places we can see the shadow take hold in our lives are when we:
- Judge others harshly
- Are very critical of ourselves
- Self-sabotage
- Struggle to have a healthy relationship with others
What is shadow work?
Shadow work is about making conscious the unconscious. Shining a light on the parts of you that have struggled so hard to remain hidden and out of sight.
It is not to be taken lightly or be considered easy work for we can uncover trauma and the parts of ourselves that we think about as undesirable.
Yet, through shadow work, we empower ourselves to not only love all of ourselves but also get rid of certain patterns or habits that we don’t feel aligned with who we are or are values.
By embracing the parts of us that we have worked so hard to remain unseen, you start recognizing the shadow not as a mistake or flaw, but as parts of who you are.
In this way, we can then start asking questions and exploring why we have certain thoughts or behaviors. Creating awareness then leads to being able to manage those thoughts and behaviors much more effectively.
At the end of the day, the goal of shadow work is to create acceptance of ourselves and learn to show ourselves the same compassion that we often extend to others.
Benefits of Shadow Work
Everyone can improve their well-being by doing shadow work and there are several particular benefits I will list below:
- Clarity. There are plenty of times we feel or act a certain way and we don’t realize where it’s coming from. Shadow work will help you have a clearer perception of yourself and the world around you.
- Better relationships. This happens for a few reasons:
- Accepting your shadow makes it easier to accept everyone else’s.
- Awareness around our shadows leads to being less triggered and more grounded.
- Build self-esteem. There is no greater love than the one we can show ourselves and accept all we are without hiding parts of ourselves.
- Authenticity. By bringing forth all of who you are, you will feel more like your authentic self.
- Boosts creativity. Self-acceptance leads to improved general well-being that in part leads to tapping more into our creative side.
Shadow Work Prompts
Shadow work can be done with the help of a professional such as a therapist, or coach. Yet, it can also be carried out on your own.
It is similar to the Socratic Method in the sense we ask ourselves questions or prompts. We are exploring our unconscious and bringing it into consciousness.
We examine our thoughts, feelings, assumptions, and beliefs by holding a mirror to ourselves and asking questions.
Often our shadow projects onto others, as it is easier to criticize others than work on ourselves. Here are some prompts to explore:
- Reflect on someone who triggers you
- What specifically about this person do I dislike?
- Do I behave in this way at times?
- Why is it difficult to be around this person?
- What parts of me come out when I am near this person?
Some other questions that you can reflect on to continue your shadow work journey are:
- How do you believe people see you? How would they describe you to someone else? How does that make you feel?
- What makes you feel unsafe?
- What makes you feel the most valued?
- How do you define failure? How does failing make you feel?
- Are there negative emotions you try to avoid? Which ones, and why?
It is not easy work, but it is definitely very rewarding work that will lead you on an amazing path of getting to know yourself better and improving your relationship with yourself and those around you.
Tiara Hoquee
Psychologist and Emotional Intelligence Coach
Get Better EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE Results By Following 3 Simple Steps
The world is changing at a frightening pace. To the point that sometimes it’s hard to catch our breaths in the midst of the waves of challenges that we meet on a daily basis.
Today’s working force grew up without cell phones, and now we can’t leave home without them. We went from cassette tapes and radio to CDs, to mp3 players, to streaming platforms in less than 30 years.
To say the world changes fast is a bit of an understatement. In We find ourselves constantly adjusting to new situations, elements, and deadlines. Trying to keep up with soft and hard skills in an increasingly demanding work environment.
They say we live in a VUCA world, which stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. In these conditions, it’s challenging to plan and know what will happen next because the circumstances keep changing. There is an increasing number of variables to consider and motivation is hard to pin down.
The concept of a VUCA world plants a seed of uncertainty and fear, which leads us to feelings of self-doubt, instability, loss of motivation, and lack of trust. With so many moving pieces and unsure about what our next step can be. Our mental health gets affected by what is perceived as a lack of control over many outcomes. It’s a standard response - our brains are programmed to try to predict the future.
We need an anchor that can steady our boat in the face of the stormy seas of uncertainty. Let’s dive into how we can create stability in a world that’s always changing.
How to Grow Resilience?
The American Psychological Association defines resilience as the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.
A simple way to put is the more resilience we have, the better our ability to adjust, adapt and "roll with the punches" that life throws at us. Alternatively, people with low resilience will struggle more to pivot when faced with challenges and changes.
Research shows that those who deal with minor stresses more easily also can manage major crises with greater ease*. So, resilience has its use in the daily stressors we face every day like, a spilled coffee as well as a bigger crisis like losing our job.
Martin Seligman proposed the 3 Ps of Mindset to help us navigate the waves of change. By considering the following three concepts we are able to take some perspective and look at a situation from different lenses:
- Permanence. Refers to how we think a bad situation will last forever.
- Personalization. Refers to thinking that the problem is yourself.
- Pervasiveness. Refers to thinking a bad situation applies across all areas of your life.
| Instead of This | Try This | |
| Permanence | I will never achieve X. | I haven’t achieved x, yet…How can I achieve X? |
| Personalization | I am not smart enough. | I am lacking in this specific skill. (speaks of the skill, not you as a person) |
| Pervasiveness | Everything is ruined. I fail at everything. | This bad situation is about X. I can separate it from the other areas of my life. (can remind yourself of success in other areas) |
Becoming resilient doesn't happen overnight. Much like riding a bicycle, employing a new skill feels very awkward at first, yet the more we practice the more it becomes a habit. To the point of feeling natural and second nature to us.
Practicing self-awareness will allow us to catch ourselves in moments where we fall victim to permanence, personalization, and pervasiveness. Once we have gotten used to catching it, we can then start replacing it with more positive thoughts that will allow us to build up our resilience and deal with changes big and small.
Tiara Hoquee
Psychologist and Emotional Intelligence Coach
*Southwick SM, Vythilingam M, Charney DS. The psychobiology of depression and resilience to stress: implications for prevention and treatment.
Focusing on the Positives
Did you know that we have about 50,000 thoughts on a daily basis and around 80% of those thoughts are negative, according to research conducted by the National Science Foundation?
This happens because of the way that our brains are wired. From prehistoric times, when we were cave people, our brains would focus on threats and dangers, such as a lion hiding in the bushes or a bird flying out of the sky to eat our food. We programmed ourselves to look out for the negative to be able to ensure the safety of us and those around us.
We no longer have lions waiting in the bushes to attack us, yet our brains are still programmed to focus on things that can possibly cause us harm. The main problem is that in the world we live in now instead of tigers and birds we have deadlines, and people who cut the queue or bump into us while looking at
their phones. All of these are annoying but definitely not life-threatening.
When we get home and our partner asks about our day a lot of the time it’s about everything that went wrong: that annoying co-worker who won’t shut up, that you spilled your coffee over your new white shirt, and how the waiter got your order wrong at lunch. We do this despite positive events happening even more frequently than negative ones.
It’s like we have a pair of glasses that make us blind to the good things that happen around us. From small things like enjoying your morning coffee and the sun shining on your face to the bigger things like being healthy, a good review at work, and having friends and family you love surround you.
If you do a presentation at work and most of your co-workers come up to you afterward to tell you what a great job you did. Yet, there is one person that mentions something you did wrong. The chances are you focus on the one “bad” review. That’s the glasses in action making you blind to all the
positives.
This also translates into our personal relationships where we tend to focus on what are partners get wrong or are mistaken instead of bringing up all the things they do right.
The good news is the brain can be reprogrammed to focus on the positive at work and in our personal lives. It all starts with creating awareness of ourselves and those around us.
Begin with paying attention and catching yourself when you notice you are focusing on the negative. Once you start, you can then replace the negative thought with a positive one.
Let’s say you are at home and you notice your partner hasn’t washed the dishes. They did go to the grocery store and restocked the fridge and remember to get those snacks they love. Instead of nagging about the dishes give thanks for what they did well.
Take off the negativity glasses and look around at all the positive things going on around you. Reprogram your brain and you’ll notice the more you focus on the positive, the more your brain will look for even more positives because not only is it rewarding but it also decreases stress and improves your mood.
Tiara Hoquee
Psychologist and Emotional Intelligence Coach
How can Self Awareness and Emotional Intelligence Work for Us?
Throughout history, human beings have harnessed the forces of nature such as wind and water to our benefit. We took something dangerous like fire and learned how to control it. It ended up serving us to cook meals and keep warm. Once wind would smash our boats into rocks, we learned to use it to impulse us in the right direction. Emotions are a similar story; they can be dangerous and make us crash, yet if we know how to control them they can serve us and take us in the right direction.
Emotional intelligence is making emotions work for you, instead of against you. The first step to accomplishing this is self awareness. Let us define what this means. Self-awareness is the skill of being aware of our:
- Thoughts & Emotions
- Strengths & Weaknesses
- Values
After reading that definition, you might think I know all those things. Interestingly enough, self awareness is like multi tasking in the sense most people think they have this skill. However, Even though most people believe they are self-aware, only 10-15% of the people fit the criteria, according to the Harvard Business Review.
Being able to identify and name our emotions helps us in a significant number of ways. For starters, when regarding emotions we usually limit our vocabularies to okay, angry, sad and stressed. This is very limited when the reality is there are at least 27 distinct emotions—and they are intimately connected, shows a study from Greater Good Science Center.[1]
By being specific and accurate about naming our emotions we are better able to understand what we need. Emotions are our mind’s way to give us information about our inner state. We often tend to ignore and distract ourselves. We live in a culture where we glorify “powering through” when this often leads to burnout and poor mental health.
If we wake up and think, “Oh, I feel bad”. This doesn’t give us much information. If I were to narrow it down to something more specific I will be better equipped to improve my state. For example:
- I feel overwhelmed. I can take a look at my to-do list and prioritize important tasks. Create a plan. If possible, delegate or postpone other less urgent tasks.
- I feel unfocused. I can take some time to take care of myself, which could look like better sleep, healthy meals, a workout, a massage, or a walk in nature.
- I feel indifferent. I can think about what activities I love that bring me joy and make time to do them, whether it’s shopping, playing a musical instrument, or having dinner with friends.
Among other benefits of naming our emotions, we can point out that by accurately recognizing how we feel we can put some distance between ourselves and the emotion. Creating this separation can bring some clarity as we realize we are not our emotions, and allow us to act more thoughtfully.
To illustrate this principle, I would like you to try a short exercise.
- Place your right hand in front of your face, almost touching your nose. And now ask yourself:
- What can you see?
- Is your hand getting in the way?
In this exercise, our hands represent our feelings and thoughts. When they are in such proximity, it’s hard to know where they end and you begin. Not only this, but also we are unable to see the situation around us clearly because we are so immersed in our thoughts and feelings that we fail to notice everything else.
- Now, place your hand at a distance from your face. And now ask yourself:
- What can you see?
- Is your hand getting in the way?
The thoughts and feelings are still there but they don’t consume you and you can see the situation more clearly. It is important to highlight that to manage emotions is not to avoid or dismiss them. Rather it is to allow ourselves to feel them and at the same time not let them dictate our actions.
We become thoughtful rather than reactive by paying attention to our inner states and then identifying them to create distance. Our inability to notice our own emotions and thoughts often leaves us at its mercy. Much like our example of fire, if we are unaware it can burn us.
People who can recognize their thoughts and emotions are better drivers of their life. For example, if I have a presentation today and I realize I am feeling some anxiety around it. By paying attention to my inner state I can observe my options to improve the situation by asking myself where is the anxiety coming from:
- Lack of preparation. I can review my presentation to increase my confidence
- Overthinking. I can occupy myself with other tasks.
- Wrongly perceived emotion. Excitement and anxiety feel similar in the body.
Recognizing a feeling as it happens and not as an afterthought is the keystone of emotional intelligence. There is a clear connection between our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The better we get to know our thoughts and emotions, the better we can make our emotions work for us and behave in a way that is aligned with our values.
For more idea on how our strengths, weaknesses, and values are important elements in self-awareness, please read my previous blog "The Importance of Knowing Our Strengths".
Tiara Hoquee
Psychologist and Emotional Intelligence Coach
[1] Keltner, Dacher. “How Many Different Human Emotions Are There?” Greater Good Science Center, 8 September 2017, https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_many_different_human_emotions_are_there.
The Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback
Managers dread giving it. Employees cringe at receiving it.
The word feedback has a terrible reputation.
Yet, it is undoubtedly one of our most important tools to achieve growth, deepen our connections and improve performance.
How do we master this art?
The mere mention of someone saying, "Come to my office I have some feedback to give you" can make us stop in our tracks and conjure frightening ideas of all we've done wrong.
It's hard to say which is more difficult to give or receive feedback.
In the first instance, we are tasked with telling a person their weak points which aren't the most pleasant of tasks.
In a recent survey done by Harvard Business Review, they found that 44% of managers believed that giving developmental feedback was stressful or difficult.
On the other hand, receiving feedback involves listening to what you did wrong, which no one wants to listen to.
It’s hard to hear criticism, even if it is positive.
The first step to getting us on the right track is to determine what we shouldn’t do.
What makes feedback “bad”?
Where did Feedback go Wrong?
Well, in reality, feedback didn’t do anything wrong per se.
It is us, the human race, who have used it in a less than ideal way.
What has caused us to associate this word with negative connotations?
- Lack of engagement from the giver. This could stem from feeling uncomfortable, insufficient skills, or fear of the employee's reaction among others.
- Lack of reception from the receiver. Often, when the feedback is taken personally, it creates reactions like shutting down and/or getting defensive, which tends to harm relationships instead of enhancing them.
- Lack of clarity in communication. When either party isn’t clear in the message they want to convey it tends to result in a negative interaction. Where one or both parties leave feeling misunderstood or unheard.
Why is Feedback Key?
It is clear so far that it’s no easy task to deal with feedback.
So, why go through all this trouble?
Something amazing can happen when two people sit together and seek to listen and understand each other.
Caring, trust, and vulnerability create fertile soil to plant the seeds of real connection.
You create a culture where leaders look after their employees and that in return increases engagement, develops performance, and fosters a positive atmosphere.
Feedback when done right has the power to motivate and result in personal and professional growth. So, how do we do it right?
Mastering the Art
If we break down the components of feedback we can find three elements: the giver, the message and the receiver.
The Giver
Open-mindedness, empathy, and teamwork must be present at the time we offer feedback.
To make sure, as a leader, you are prepared to give feedback ask yourself these questions beforehand:
- Can I separate the person from the problem?
- Do I want to listen to their perspective?
- Am I willing to provide support to overcome the problem and tackle it as a team?
Another element to keep in mind is the timing.
We want to try our best so that both you and the receiver are in a good place mentally to have this conversation.
Once you know as the giver you’re ready, you can check in by saying: “Can I offer you some feedback?”
It provides the receiver with the courtesy of asking, starting with a positive tone.
The Receiver
We know that we all have room for improvement, yet we are reluctant to hear how we can improve.
We can turn this around by acknowledging that by receiving feedback we are learning important information about ourselves or our work that can lead to the growth that we seek.
This change in mindset can make all the difference.
Be grateful to listen to the guidance on what you can do better and ask questions to clarify what steps you can take to correct and improve.
The Message
Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. - Brené Brown, Dare to Lead.
Beating around the bush, walking on eggshells, and another number of metaphors dealing with lack of clarity when we talk to protect either ourselves or others end up hurting more than they help.
The greatest disservice we can do is not speak clearly.
For both the receiver and giver to be understood better check the following when communicating your message:
| IS THE MESSAGE… | UNCLEAR | CLEAR |
| SPECIFIC | All your reports are very confusing. | Your last report wasn’t as clear as we needed it to be. |
| DESCRIPTIVE | Make the report clearer. | What do you think about adding data to back up your information, and using bullet points to ease reading. |
Positive Feedback Culture
Last but not least, they say that no feedback is positive feedback. This is not the culture you want to promote.
If we never hear positive feedback, and only get called out for negative feedback this can create resentment in the employees.
Whereas, if you regularly practice giving positive feedback, a baseline of confidence and appreciation is created which allows employees to thrive and when they receive negative feedback it allows them to receive it much more gracefully since they know there are many things they do well.
Tiara Hoquee
Psychologist and Emotional Intelligence Coach