33. Emotions In Your Leadership Practice: A Power Conversation with Abby VanMuijen

Saralyn
How, and why are emotions important in our leadership practice? Many people over identify with emotions, they let the emotions either guide them or lead their reactions or what comes out of their mouth. But what does it look like when you can take a step back, observe emotions, use it as data, see with curiosity, and then let flow and let go and make different decisions about how you move about in the world.

You’re going to hear from Abby VanMuijen today, who has done a lot of thinking and playing in this sphere. And they are an inspiration for me to constantly come from a place of curiosity, acceptance, love, experimentation, in creating tools that are just damn useful in our practice of being human first and foremost, much less using something called the emotion wheel, which Abby will bring in to be able to help for me do my own inner work of figuring out how I show up in the world and what that looks like.

Abby, I’m so excited to have this conversation with you. So help me out here, uh, by introducing yourself who the heck are you? My friend? What are you doing here? Talking to us?

Abby
My name is Abby VanMuijen. I am on unceded and stolen Ohlone land out in the bay area, which is, the very leftist part of California. Saralyn and I met on the internet over the pandemic and she reached out to me after seeing the emotion wheel and was like, I have a lot of questions. Can we talk about this now? Like yes. And then ever since then, we’ve been, uh, staying in touch, just we get into a session of just being like, we have so much to talk about and just go down these sort of riff, riff brains.

And it’s been so helpful for me as, the emotion wheel is a project that’s relatively new in my life. It’s now maybe two years old, but it’s been so helpful to just have a person who thinks all the time about doing your own internal work and your own leadership work and your own personal transformation work to just poke at it and to think about like, how, how can you use this?

How can you use this better? How can this be more helpful, more useful? And yeah, I think that’s, that’s at the crux of a lot of the work that I like to make.

Saralyn
You can go to Abby’s Instagram, at A V A N M U I J E N. And you can check out their link tree, their different posts and see what we’re talking about.

And you can also go to Abby’s, uh, website and just Google Abby VanMuijen and emotion wheel. You’re going to find it, or you can go to the practice your leadership website, and find our webpage and we’ll have links for you.

Abby, you’ve been really involved with your heart and your emotions and your essence on the planet in having conversations around emotions, creating the emotion wheel and so on. And my curiosity is first and foremost, why? Why is this so important?

Abby
This version of the emotion wheel or the one that I’ve made, started for me as a tool, just because I needed something to like have more vocabulary and have a tool for explaining to other people like this is what I’m feeling. This is what’s going on for me in this moment.

I think in the process for me of starting to go to therapy and starting to like engage in my own work of explaining what’s going on in my body and my emotional experience, I like was looking for tools. And I remember my therapist referenced me to so many emotion wheels that have been created in the past.

But in the process of like looking at those emotion wheels, I’m an artist and a designer and my kind of designer brain was just like this is super ugly. This, I don’t understand the logic for how this is put together. Why is this word in this category?

And so I like found it more distracting than helpful and I was kind of like, I think I could make my own version of this.

But yeah, it was all just very much based on like a need for myself to have more vocabulary and more tools to talk to other people about like what was going on for me at a hard moment in my life. And in particular, in my leadership life.

Saralyn
And being able to have all of that while you’re trying to transition in your career and your business and figuring yourself out, reaching for a tool that is more distracting, as you said, than it is helpful, but then leaning into creating something that’s really helpful for yourself.

Where has that gone now?

Abby
I think the, the most like core part of it that’s been and continued to be helpful for me is, like the colour coded language or just the framework that I have built around it. So for me, it’s really associated with just a general check-in or way of understanding what’s going on in my body and how do I give a colour and maybe a word to it?

So like, is there scraggly purple shaped, like around kind of my heart space or my like lungs? Like, what’s the quality of my breath? What colour and what shape does that have? And so both having that as just a visualization tool where I can think on the wheel of like, Ooh, purple energy is fear based, like is anxiety based, you know, like these different colours of blue feel like they’re rooted in sadness.

But ultimately like making the connection between the vocabulary that we use to explain emotions and like where and how those are actually manifestations of just like energy in the body, like being able to tie those things together has ultimately been the most helpful place that this has helped me get to.

Saralyn
Here are the two things that I’m picking up from what you’re saying that are really sticking out for me is you’ve developed a practice.

Abby
Yeah.

Saralyn
And that practice required a connection of vocabulary with colours with, it’s like clearing the noise, a silence. But that, that’s a, that’s a tricky word because you’re not being silent.

Right. You may not be speaking out loud, but there’s no silence to it when you’re doing that inner work. And so there’s this practice of connecting to your emotions. Why, like, who cares that you know about your emotions? Where does that practice lead?

Abby
I think there’s like a, a really different awareness of how you show up, with other people or like what both the emotions or the, the sort of like body energy that you’re bringing into even just being in the same space as another person. And then the next level of like being in conversation or being in community, like just having an awareness of like what’s going on in my body and what am I feeling allows you to show up in conversation with another person in a way that’s much more aware and also in a way that like has an understanding that like, oh, this other human is coming into this space with a whole set of other emotions and experiences that I will have no idea about. Um, so I think that that practice and awareness of like, oh, there’s a lot of shit going on.

Like in my own experience, like literally 17 different emotions at one time, all like doing things in my body that are, you know, I wouldn’t otherwise have recognized. It’s really helpful to have that practice and understanding to then walk into a conversation with someone else to be like, oh, you seem like you’re just person at whatever, frequency you’re vibrating at.

But if you had done the same, emotional kind of cataloging that I just did. There’s probably 17 completely different things going on with you that I’m not aware of. And so I think it has allowed me to enter into conversations with other folks with a little bit more of an awareness that there’s plenty of things going on that I have no concept of.

And also, I mean, with a little bit more curiosity, or just thinking about like the questions I ask or the way that I noticed that person, is holding that there’s a lot of other stuff going on that is influencing what their experience of being a person is like in them.

Saralyn
And this is it right? Is that we can make a whole bunch of assumptions of what’s going on from our own focus group of one ourselves. But to be able to make the space, allowing us to show up with as you said, an awareness of ourselves, and then opening that entity. The emotional field has just shifted.

You know, emotions are always there, whether you acknowledge them or not, if you allow them to stay invisible, doesn’t mean that they’re not going to affect the conversation.

Abby
Yup.

Saralyn
And this is what, you know, the likes of Marc Brackett talk about what the permission to feel or Brene Brown talks about with her new book, Atlas of the heart. And so on. It’s like, let’s be honest here. And I find that your tool, your version of the watercolours, and so on that it’s so helpful for people to see an array of a vocabulary of emotions, because they show up differently for all of us, whatever the emotions are and that when I use it with teams, it’s not to solve those emotions.

It’s just put them on the table. As you said, just be aware so that as I’m aware and allows me to step into space with you differently than all triggered and fixated on the whatever’s, right? Yeah.

And have you, I think if I’m not mistaken, you’ve created other versions as well. Right? One or two other versions. Am I right about that?

Abby
Yeah. I have also made there’s a version that’s in Spanish. And so the Spanish English version is double-sided. There are a few folks who work at San Quintin, which is a local prison.

And they are social workers who work with folks who are incarcerated there and said it would be really helpful to have a version that we could use to help translate emotion across, English and Spanish.

the Other version I did was just like a pride pride wheel, uh, or a queer wheel where I asked a bunch of my queer friends.

I’m a queer person I’m a trans person. But in a lot of my, like, exploring of that, just a lot of feelings that come up too around just like, what does it feel like to be in your body? As a queer person, as a trans person. And so it was really interesting to just ask my community. Like what words, what phrases, things like that make you feel like, yes, this is a particular feeling that I feel when I’m myself really. And even just that phrase, like, I feel like myself, it’s like, when that we maybe don’t put as like an emotion word, but can give you so much information as to like, whether you’re doing it or not.

Saralyn
Here it is right is it’s, we don’t have to make this more complex than it is meaning that the purpose of this tool is to be able to feel myself and be able to then show up in that and the way I communicate and the way I show up in this team, the situation, or, and sometimes that doesn’t mean verbalizing it.

Sometimes that means I see that coming up and I’m going to be quiet here because that’s the best protection I’ve got. And that’s what I need right now. You know what, however, that, that plays out for a person, it allows them to have agency and the power to be able to make a decision about how they turn left right up down, show up, not show up, whatever it is.

Cause they can figure it out for themselves and then have agency to be able to go off of that. It’s collecting that data to be able to move in the world.

Abby: Yeah. And then the one other version that I’m working on right now is some version of a social justice wheel. Whereas thinking about in a world where abolition is present, where everyone gets to just show up as themselves, like, what is the language we can use to explain? Like what, what of that actually feels. And what it doesn’t feel like or the tiny little nuances and the emotional flavour of like, what does it feel like to be marginalized, to be oppressed, to not feel safe, just walking around in the world.

So that’s been a really helpful project for me as I’m a white person. I think there are a lot of, identities that I occupy in which I’m constantly back and forth around. Like, how am I oppressing? How am I being oppressed? What’s my sort of situation in the world and trying to navigate the, like emotionality of that, um, something else, my own work that I’ve been working on.

But I think that there’s a version of the wheel and just listening to language and the books I’m reading, or on podcasts, like, what are the ways the systems need to change so that bodies can literally feel safe and the safe is a big word. And there’s a lot of confusion that goes around with that. But I think that that is, uh, an interesting, version of the wheel that I’m also working on and I think is of use, but yeah, it’s much, you can tell it’s much less formulated, obviously, because I’m still in the process of working on it as is our whole world.

Saralyn
Definitely. And it’s supposed to be wobbly, right? As you’re forming and playing and figuring out it’s supposed to be wobbly, not supposed to be formed. Talk me through a little bit around some of the anti-racism conversations you’ve held using the emotion wheel.

Abby
Yeah. I think, again, it started back with my own work of the summer of 2020 when George Floyd was killed and there was all sorts of demonstrations and resistance all over the US.

And I think in that moment, I was also going through and navigating a lot of my feelings as a white person of like, how do I show up in this moment of history and what is my role and what am I doing that’s wrong.

And then trying to be in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and I think that was the same time when I was starting to really like build and work on this wheel.

So if you look at the wheel, there’s this, uh, circle with sort of a rainbow, six sort of pie wedges that each have a colour associated with them. And if you cut the wheel in half, sort of diagonally from the top left to the bottom right that’s one of the sort of axis that I think of as the wheel being split on with the cool colours being things like fear and disgust and sadness, um, and sort of the like heavier parts of like anger and heavier parts of disgust or sort of shame and violence and things like that live. And then the warmer colour sort of yellow, like joy, genius parts being more in the warm colours but for me that was, a thing that I, I designed into the wheel to be like, okay, in a moment where I am feeling my white people feelings and I’m feeling all sorts of self-conscious and fragile and sad and heartbroken and, and a lot of these cooler colour feelings, um, which I was in a moment where I’m like, well, what do I do as a white person?

I feel so guilty, um, is helpful to recognize that and to like realize, oh, in this moment, I’m circling a lot of cool coloured feelings. And then to think a little bit about, well is in the broader context of when I’m showing up, to support social justice movements, to be a part of them myself, is that what needs to be centreded. No. So it’s helpful to be able to recognize that those are the feelings I’m feeling and then to think about, okay, well, how you know those aren’t going to go away. It’s not going to ever feel good to have a legacy where your ancestors have been the perpetrators of genocide and the perpetrators of violence.

But it’s also helpful information for me to be like, oh, well, am I, am I, regardless of that showing up in a way that makes me not only makes me feel good or feel better and not feel guilty, but is also promoting the genius and love for black people for brown people. To centre that work rather than centre my own feelings. It was that process of noticing like I’m stuck in this zone and that’s when I go into a shame spiral versus being able to say like, okay, how could I add on top of this more feelings of connection community?

So things like being in community and in spaces of anti-racism work having more conversations within my own family, being loyal, protective of not myself and my own feelings, but of the folks who are experiencing violence in this moment and historically, um, but yeah, just having some sort of a framework for recognizing like, oh, this is how I’m showing up and feeling in this moment and having a tool to say like, oh, how would I balance out the sort of emotional state or shift it into a different place?

Saralyn
I think that that for me is the most important part is having a tool or a framework to not go into the shame spiral in the judgment, but dwell in the discomfort, because it’s not supposed to feel good, right? To dwell in this discomfort, gather the data and say what’s going on here. And then being able to consciously decide, what am I going to centre in how I look at this or have this conversation or move forward over here. And using what I’m hearing is using something like this allows you to get into that space, to be able to get curious, to be able to snuggle up with the discomfort and then take a step from there.

Abby
Yeah. And holding your body in that space too. I think that’s the other component of this whole wheel and work is just being like, oh, I can notice what’s happening in my body and settle it into a different place. And like recognize it, like that’s messed up. Like, this is the way in which like my body is holding this and it feels terrible that, you know, that’s like, it’s never going to feel as bad as experiencing and suffering the violence of oppression, but even feeling in myself helps give me empathy for what it must feel like to inhabit a different body.

Saralyn
Yeah, well, and here it is, I think the word empathy that’s kind of the hook I want to pick up here is the practice of empathy is not easy and is required. I feel is required. And that’s part of what’s going on here, right? Is that the emotion wheel and your practice with it, either with yourself or with your team or with your community or with your family, however, you’re using it wherever it’s allowing data to be revealed, it allows you to show up, as you said, right?

Allows you to show up in these conversations to be able to a find a) place of empathy of people who have situations that are not your situations. Right. And b) to be able to lean into some of those hard conversations with yourself.

And with others in a way that doesn’t just centre your situated emotion of the moment, but I’ll again, have that perspective of, wow, there’s a lot going on here and let’s hold that together in this hard conversation and see the system that we’re in, whatever it is, see what emotions are sitting here with us, revealing that because that data is priceless.

Just want to centre yet, again, is the connection of identifying emotions. And then that somatic work, connecting into your body, right. And making those different decisions. And, you know, all of us get caught up in, like the heat of a moment and an argument.

And what would it look like to have a practice where you could actually tap into your emotion, see that data for a minute and just breathe. Just take a moment and breathe and then say, okay, wait, what do we have in common here that we can start from?

And then can we move into a place of acceptance conversation? Dare I say, bring in a little bit of love. Um, whatever that looks like, right? Teasing some of those, uh, some of those yellows, maybe some care, whatever it is to be able to change the conversation, but it goes beyond just identifying some emotions and circling some words.

It connects into the body and the breath as well, to be able to really open up that window of tolerance and have that resilience to be able to step into those hard conversations.

Abby
Yeah. Yeah. It’s been really helpful to tie it into somatic works and having a separate space with, with a teacher and with a group to practice, just body awareness with, for me, the, place where I’ve noticed some help, like really profoundly is in the moments where I’m like, oh, I’m really activated.

And I, at this moment need to set a boundary and pull myself back a little bit and, or wait until the really intense red and purple that I’m feeling in my like lungs and breath and the red in my arms. Like, I need to take a breath and wait till that changes to like, even a different flavour of like a lighter purple or a lighter red, uh, to then re-engage with that person in a conversation. I think that that has been really helpful.

Saralyn
We all get activated, whether it’s at work or family or the grocery store, whatever it is. Right. And part of the practice here is to have some kind of framework like using the emotional wheel, to be able to identify that you’re activated to be able to identify some of the emotions and then come into the body and take a breath.

The bridge for me is the boundary work that is needed to be able to do that. Because if you’re in the heat of the moment, you need to be able to say, hold on, I need a moment. And that alone can take a lot of courage, right. And sometimes it’s not appropriate. And so you got to get into that stress cycle that the Nagoski sisters talk about.

Right. And get into that stress cycle and say, okay, let’s just let that play out. Then I’ll go find my safe place and process later, whatever it is, can’t always do it in the moment. Sometimes you got to do it after fine, but it’s that I’m hearing what the priority here is, is identifying and getting that data from something like the emotion wheel and then being able to use the body to be able to process and then make a conscious decision of how you’re going to then go out and move into this relationship, this conversation, this action, the situation, whatever it is.

But that body piece is pretty important.

Abby
Yeah. And I think it’s both that like in the very activated moment and then as like regular emotional flossing, like just having the practice of like a regular body check-in, uh, like it just gives you more data on a daily basis or on a regular cadence to be like, what’s my general flavour of emotions feeling right now.

Um, but just it’s something I do at least once a day now. And just check in on my, it could be either through like, thinking about what my breath is doing or what my heart rate’s doing or starting with the wheel. It’s interesting to like work with other folks too, to see some folks are so much more inclined to start with the body, start with like, what am I feeling where, and then maybe go to the wheel or the words and colours to place with it. Um, for me, it was at the beginning, so helpful to just start with a word and maybe then give it a colour and then think about where it is in my body. But I think now I’m practicing enough where I can kind of go back and forth between those things a lot more easy, but it’s all, I think it depends on sort of what you’re most drawn to first or what feels like in closer proximity to the to the tools that you already feel comfortable with and have.

Saralyn
I like the emotional flossing, cause we all got to floss. And how many of you actually floss once or twice a day, come on. But it’s such good practice. Gotta floss, emotional floss. For a while. I actually had it as my, um, what do you call it? Your desktop background so that it was just right there. I’ve recommended to people who are trying to figure out why they get triggered in a certain situation.

So I was coaching one person who was having a situation in their context. And so they would use the emotional wheel every time they went into a team meeting

Abby
Okay.

Saralyn
And just seeing what’s going on there. Right. What kind of activations happen when I go into that team meeting with these certain individuals, right.

And being able to then have a conversation about your agency and your power and your inner critic and so on, right. Of what’s going on there. I suggest to teams all the time at their weekly team meetings or monthly’s. To just start by doing three deep breaths altogether, and then silently tapping into this emotion wheel, circling it, with it all up on a jam board or something so that everybody can see the final product together, not to solve it, just to be able to reveal because then the conversation could be like, when you want to get into, so how’s the team doing?

You’ve already got one artifact. That’s telling you how the team’s doing. Right. So it’s really finding all these different places to say, where do you want to reveal the invisibility of emotion so that they have, again, what Marc Brackett talks about the permission to feel.

Abby
Yeah.

Saralyn
Just to be able to give them permission, acknowledgement, not to solve them, but to give them that space and honour them in that way.

Abby
That’s sort of visiblizing the invisible, like also reframes the conversation around psychological safety and, just emotional labor in a way that often doesn’t happen in teams that are working on psychological safety. It’s like, I think so much of that work is like impossible to do, if you don’t have the tools to actually express and understand what are we feeling. And so it’s a really different definition of like, are we, are we as a team creating an environment where there can be psychological safety, if you don’t, as individuals understand like, what that feels like or what it doesn’t feel like. And so I think that there’s a way in which like that exact exercise of anonymously circling all of the feelings to show here’s all that’s present in this room. It just, it can make the beginnings of a shift in the conversation around psychological safety. And then also the conversations around emotional labor, which are oftentimes emotional labor basically is the work of those really uncomfortable, hard feelings that people do without anyone ever knowing about it.

Saralyn
And for people to be able to make the choice, do I want to put the emotional labor in right now or not? Right. To be able to make that conscious choice, to be able to even see that holy cannoli, am I ever doing a lot of heavy lifting here on emotional labor to be able to engage in this conversation right now, this isn’t working for me or I’ve got to approach this differently.

Like that’s where it can go. Right? So using the emotion wheel, your breath and your body, you can identify these, these moments for yourself, but then possibly as a team in terms of psychological safety, brave spaces and so on.

Abby
Yeah.

Saralyn
Part of what we’re inferring as we’re talking Abby, and I think it’s useful to make it really clear is that this is work and it can be very invisible because a lot of times it’s your own damn work.

Abby
Yeah.

Saralyn
And so it’s hard. And for those of you who are doing this, we see you,

Abby
Yeah.

Saralyn
We honour you, and it’s required for you to be able to level up your own self-awareness and step into the iterations of self that you are stepping into. And that it’s brave teams that are bringing it forward. And it’s damn hard when you’re just trying to do your own goals, like your team goals.

And then we’ve got to work on the us and talk about emotions on my like, and yet the effects and what are possible are things like psychological safety, brief space, and so on that leads to creativity and innovation and for people to be able to show up without fear what a wild concept, because let’s get really clear.

There is dehumanization and workplaces that are filled with fear that you don’t see. And that you don’t know because you don’t experience it. And so just, there’s a lot of inference underneath what we’re saying. So I think that, you know, it’s useful to be able to just call it out,

Abby
Yeah.

Saralyn: be able to call it out because I know a lot of teams, I’ve referred a lot of teams to your website and Instagram and they’ve printed it and they have it up on the wall and they have it in their digital spaces and so on.

And it’s, they, what they tell me is it’s so helpful and it’s work.

Abby
Yeah.

Saralyn
Right.

Abby
Good in the kindest way.