Melissa Doman

And when we have silence around work,

conversations around emotional suppression, conversations are not authentic.

They are stagnant.

They don't have an opportunity to evolve and grow.

And oftentimes people will vote with their feet and they will leave organizations when those conversations are not happening.

And it's funny you mentioned that.

I was posting on LinkedIn a few days ago that when difficult conversations need to be had,

And that may include some emotions that are tough for people to deal with.

The question shouldn't be, should we say something?

The question should be, do we have the skills and the shared language to talk about this?

Oftentimes the answer is no.

And earlier when you were talking about, you know, people have trouble controlling how things come out, you know, you know, as well as I do that self-awareness and self-management are not the same thing.

Self-awareness tends to be much easier than actually managing the emotions.

And so I think a big reason people have trouble talking about difficult emotions while being resilient is that they've been suppressing it for so long.

They're very aware of how they're feeling.

But by the time it comes out, what happens to a finite amount of space with building pressure and pressure and pressure and pressure if there's no release valve?

You go, boom, and then people start to judge you the way it comes out, which, depending on how you act, might be valid.

But that's why having conversations earlier about, you know, emotions that accompany resilience would ideally prevent some of those blow ups.

So the way that I look at talking about mental health at work is that it is a shared language we all need to know how to speak.

And learning how to talk about mental health at work, in my opinion, is really about developing the skill for the conversational literacy.