Working Through Hurt Feelings at Work
Episode 506 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Tara Mohr
How do you deal with resentment and betrayal in the workplace?
Chances are, you’ve had to deal with having your feelings hurt at work. But what do you do with building resentment or frustration in the workplace, when it’s often considered “unprofessional” to express personal disappointment in such a context?
Tara Mohr, the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead, has given this question a lot of thought. We first spoke in episode 30, back in 2018, and she joins me again to cover a topic that’s been too long swept under the rug: how do we deal with hurt feelings at work?
From Playing Big to getting hurt
On the back of her book’s success, Tara founded the Playing Big Leadership Program for women, as well as the Playing Big Facilitators’ Training. In her many years of helping clients unleash their full potential, she’s explored the link between a social and political reality that still questions the worth of women and our deep-seated, widespread sense of self-doubt.
Years ago, Tara noticed a theme with her clients—hesitation to make the leap from having an idea to acting on it— and this was a reticence she could relate to. So many women express the desire to do work they are passionate about, to speak up more, to pursue a creative hobby, to be an entrepreneur…all laudable, practical goals that reveal to Tara that women, by and large, want to build for themselves a holistic life that includes career satisfaction but isn’t limited to it, but something is holding them back.
One step toward realizing that holistic happiness is ensuring the workplace is a generally fulfilling and emotionally safe place. And that’s where Tara’s work with office relationships and hurt feelings comes in.
70% of women surveyed have had hurt feelings at work
More recently, Tara has noticed another theme in her coaching: many women were experiencing hurt feelings at work. Often, it wasn’t driven by heavy issues like institutional sexism or gender bias—it was just “the normal human stuff that comes up at work.” That prompted her to put out a reader survey in the Fall of 2024. Of the 1,300 women who responded, 70% had a significant hurt or betrayal in the workplace. This alone tells us these feelings aren’t rare, so if you’ve ever felt like you’re being oversensitive—good news! You’re normal.
Tara also asked respondents whether past hurtful experiences still affected them. More than 60% said yes, and another 20% were unsure. Just 20% of these women were unburdened by past upsetting work experiences.
The impact of hurt feelings at work goes well beyond fretting for a few days. It can start to feel like burnout; the wounded party might consider leaving their job, even when it’s satisfying overall. It became very clear to Tara that the workforce needs a real conversation about how widespread these experiences are and how to work through them without jumping the gun and resorting to drastic measures.
Put Tara’s F.O.U.R. framework into action
In response to her observations and research, Tara built out her F.O.U.R. process, which she breaks down for anyone floundering in the mire of unrelieved hurt, not only in the workplace but in any similar situation.
1. Feel your Feelings
While we’re familiar with what it’s like to have feelings, many of us struggle to fully feel them. Step one of Tara’s process requires taking time to sit in the discomfort, to journal through it, perhaps, or talk it through with a friend or therapist. Basically, to deeply explore the sensation.
When we label our feelings, like Marc Brackett talks about in his book Permission to Feel (and in episode 323, “How to Lead with Emotional Intelligence”), we connect our prefrontal cortex to the more emotional part, automatically reducing the intensity of the feeling. Tara stresses the importance of this step—don’t skip it!
Feeling our feelings and meeting them with compassion is how we avoid an instinctual fear response, Tara explains. We have to begin by calming our nervous system and clearing up our cognition so we can think through and work with the issue in a non-reactive way.
2. Own your role in the situation
Fully feeling our feelings grants us a greater ability to think about our own part in the scenario. This isn’t to lay blame but rather to identify points of agency, moves we might do differently next time, so as not to relive the same situation over again. If you stick to the mindset that there was nothing you could have done to stop whatever hurt your feelings, you can’t feel safe going forward.
Tara suggests a few ways to own up: You can consider what it would have looked like to be “exquisitely loving” to yourself all the way through the situation. You can also think about where you may have been dishonest, even simply from a people-pleasing angle where you didn’t express your concern right away. Just notice these points of agency; don’t go down the would’ve, should’ve, could’ve road.
3. Understand the other party
Another practice that’s easier said than done is considering the other person’s perspective. Ask yourself how their behaviour might make sense “given what you know about their capacity.” Maybe they never apologize to anyone, so it makes sense they didn’t apologize to you. Maybe you mentioned an illness, and what you read as them stealing your work was actually them trying to take things off your plate to lighten your load.
The goal here is to consider their behavior not through a lens of morality but of causality. There’s always a reason someone does what they do, and figuring out theirs could help inform your next steps, including the boundaries you might need to set.
4. Respond with intention
Chances are, the way you’re moved to respond to your hurt feelings will be very different after you’ve gone through steps 1 through 3 above. Sometimes, the response has a personal development angle that’s completely unrelated to the instigator in question. Or, it might require a different way of being with that person in the future. Either way, you’ve mindfully transitioned from a reactive, possibly explosive response plan to one that should help mitigate both your feelings and future problems.
How does F.O.U.R. apply to big career transitions?
I asked Tara how her F.O.U.R. process could be applied to the context of preparing for a major leap, such as a career transition. She says working through this will help lighten the load. “You don’t want to leap with heavy luggage, and our old hurts are some of the heaviest luggage we carry.”
Furthermore, if you lack the skills to deal with hurt feelings and other workplace altercations, you run the risk of stumbling into the same scenarios in your new work environment. Practice healthy responses to fraught co-worker situations, and you’ll be wonderfully set up to build and maintain strong, supportive relationships wherever you head next.
I want to hear about how you navigate hurt feelings at work! Does Tara’s F.O.U.R. framework strike you as a helpful way to create mindful responses? Speak up in the Courage Community on Facebook or join us in our group on LinkedIn to share your take. And, if you’re ready to keep working on your own process, be sure to check out Tara’s F.O.U.R. Process journaling worksheet.
Related links from today’s episode:
Download Tara’s F.O.U.R. Process journaling worksheet
Learn more about Tara and her work
Buy Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead
Episode 30, Coping with Your Inner Critic
Episode 323: How to Lead with Emotional Intelligence
Episode 394, How to Recover from Workplace Bullying
LEVEL UP: a Leadership Accelerator for Women on the Rise
Learn to level up your emotional
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 506. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And today I want to talk about hurt feelings at work.
[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
What do you do with the experience of feeling resentful or betrayed or somehow violated by your colleagues at work? And to be clear, we're not talking about things that rise to the level of harassment or discrimination. We're just talking about the everyday experience of feeling the passive aggression from colleagues you might work with or feeling like you've been stabbed in the back by your boss. These are common everyday experiences that a lot of us report feeling when it comes to having our own feelings hurt at work.
So helping me to break all this down is a returning guest to the Bossed Up podcast, Tara Mohr. Tara is an expert on women's leadership and well being and the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom For Women Who Want To Speak Up, Create And Lead, which was named a best book of the year by Apple's Ibooks. Tara is the creator and teacher of the global Playing Big leadership program for women and of the Playing Big facilitators training for coaches, therapists, managers and mentors.
She's a co-active training institute certified coach with an MBA from Stanford University and an undergraduate degree in English Literature from Yale. Her work's been featured on national media from the New York Times to Today show to Harvard Business Review. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and three children and she's joining me back on the podcast today to break down how we can parse through hurt feelings at work. She previously joined me right here on the Bossed Up podcast back in 2018 on one of our earliest ever episodes, episode 30, which was called Coping With Your Inner Critic. Tara, welcome back to the Bossed Up podcast.
TARA: Thank you. I'm so happy to be back and I'm excited to chat with you.
EMILIE: Likewise. I feel like so much has transpired in our lives since we last had you on the pod in 2018.
TARA: Yes.
EMILIE: So much has happened in the world. First of all, Playing Big. Your incredible book is celebrating a decade, a 10 year old birthday. Congratulations. How does that feel?
TARA: Thank you. It feels great. And I, uh, think what feels great about it is that women continue to give it to each other. And so it's just had this life of its own that I couldn't have forced or foreseen. But I am so glad people are still finding it useful in all kinds of contexts.
EMILIE: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm not surprised to hear that because I think for so much of the work that we do here at Bossed Up, so many of the women I work with in big ways and small, in the start of their career, in the last decade of their career, playing big, this idea of like actually unleashing, um, your full potential internally before even navigating the barriers that you might run into externally continues to be a huge part of this. So, just to remind listeners who might be hearing our conversation here for the very first time, can you tell me a little bit about your Playing Big philosophy just to set the stage here on how that work really has inspired so much of your career?
TARA: Sure, I would love to, yeah. So I started out doing some coaching of women about 15 years ago now. And I didn't know what the focus of that work would be. I mostly knew I wanted to work with people around their inner lives. I was fascinated by psychology and questions of human potential. And I happened to have the sort of early clients I had who were friends of friends and colleagues of colleagues, were all of these fabulous women.
And very quickly the pattern I saw in those coaching sessions was that those women came across to me as incredibly capable and bright and they had great ideas and they had wise critiques of their industry or company or world. And at the same time I kept hearing from them, yeah, but if that was a good idea, someone else would have done it already. Or, you know, I'm not, I want to take that leap, but I'm obviously not ready for it. And I got very interested in that because I saw a lot of myself in that. It's like, that's familiar to me. I have lots of reasons to feel confident, so kind of a high achiever in school and work, but I wasn't feeling confident and maybe even more deeply than confident. Like, I just wasn't feeling free and self trusting in myself and my voice, especially at work. I had another full time job at the time inside a large organization.
So I got very interested in that pattern. And then it kind of linked up for me with a broader social and political reality of, hey, we live in this world that women are still not leading and shaping to the degree that I believe would be healthy and better for our world. And so like, what's this link between the ways we've internalized self doubt or you could say internalized a patriarchal culture or our playing small and then this reality we get in the world where women's voices are still so absent and how could I work on that?
And so my coaching practice was a very good in the trenches kind of thing where I had to figure out what's really going to help people feel more ready to take those leaps and feel more capable. And the things that my clients and I figured out about that became the playing big model and became a course and a book that, you know, has now really made it’s way around the world and had thankfully a big impact.
EMILIE: That's great. Amazing. When you say feeling capable and confident of taking those leaps, what are some of the examples of leaps that we're talking about here?
TARA: You know, it's often, I want to do work that I actually love and I'm passionate about. I want to just speak up more. I want to do a creative passion, even maybe on the side of my job, but that I just have too much self criticism to even entertain. Maybe I want to become an entrepreneur. That's a big one. But I have to say, over the year, you know, when I started, I thought like, we're going to help everybody, like get the career thing they want through this. But even now, like this past year, when I surveyed my readers and asked them, how do you define playing big? The thing that is the most common answer is it's just creating more of the whole life that I really want.
So it's more this personal, am I really living it? Like, am I going to go out with regret or feeling like I lived someone else's life instead? Or I cowered to fear or expectations? Or did I really create the whole life I want, which might include my schedule, my work, my home, my choices, in the broadest sense?
EMILIE: Yeah, I love that. Here in Colorado, my husband Brad and I talk about the full send, which is a skiing term, right? Like send it. You're just going to go down the mountain, throw yourself down that double black diamond, you will figure it out on the way down kind of a thing. [LAUGHTER] And we've been joking recently about our life choices and our lifestyle and just the overflowing plate of stuff that we've got going on right now. That on my best days, I feel blessed to have this like, overflowing plate. On my worst days I'm like, who the h*** signed me up for all this stuff? Oh, right, it was me. But this idea of like that full send, of going for it all out, like living life to your maximum potential is something that really is such. It looms so large for me that, I just did a team engagement recently where I was looking at my Gallup’s strengths again for the first time in a while. One of my top strengths is activator. If you're familiar with the Gallup.
TARA: Yeah.
EMILIE: Right. And I'd never seen it this way before, but in the activator description, a friend of mine was saying, like, when I'm around you, I feel more confident. I said, huh, that's funny because in this description it says people who you coach or people you're around in general, you inspire confidence in them. And I'm like, yeah, throw yourself down the mountain. Let's figure out how we, you know, prevent injury down the way. But this idea of like unbridled ambition, taking that leap, if anything, sometimes I leap before I aim, right? That's like the dark side of the activator strength. But I just can't. I identify so strongly with what you're talking about of like not having regrets on your way out the door. It's such a freeing way to live.
TARA: Yes. And I also want to say, you know, I'm thinking about the people listening and I just want to underscore to me, that does not mean that you quit your job just because you have this burning entrepreneurial desire. And it doesn't mean, you know, that you have to go on a paragliding adventure this summer. Like, I think I'm much more and probably maybe even more than is your style personally. Like, I think it's often quiet internal moves that really are that shift to being on our own side again.
And it can just be as simple as I'm going to let myself ask the question in the meeting or I have no idea how I could ever have a viable business. But instead of arguing against myself about it today, I'm at least going to go to the library and get a few related books and read them with a sense of curiosity. Like it can be that. And it's often a bit of an internal pivot and how we're standing in relationship to ourselves. It just kind of opens a new pathway.
EMILIE: When you said self trusting, that kind of really stood out to me.
TARA: Yeah. Which is especially hard for women because far more than our male counterparts were getting constant messages that were really not very trustworthy.
EMILIE: Mhm. From a very early age. I mean, it's just being shushed, basically. I want to talk about how those underlying feelings can influence our behaviors and influence us even going for or unlocking our full potential personally or professionally.
One of the topics that I know you have been thinking a lot about lately is just like hurt feelings at work. In big ways and in small women are just told to like, sit back and shut up, quite frankly, and just not encourage. We're penalized, frankly, in gendered ways for exhibiting the same leadership characteristics that men are on the whole, in the workplace, praised for. And so obviously, these are sweeping generalizations. And gender is much more complex than just men and women. But when it comes to those hurt feelings at work, what do you often see women navigating?
TARA: Yes. So this is something that has recently been showing up as, like, a glaring pattern with people I'm coaching and talking to. And I was really intrigued by it because I don't think we are talking about it. And that is women who have what they would call an experience of significant hurt or betrayal in an interpersonal way at work. And it may, it's often not even. I mean, of course gender is tied up in it, and we'll talk about the ways, but it's not even, I'm feeling hurt because this place is biased. It's just maybe this person backstabbed me or I feel like my boss threw me under the bus, or this person has no respect for me. The normal human stuff that comes up at work. But I think we don't really talk about it often in terms of hurt and apply sort of, what do we know about how we heal from hurt?
So this fall, I did a survey with my reader community. We had about 1,300 women who responded, and 70% felt that they had a significant betrayal or hurt at work. So that's the first piece I wanted to talk about, is like, we just need to normalize this because people think they're having kind of exceptional experiences. And then we also asked, would you say that this still affects you? In other words, if that betrayal happened many years ago, do you still feel affected? And about 62% said they do still feel affected, and about 20% said they're not sure if they're still affected, which I find very interesting because I think we can all relate. You know when something's like, really hurt you and you're like, I don't know. It's all so darn foggy and confusing. Like, is that, am I carrying that? In what way? So only about a fifth said, no, I'm not still affected by that hurt. And what I have seen coaching is that we're not even aware that the hurt is what's going on.
So, for example, one of the first calls that really made me think about this was a woman who said, I'm struggling with burnout, which is such a big buzzword right now, right? Struggling with burnout. And I don't know, there was just something listening to her, I was like, I'm not feeling this burnout energetically, but this person does seem hurt. Like the, you know, when someone seems almost ready to cry. So we just probed a little more and it was like, well, no, what actually happened was a colleague that she really trusted said some things about her that were very hurtful to her, and she found out about them, and it hit her really hard. And it was someone she had worked with for years, and she couldn't quite figure out what to do with it.
And so, of course, soon that started to feel like burnout. That started to feel like I just don't have energy for my work. So there's the burnout place that goes. For many other women. They leave the job because of it. They go away from work that is otherwise pretty satisfying or a good fit for them. They might leave the part of the organization that's a good fit because they can't be around the person anymore. They might go start a business because their mind is sort of thinking, I just can't work closely with people in that way anymore. Which is not the great reason to start to start a business and try and make it survive.
So I just felt like we really needed to start having more of a real conversation about this as a reality for so many of us, and then talking about how do we move through the hurts or resentments or feelings of betrayal that a lot of us are carrying so we don't have to go make these huge career switches or carry around pain at work every day because of it.
EMILIE: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting framework because we, for some reason, I feel like we don't give ourselves permission to say, my feelings got hurt at work. There's still in 2025, this underlying assumption of, like, your feelings don't really matter at work, right? Or, like, you're not entitled to have hurt feelings at work. I'm. I'm your boss. I'm not your best friend. This isn't the schoolyard, right? And so there's something there about just the basics of emotional intelligence that we know about, like, feelings matter at work whether we want them to or not. So I'm wondering from, like, from management's perspective, where perhaps there's an old school philosophy of command and control, why should we care? Like, I think I know, but why should we care about people's hurt feelings at work?
TARA: Right. Okay. Yeah. Such a great question. So, first of all, I would say I completely agree. There's kind of the idea that at work we wouldn't say, my feelings are hurt, or we're not really talking about that. I would say broadly, culturally, also, even in a personal context. Most of us are not good at going, oh, you know what happened? I feel hurt. Instead. We're like, you're wrong, actually, you're a crazy jerk. I'm mad at you. We go a lot of places because we don't really have the tools to go to the hurt that's underneath.
So that's kind of the first piece is just, can we normalize as human beings? We do get hurt. We hurt each other. We know that emotional pain actually registers in the body in the same way as physical pain. You know, like, you can even take Tylenol. There's these studies where they give people traditional painkillers and it reduces, slightly reduces their feeling of hurt. I'm not recommending that as the tool, but just to say the pain of it is actually real and it is a kind of pain. So we're not very good at noticing, oh, I got hurt. That's what happened. We kind of go all these more cerebral, argumentative places.
And then on top of that, even more so at work. And because we're not. If we're not supposed to feel hurt, period, as humans, but we're definitely not supposed to feel hurt at work. We also, I think we don't always take our workplace hurt to a therapist or to our friend and even use our normal tools. As a manager, I'm not sure that managers are responsible for healing people's hurt, and I don't think they could entirely prevent it. I'm more interested in, how do we each, as individuals, move through our own. And we'll talk about that today.
But, yeah, why would you care as a manager? Because if someone's carrying around a lot of hurt and resentment, they're probably not going to have great morale. They may not stay that long. They're going to come up with some other reason why they need to be moved to another role. They're not going to collaborate with this person. They're going to be more defended and armored up around other people. Like, all of that.
EMILIE: Yeah, I can just imagine the bad behaviors that come from that. Like when they say, hurt people, hurt people, right? You're like, I don't want a whole bunch of bullies who are protecting their own territory and exhibiting really not helpful behaviors on the team. And I can just imagine how, like, a higher trust environment could breed better behaviors, more collaboration, more creativity, better decision making. But it's interesting, we had an interview a couple years ago now on episode 394 with Zenica Chatman about workplace bullying. And you're right, like, there's a lot of hurt feelings. There's a lot of bad behaviors that we experience at work.
And so, if you are on the receiving end of betrayal, that's a heavy word, right? If you feel double crossed, if you feel like you can't trust your colleagues and you're starting to feel resentful, which feels, I don't know, pretty natural as a reaction, how do you advise folks to navigate?
TARA: Okay, so this is the process I've been taking people through. And so if you're carrying a hurt, which we know a lot of us are, you can try out this process. And we can. We can work a scenario on it today if you want. But I'll kind of give an overview of it first. So the acronym I use is four, like, F O U R, like the word four. So the first part is we want to just feel our feelings about the hurt, which a lot of people also don't know yet. What does it mean to feel my feelings? That's actually not obvious, right? Most of us don't feel our feelings. It kind of requires slowing down and sitting still for a minute. It requires some discomfort.
So, it can look like something you do in journaling. It can look like something you do with a coach or a therapist, or if you have a friend who's a really good listener, who can be more of a listener than a jumping in and advising friend. Any of those contacts. It can be something you do by yourself on a walk to just be like, okay, how am I actually feeling? And, you know, just last week I was coaching someone, and it was amazing to be, like, about a workplace hurt issue, and it's like, how are you feeling? Well, I'm feeling like she's really unreasonable because she totally keeps me out of high influence. It's like, that's actually not a feeling. That would be a big stream of thought. So let's go back, you know, Ann, how did that feel? Was it disappointing? Was it painful? So we're looking for those words, like sensory words. I felt hurt. It was disappointing. I felt angry. And we're giving a name to them. And research shows that when we label a feeling with a word, first of all, it automatically reduces the intensity of the feeling. Cause we're kind of. We're hooking up our prefrontal cortex language part of the brain to the more emotional part.
But then the second part that's really important is we have to experience the feeling, even just for a few moments, and meet it with a real spirit of compassion. And I think of that as just the, like, putting my hand on my chest over my heart kind of, and going like, oh, honey, like that, that was hard. And this is the part where we're not questioning ourselves. We're not blaming the other person with a bunch of arguments. We're just like, that was hard. How it felt. It was so disappointing. It was such a shock. Oh, wow. It felt really painful and kind of re, in a way, it's like meeting ourselves. If you could imagine, like the most loving, you know, energy that you could meet yourself with and just meet the feeling that way.
EMILIE: Totally. I cannot help but recognize the fact that we both have toddlers.
TARA: Yes.
EMILIE: And nothing has made me better as an. As a emotions coach than having a three year old in my life, right? But Marc Brackett's book, Permission To Feel, we had him on the podcast recently. And just walking through the labeling of your feelings, which I do with my toddler all day, every day with my preschooler, and sometimes I gotta bust out the same feelings wheel for my husband, right? Because we haven't taught men and boys in this country for many generations to identify how they're feeling much women. But it's just like that process alone is like mothering yourself, right? Like parenting yourself and being there as a mirror for your emotions. Not necessarily to. To question them, but to validate them, right?
TARA: Exactly. And it's so hard. Just the same way with kids, we want to be like, you don't need a second ice cream, you know, you had a first one. That's unreasonable. It's like, well, that doesn't help. Or, you know, promising the ice cream another day. Like, we know what's best, right? Is to just let that child have their feelings. And then we know they're kind of a different person. On the other side of getting to feel their feelings, they have space again to be patient and to think of solutions for themselves. So the same thing is true for us.
EMILIE: Reasoning with a toddler having a tantrum is never a good move.
TARA: No. Or an adult, really. Right? It's true with adults too. So that's the F in the four is just we're feeling our hurt feelings, or our sad feelings, or our betrayed feelings, and we're meeting those with compassionate ways. Okay. Do not skip that step in the process. I have tried this with skipping that, and we are not able to do any of the other steps until we've really felt our feelings.
The next part has to do with understanding our own role. So that's the O is like your own role, your own part, which often we're way too defensive to even think about before we've met our own feelings with some compassionate witness. But we're doing this to not blame ourselves, but to find, like, where were my points of agency in this situation? Because the only way I can heal from hurt ever, in personal or professional the only way I can heal from hurt is if I can see why I would be able to care for or protect myself a little better if a similar situation were to happen in the future.
EMILIE: Mmmm, that's the self protection instinct kind of kicking in.
TARA: Yeah. In a healthy way. Because if I walk away from this situation with the narrative that sometimes your boss can just be a raving, you know, jerk and there's nothing you can do about it and you're a complete victim, how can I ever feel safe in the world again? So I have to find, where are those points of agency? And there some ways I like to do that. One is just asking, what would it have looked like to be exquisitely loving to myself in this situation all the way through? So maybe you have a co-worker that you feel like is always slacking on deadlines and it doesn't care how it impacts you and you've let that situation fester and now you're furious about it. Or maybe you have a situation where a colleague seems to make subtle jabs at your ideas in meetings. You're asking yourself, what would it have looked like to be exquisitely loving to myself in this situation all the way through?
EMILIE: When you say exquisitely loving, what do you mean?
TARA: Yeah, great question. Well, first I would say, I mean, close your eyes and feel into your body and feel that phrase being exquisitely loving to myself and just see what pictures or ideas come up. And I see you smiling a little. So something maybe came.
EMILIE: Well, I'm just trying to think, like, if someone's really crossing some boundaries, let's say in a corporate setting, and you're like, you know, to be exquisitely loving is for me to like, lash out right now, right? That's not what you mean, right? But the mama bear in me like claws are out. [LAUGHTER]
TARA: Yeah. So really check. I mean, if you. Let's check, let's say some, you can imagine whatever the particular boundary crossing situation is and then let's actually check what would be exquisitely loving to yourself. So it carries that energy of like, really being loving to you.
EMILIE: That's probably not the lashing out part of me. Yeah. I think like, to me it's like, that self care for your career in that moment, right?
TARA: Mhmm.
EMILIE: Which is like, what do I need to have my needs met and not do damage in an unnecessary way, right. Because like what's actually loving towards myself is protecting myself and, and making sure my needs are still met in that moment.
TARA: Right, right. And not in a way that would come back to bite you later. Necessarily, right. So. Exactly. So exquisitely loving. There's no prescription that I or anyone else can give you of what that looks like. But that's kind of a phrase to try on in any situation and really feel your way into. And then, oh, what would that love have me do? And there's often real interesting, wise and surprising answer there, like you just found. So that's number one.
You can also ask, and this is, I'm deriving a little bit from actually 12 step recovery processes of kind of looking at our own part in difficult relationships where we can ask like, well, where was I dishonest in this situation or fearful or maybe just didn't have the skills or tools I needed? And I find for me as a, you know, and I think this has a real gendered quality, a lot of times when I have developed a resentment towards someone, I have been being dishonest.
EMILIE: Yeah. People pleasing, right?
TARA: Mhmm. People pleasing. Not wanting to wreck the boat, scared of conflict, questioning my own feelings or thoughts. And it's not to say I should have said, you know, there's no should there, but just noticing, oh well, that's a place of agency. That's a place where I helped weave whatever this dynamic became. So I might write that down too. If I'm doing this as a journaling process.
Sometimes if I really, you know, it's not that I was dishonest. It's not. I really don't want to blame myself. It's just I didn't have the skills I needed. Like, I can look back and be like, I just had no idea how to give someone tough performance feedback. I didn't have that tool. And so, that contributed to this situation. That's how we're looking at our own part. That's step two.
EMILIE: And then there's a U, right?
TARA: There's a U. So the U is understanding the other party.
EMILIE: Yes. My side of the street's clean. And what's going on on your side of the street? What I'm hearing.
TARA: Yes. And this is from the parenting world directly. This is a question I originally got from Susan Stiffelman, who's a parenting expert, and she says, you know, whenever your kid is doing challenging behavior, the question to ask yourself is, how does this behavior make perfect sense?
EMILIE: Oh, wow. That's a skill we've lost as a country. I just had a conversation last week for the podcast that was like, assuming the other person's perspective, which used to be a civil discourse skill that we all learned that we have atrophied really.
TARA: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. So, you know, I think it's a great question to ask about kids or adults because everyone's behavior, you know, I think we've confused, like, we're looking at people's behavior only through the lens of morality and not the lens of causality. People's behavior has causes. We're not crazy, unpredictable creatures. A set of factors lead to outcomes. We understand a lot about human psychology and the nervous system. Like, the research understands way more than we act like we understand when we're just like, there's a random bad behavior. There's a random bad person.
EMILIE: Yeah. Or a stupid person is what I hear more often.
TARA: Yes. Right.
EMILIE: It's not even like, the morality. It's like, this person's dumb, therefore they're acting out of their self interest. And it's like, that is the laziest argument you can make in politics or in, you know, the preschool classroom. It's like, no, this behavior definitely is in their self interest from their vantage point. You've got to work a little harder to figure out how that's true.
TARA: Exactly. And how did this get here? So, so whoever that person is that hurt you, we get to ask ourselves. Hmm, how does their behavior make perfect sense? And that can be. How does it make perfect sense? I really like the phrase, like, given kind of what I know about their capacity. Oh, I , yeah, that's right. I kind of know they don't really apologize for anything, why would they have apologized to me? Right? Like, Or I can kind of guess that they don't seem like they really trust other people much. So it's just an acknowledgment.
We're all shaped by our wounds and our conditioning, and this person's behavior, you know, makes perfect sense. You might totally be able to see why. You might have to make some guesses. And this is always so powerful because when I do this in big groups, you just see the stream in the chat. Oh, she was probably having a stressed day. Oh, she's under pressure from her boss. Oh, she thought she was doing the best thing she could, I mean, I just, yesterday I was teaching this and we went from someone being like, this woman is trying to steal work from. From me. Like, she's trying to reduce the scope of my role. By the time we got to this part of the process, it was, oh, I. I told her I have a health issue. She's probably trying to reduce the scope of my role to help me, not because she's out to get me. And she had messaged the woman by the end of, like, while we were in the workshop, they were messaging and they had come to a totally new place. So it's a very powerful question.
EMILIE: I believe that it's not our first instinct to assume someone else's perspective. And that's hard, right? Empathy, even though women tend to have more empathy, right? Women leaders lead with empathy as, like, such a superpower. And it can be exhausting if it is your superpower, quite frankly. It's like, perspective taking when you're feeling cornered, when you're feeling hurt is probably the hardest moments within which to lead into that empathy skill. And yet it's probably the most transformative opportunity to assume someone else's perspective.
TARA: Yeah. And for some reason, we think that if we can assume someone's perspective or empathize, then we're also not allowed to have any boundaries.
EMILIE: Right. Which is not true.
TARA: It's not true at all. The two things actually have nothing to do with each other.
EMILIE: I always say it's an explanation, it's not an excuse.
TARA: Yeah.
EMILIE: If someone's exhibiting totally disrespectful behavior towards me, let's just say hypothetically, in your own extended family, right? If someone's, like, exhibiting behavior that I find totally unacceptable, and we can all pathologize this person and say, well, here's the origin of this behavior. Oh, is this thing that I said that is totally innocuous, frankly. That completely triggered this person's bad behavior. That's an explanation, but it's not an excuse, you know what I mean? Like, understanding their perspective. It doesn't mean you can't hold a boundary or say, well, I'm not going to be coming to Thanksgiving dinners if this is what they're like, right?
TARA: Right. And I think it's so important that, you know, the boundary comes from how we want to live in our own quality of life. It's not there to punish them. It's not really even about excusing or not excusing. It's just like, is that something I'm up for or not, maybe not.
EMILIE: Do I tolerate that in my life?
TARA: Yeah. Yeah. Do I want that in my life? Yeah. So that's we're understanding their part, and then the last part is kind of what we've naturally segued into is once we've got all that. So that can be like, okay, I felt my feelings. I see where my own dishonesty played a part or my own lack of tools or skills for that kind of communication, whatever. And I see how their capacity or their shaping or their stressors gave rise to this behavior in them. Now I can do the R, which is kind of how do I want to respond? And the kinds of responses that seem like a good idea are so different after we've done that process.
EMILIE: Yeah, I bet, yeah.
TARA: And sometimes the response is, I need to set a boundary or I need to work differently with this person. Sometimes the response might be, oh, I realized I'm a total people pleaser. I need to go work on that. Like, the response can actually sometimes have nothing to do with the person. Especially if it's a past situation. It's like, well, am I ready to be different if a similar situation were to occur? Oh, no, still, I still don't know how to give tough performance feedback that's going to play out the same way. Let me go learn about that, right? So it's kind of, again, it's how we take care of ourselves and feel safe in the world again. Sometimes it involves, you know, some kind of conversation or different way of being with that person. And sometimes it doesn't. That's really up to the individual then to discern.
EMILIE: Yeah. So this feels like a really helpful framework for mindful response. So for being really conscientious of, I feel like when my feelings are hurt. And this comes from Kim Scott's Radical Candor framework, right? When you're like, backs against the wall, some people resort to, what is it called, like, toxic empathy. I forget exactly what she calls it. But saying like, whatever you want is fine with me, you know, passive.
TARA: Mmm.
EMILIE: Passive dishonesty, right? To your earlier point, we're kind of rolling over and being a doormat. That leads to resentment, that leads to frustration. And then some people get aggravated and aggressive and lash out and say, well, I'm just going to be brutally, you know, honest with you here and not take responsibility for my own behaviors in that moment. And so this is such a better way of proceeding, right? Like, how do we stop ourselves from reacting from a place of anger, fear, you know, in our own best interest or not towards a really thoughtful perspective taking exercise of how am I actually feeling? How might I actually explain the behaviors coming at me from this other person? And what can I own in this process? I love that. It's really interesting.
TARA: Yeah. And that part of not just what am I feeling, but taking a few minutes to feel it, because we don't, you know, the way we get to the other side of our feelings is by sitting there and feeling them. And then also that meeting those feelings with compassion is so important because that's what really like, what you're talking about, about the defensiveness and the passivity. You know, we could talk about all of that. That's all very well mapped out now in terms of how we understand the human nervous system. That's like, okay, something happened, we went into fight or flight. You know, you can have a fight response. You can have the dorsal vagal shut down where you go into apathy and numbness like that, the, you can have the fawn response, which you're also talking about.
So in order to not just have a fear response, which is we'll, we'll feel reactive because we're being powered by our…
EMILIE: Lizard brain.
TARA: …reptilian instinct, right. The first thing we have to do is kind of bring our nervous system calm back. And so that's another way to look at what we're doing in that F step is just by feeling the feelings and being that loving mom to ourselves, right? We're going, okay, now I could be back in my ventral vagal nervous system state where I'm calm. I'm, my clearer cognition is back online, so I can actually think through this situation. And now I'm, I'm ready to work with it in a non-reactive way.
EMILIE: Yeah. I can't help but see all the parallels with parenting on this, right? Like, I try not to make constant references between managing and parenting because they're not identical, but man, I can just see how relevant this is for leaders of teams, for individual contributors, and for parents out there to say, look, we can't really reason with ourselves or others if we're at a dysregulated emotional state.
TARA: Yes. Yeah, I call that now. I just think of that as, nervous system first. Like in any conflict situation, you have to handle the nervous system part before you can handle the content. Two people in an activated state cannot get themselves to any solution on the content because quite literally, we do not do our best thinking and we are not open to giving and receiving connection when we're in fight or flight. So, yeah.
And a lot of times, you know, we're just, we give kids the benefit of the doubt around psychological drivers of behavior and we're not quite always there with adults yet. And so the parenting tools are sometimes more advanced, but they're like, we're further along in a kind of psychological understanding. And we're motivated because we don't want to, we don't want to mess up our kids. So we have a motivation to act that way. We don't always think, I don't want to mess up my colleague without behaving towards them. [LAUGHTER]
EMILIE: That is really funny. Super helpful stuff, Tara. I'm loving this FOUR model. Thank you so much for walking us through it. Besides altruism towards our colleagues, which we might not have to your earlier point here, I'm wondering how we might apply this in that situation we talked about at the start of our conversation here, when we're on the brink of making a big move. I call them making boss moves, right? When you're going for that promotion, when you're thinking about transforming your career or going for a big personal goal for self fulfillment purposes, when you're trying to make a big leap. How might this model help you do that?
TARA: You know, I think you don't want to leap with heavy luggage, right? Like, we need to be light to leap and our old hurts are some of the heaviest luggage we can carry. So if you are thinking about making a big leap, it is a really great time to just do that process on a hurt you might be carrying. And I always say, like, start with a moderate hurt. Don't start with mom. [LAUGHTER] I mean, we're talking about workplace here, but, you know, or it's like if you have one, you know, watershed trauma from a lifelong mentor, maybe don't do it for the first time on that. Like, do it on the colleague who also, you know, moderately made you feel not great just to give a practice run and see how it is.
And then you can do it on more significant hurts, but like it's a way of clearing the load you're carrying before you make a leap. And not just in the metaphoric sense, but then like, you are freer to see the people and the situations that are actually in front of you instead of kind of projecting an unfinished past onto them.
EMILIE: That is so true. It's kind of like avoiding the rebound effect, right? We know that you can't just hop out of a toxic relationship and pop into the next one without doing the work unless you want to repeat those patterns.
TARA: That's right. And I always, I'm sure you see the same thing with coaching clients. I'm always like before you quit that toxic work environment, like, get some better skills to survive within it. Because you can easily go create a similar dynamic after a really time intensive, labor intensive job search. If you didn't change at all, you very well may go do that.
EMILIE: That is such a key, key point. Well, thank you so much for making that connection for us, Tara. Where can our listeners keep up with all the great work you're doing and join your reader community for these polls and surveys coming up?
TARA: Yes, yes, it's all at taramohr.com and love to see you there. Lots of good stuff to support you.
EMILIE: Amazing. Thank you so much Tara. This was so helpful.
TARA: It was really nice to reconnect.
EMILIE: And now I want to hear from you. How do you navigate hurt feelings at work? And did you find Tara's model, the FOUR framework, to be a helpful way to create mindful responses in your personal or professional life?
By the way, in today's show notes, Tara's sharing with us a step by step handout for you to walk through the FOUR framework and apply it to your personal or professional life. You can access that handout and find links to all the resources and past episodes we mentioned in our conversation today at bossedup.org/episode506 that's bossedup.org/episode506.
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And as always, I'd love to keep the conversation going in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or in our Bossed Up Group on LinkedIn. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose and together let's lift as we climb.
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