Have You Been Labeled “Too Emotional”? Here’s How It Can Be Your Superpower
Rachel Radway, a leadership coach passionate about helping women leaders who are wired a little differently create the conditions they need to thrive, shares her unique insights and experiences in navigating and flourishing in the world as someone who is highly perceptive. If you’ve ever been labeled “too emotional” we’re exploring how it can be your superpower.
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Rachel is a certified leadership and executive coach, Mastermind facilitator, and author. She has more than 25 years of leadership experience across tech startups, not-for-profits, and Fortune 500s.
Rachel runs RER Coaching and loves seeing her clients light up as they learn more about their brains, embrace their superpowers, and redesign aspects of work and life to better align with their values and goals.
In this blog post, we’re covering the following:
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1) Exploring High Sensitivity Perception
Rachel explains that while there are different numbers floating around, about 30% of the population are not very sensitive at all and about 30% of the population are highly sensitive.
A common example is sound.
“When there's noise in the environment that I can't control, it plays on my nervous system and gets really frustrating.” - Rachel Radway
Some examples Rachel provides are people using power tools or low humming noises like a neighbor’s fan.
“It doesn't mean I can't take noise at all. I can go to a concert if I psych myself up for it and prepare.” - Rachel Radway
There are many different things that individuals can be sensitive to - caffeine, medications, alcohol, cigarette smoke, or the tags or seams on clothing.
Another example is emotional sensitivity.
“One of the gifts that high sensory people often have is they can read a room. They have deep empathy and they can understand what other people need to feel more comfortable.” - Rachel Radway
Even so, many highly perceptive individuals want direct information and like logic.
High sensitivity is something that 30% of the population feels and yet we don’t take the time to learn about our brains. Rather, we try to hide these feelings.
Archita explains that when she was 18 one of her managers told her that she was very sensitive to feedback.
“I kept training myself about how to receive feedback for the last 15, 20 years versus exploring other aspects of how my brain actually works and how it functions because the workplace kind of channels us and molds us to look at problems a certain way. And those problems don't tend to go inwards.” - Archita Fritz
If you want to start this introspective journey, Rachel explains that there are a number of quick and easy self-assessments that you can take online which will ask you to reflect on patterns throughout your life to determine if you are highly sensitive.
2) Strategies for Managing Sensory Overload in Our Increasingly Connected Workspaces
Rachel explains that working from home can make things a lot easier for highly sensitive people.
“When you are in a workplace that is a shared workspace, there are all kinds of factors that we can't control.” - Rachel Radway
These factors include sounds, smells, air conditioning, and ergonomics to name a few.
“Working at home is an option that just allows those of us who are wired a little bit differently to create conditions for success.” - Rachel Radway
However, there are also challenges that come with working from home especially if your home is a shared space.
In this case, Rachel recommends coming up with agreements for timing with the other members of your household.
“If there's a place with a door that you can close, maybe you can hang a little sign outside the door saying from 1 to 2 pm I am off-limits. Please keep the noise down.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel explains that it is complicated because there are so many different potential scenarios.
“Creating a space that is calming and that allows you to concentrate can be super helpful.” - Rachel Radway
You can do this through plants or specific objects that have meaning to you.
“I also have very specific rules about digital contact.” - Rachel Radway
This might mean turning off your phone at certain times or turning off notifications.
3) The Stigma of Being Labeled as Highly Sensitive
Rachel shared one of her favorite things she says to women who realize they are highly sensitive.
“You're not crazy. You're not broken. You're not weird. And there are a lot of us out there.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel explains that in the late 1990s, psychologist Elaine Aron came out with a book called The Highly Sensitive Person. She was the first person to really study this trait.
“So many of us grew up being told you're too sensitive. [...] You need to grow a thicker skin. [...] The messages that we got over and over and over again were, you are broken, you need to be fixed, and suck it up.” - Rachel Radway
This is the reason why Rachel doesn't use the highly sensitive person terminology that Elaine Aron used.
“Women leaders have so many challenges already that they're facing, [...] the last thing they need is to have a label attached to them that has some sort of stigma that might make them seem or feel like they're weaker than others.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel did an informal Facebook poll asking what the first thing people thought of was when they heard the term highly sensitive.
These are some of the answers she received:
Difficult to work with.
You have to tread carefully because you don't want to offend them.
Somewhere on the spectrum.
This is why Rachel started using the term perceptive instead of sensitive.
“Part of the trait itself is we are taking in more information from assessing more data and more stimuli, a lot more than brains that aren't as highly sensitive. And so we are noticing more. We're noticing nuances.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel explains that it has been so stigmatized and misunderstood that a lot of people don't see the superpowers of it.
4) Navigating Extreme Self-Expectations
Many high-achieving women place this extremely high expectation on themselves to control every aspect of their environment.
“Because we are processing so much, because we download so much information, because we notice all the details, because we tend to be good at both the big picture and the details at the same time, because we tend to have some issues with boundaries, we tend to optimize for successful group outcomes, not individual outcomes.“ - Rachel Radway
This is something that has been shown in studies.
Rachel explains that all of the women that she works with tend to give 150% and they give it to everyone and everything else except themselves.
“So many women have just felt this pressure on us our entire lives, whether it's from our families, our cultures, our societies. It goes back to the I'm weird. I'm broken. I'm crazy because everybody else seems to be able to handle it. And somehow I'm the one who feels more pressure, more struggle. Why is it just me? It's not just you. There are so many of us out there.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel explains that many female leaders in the workplace feel like they’re alone.
“So many female role models in leadership are not being their authentic selves. They're putting on a persona, they're masking, they're coming across a certain way. So we have a choice. We can either try to do that too, or we can try to be our authentic selves, which can be really hard when you've got these sensitivities and when you are wired for successful group outcomes and not the individual outcomes.” - Rachel Radway
5) Understanding How Your Brain Works
Archita and Olivia both started their careers as engineers in male-dominated workplaces.
“I think we have to adopt personas to survive in that kind of environment. [...] Being in the Coast Guard, no one wanted to hear that I was triggered by noises or that I couldn't deal with the fumes. There was no time, there was no space for any of that.” - Olivia Grant-Cream
In our societies, there is deep-seated social engineering coming from both well-intended and not well-intended spaces, telling us that it is not okay to be highly sensitive.
Rachel explains that this is one of the reasons that women are hesitant to start understanding their brains and doing the work to create more comfortable environments for themselves.
“It's so ingrained. There are so many layers. I'm still peeling back my own layers and I'm not sure when I'm going to get to the core. I'm not sure where it is or how many more layers there are.” - Rachel Radway
The first step Rachel suggests is getting support.
“It is really hard to do it yourself. But there are so many others of us here who hear you and see you and have been there and are still there and understand what it is that you're dealing with.” - Rachel Radway
Support can be in the form of a coach or a therapist.
The next step is to be gentle with yourself.
“The high expectations are really, really hard to tear down. They're ingrained as well. The perfectionism, the lack of boundaries, the inability to say no - so many of us struggle with those things. Self-care is the key to all of it.” - Rachel Radway
By self-care, Rachel isn’t referring to getting a massage or taking a vacation. She means something like getting the sleep you need.
“Do everything that you can to create conditions for high-quality sleep, because a lot of us have trouble sleeping. It may take us longer to fall asleep, so turn off your phones, turn off your computers, turn off your everything an hour or two before you go to bed.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel also recommends looking at the food and drinks you’re consuming before bed and maybe moving them to a few hours earlier.
“Listen to your body and your soul and what it is telling you that you need and do those things.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel shares that she had to learn this the hard way when she burnt out badly in 2014 when she was the director at a Fortune 500 company.
“I ended up literally having to quit my job, sell my home, and move to rural Peru to find the time and space that I needed to start recovering. And that recovery journey took me years. And sadly, it wasn't the first or the last time that I burned myself out. It was the most severe.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel wants to help other women not ever get to that point.
“One of the things that you need to do is give yourself some grace and take care of yourself.” - Rachel Radway
Many of those absurdly high expectations that we set for ourselves are self-inflicted.
“Our environment has a lot to do with it, but at the end of the day, it's our behavior that needs to change. It's us. And we need to listen to our bodies.” - Olivia Grant-Cream
6) The Power of the Pause
From a very young age we stop listening to our bodies and the world around us starts conditioning us on how we need to behave, show up, and engage with the world.
Most people spend their entire lives never having truly listened to their body.
“It's so simple - wait to respond. [...] We all lose sight of listening to what our bodies tell us because in the moment we want to give. [...] One of the biggest gifts we can give ourselves is to start listening to ourselves.” - Archita Fritz
One of the ways Olivia does this is to ask her body what it needs from her while she is in the shower.
“What do you need? Do you need food? Do you need water? Do you need yoga? Do you need something from me? [...] The return on investment for that little bit of time has been remarkable.” - Olivia Grant-Cream
Oliva explains that she can actually feel herself start to spiral, feel her anxiety is getting too high, or that burnout is on the way and she can take steps to prevent it before it gets too bad.
“The pause is the most important thing we can do.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel explains that it really is all about mindfulness.
“It's not about sitting and meditating for an hour. It's not about shutting all thoughts out of your mind. It doesn't have to be anything like that. That's not possible to do.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel shares that mindfulness is checking in with yourself and seeing what your body needs.
“The number of times where I have been sitting at my computer at 10 o'clock at night trying to finish something, ignoring the fact that I'm exhausted, I haven't eaten dinner, I may have to go to the bathroom. [...] Why do we do that? We're programmed to do that. And our brains are not helping.” - Rachel Radway
That’s why pausing and taking a moment to check in with yourself is so important.
“That pause can also allow more in. So If we're stuck on something, [...] giving ourselves that pause or the walk or whatever else it is that we need can open the floodgates again.” - Rachel Radway
7) The Pressure to Be Likable
So many women feel pressure to be likable.
Likability and authenticity almost seem in dissonance with each other. It feels risky to show up as our authentic selves because we have been conditioned to show up in a certain way.
To let go of those fears, Rachel recommends looking at the leaders you respect.
“Think about why it is that you like and respect them. What are the qualities that they present?” - Rachel Radway
She gives an example of boundaries.
“If you are just trying to be liked and you're saying yes to something even though you've got a million projects on your plate [...], is that kind? It's not kind to yourself for one thing.” - Rachel Radway
In addition to this, if you are over-committed, you are not going to do a great job which is not kind to them either.
“You're not doing the best thing in that case for anyone involved.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel asks if you want to be seen as the person who does an amazing job on the things that they commit to because they know they can commit and give themselves to those things, or would you rather be the person who says yes to everything?
“Do you respect the person who says yes to everything? Because I don't.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel recommends thinking about what you want.
“Do you want a lot of people who are kind of friendly because you're likable? Do you want people who actually see you and hear you and get you and know who you really are and appreciate that person and all of the strengths that person has and the challenges because we all have both of them?” - Rachel Radway
There are always two sides to a coin.
8) Advice for Women Exhausted from Constantly Giving 110%
Rachel's first piece of advice is to go back to the questions of who you want to be and how you want to show up in the world and work backward from that.
One of the things that Rachel hears from so many of the women she works with is that they want to be the best leader they can be.
“It's not about them. It's not about ego. It's not about promotions. It's not about status. When I ask them why, it is almost always for my team, for my company, for the people who support me and my mission, and for all of the people I've been working really hard with. I want to see them succeed.” - Rachel Radway
Rachel explains that you can't do that if you're not taking care of yourself.
If you're burning out, if you are working 12 hours a day and commuting crazy distances and hours, if you are not setting boundaries and not learning how to say no to certain things, you cannot ever be the best leader that you can be.
If you enjoyed this conversation, here are a few more episodes you might like:
Episode 73: Owning Your Authenticity and Making Fearless Decisions
Episode 65: Leveraging Your Uniqueness For Success
Episode 63: Thriving in an Unpredictable World
To hear the full conversation, scroll all the way up and tune into episode 77.
About The Hosts: Archita And Olivia
ARCHITA
Archita Sivakumar Fritz is the Host and Producer of the Embracing Only Podcast. Archita is a MedTech and Life Science Strategist. She is a LinkedIn Top Voice for her insights into product strategy and nonprofit management, and the creation of inclusive cultures that champion a 'speak up' philosophy.
Following a successful 19+ year corporate career she now helps C Suite across organizations as a Fractional Product Marketing Leader through her company Ready Set Bold.
She works with individuals with 10+ years of corporate experience to find new paths away from toxic or underappreciative environments, enabling both personal fulfillment and broader organizational impact.
→ Grab your FREE resource to build your career transition here: https://embracingonly.com/cubicle-escape-blueprint
→ If you want to work with Archita you can reach out to her here: www.readysetb.
→ Book her as a speaker, moderator, or coach for your next company event or workshop.
OLIVIA
Olivia Grant Cream is the host and producer of the Embracing Only podcast. Nothing makes her happier than providing a platform to women who are changing the world.
Olivia is a proud US Veteran and HR Leader who is passionate about changing the face of corporate America by helping underrepresented people reclaim their power and live the life of their dreams.
She is an advocate for transitioning military members seeking second careers in the corporate landscape.
Olivia is a proud Jamaican and enjoys mentoring, coaching, classic cars, and nature. The way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
→ You can work with Olivia here: www.oliviacre
→ Book her as a keynote speaker or moderator for your next ERG or company event.