About AnamBliss

For the past two years, I’ve been quietly pondering to recover and heal in ways that I didn’t know I needed. I’ve been a hibernating pupa, sheltered by choice, just waiting for my thoughts to come together and for me to emerge fired up and ready to go. This is my Eat, Pray, Love story. It is series that is part of a conversation that I want to have with the world to shift the way we think about wellness and self-care.

Start at the beginning of The Cocoon:
Introduction: The Metamorphosis: Finding Purpose
Part 1: The Candle Flickers: Work Burnout
Part 2: The Start of the A-Ha Moment: What is Emotional Labor?
Part 3: Glimpses of a Career Rife With Emotional Labor
Part 4: Work Life Balance and Self Care
Part 5: Lofty Goals: Weight Loss, Health, & Insecurity

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I believe retreats provide an opportunity to eat well, move, enjoy the outdoors, and meditate with like-minded individuals who gather, share ideas, and enjoy themselves. Retreats are concentrated self-care to shut away all of the outside influences, so we can tap into our own quiet voice and hear what we really want, what we really need. Time and time again, I’ve seen individuals, who had a question, find their answer, by giving themselves the opportunity to listen.

At AnamBliss, we want to ask the deeper questions: Why do you do what you do? Does it serve you? Is it what you really want? What can you do to reach your goals better? What is holding you back?

Our name, is an extension of that process. Anam was chosen because it means Soul in Gaelic. Bliss is a word that we respond to on a higher level than others. Together, they give us a power that we can aspire to obtain, myself included.

I started AnamBliss to move away from the rat race of a company. Knowing my tendency to overwork and burn myself out, I crave the autonomy to release myself from greater outside pressures to achieve. Now, my own level of expectations will rule the roost and I'm working on adopting "Better Done Than Perfect" as a moto over perfectionism. (To be honest, this has taken me a long time to write and to edit to be in a place that I feel can see the light of day, but really, I'd love to work on it more. Sigh.)

The journey of this thought process of connecting stress, burnout, emotional labor, work life balance, and self-care, has been cathartic. I'm feeling a sense of excitement that I haven't felt in a long time. I want to talk to others about breaking the chains of our own and our cultures making, so they can feel they way I do. One way is by throwing away the scale and focus on looks, for nourishing our body through food and building self-compassion. 

I'm not feeling afraid to begin to take to more women first. I've been hesitant, as I haven't wanted to exclude half of the population, but women need to hear what I have to say in a way that men don't. I still don't plan on excluding men, as their levels of emotional labor have been increasing as well, but women are under greater pressures to be perfect.

This means that as I break out, I need to be in the limelight. Oddly, I have no problem leading discussions and speaking to hundreds when I'm in charge, but fighting through the many voices of the world is intimidating. By speaking with integrity, honesty, and even vulnerability, I know that one person will listen and tell another and a tribe will slowly build.

I expect there to be challenges, more bumps, times when I need to step away, but I also need to charge full steam ahead.

The working title for this series was The Cocoon. It’s been a festering of thoughts of musings that I expect will continue to improve. But I'm ready to soar.

Do you want to join me?

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Thank you for reading about my journey. Please share your own thoughts with me and the articles with anyone who may be interested. Continue the conversation with us.

Kate Hamm combines her 15+ years of experience in the fitness industry and high-end resort program development into sought after wellness adventures at AnamBliss. Visit www.anambliss.com for future retreat dates and locations.

For the past two years, I’ve been quietly pondering to recover and heal in ways that I didn’t know I needed. I’ve been a hibernating pupa, sheltered by choice, just waiting for my thoughts to come together and for me to emerge fired up and ready to go. This is my Eat, Pray, Love story. It is series that is part of a conversation that I want to have with the world to shift the way we think about wellness and self-care.

Start at the beginning of The Cocoon:
Introduction: The Metamorphosis: Finding Purpose
Part 1: The Candle Flickers: Work Burnout
Part 2: The Start of the A-Ha Moment: What is Emotional Labor?
Part 3: Glimpses of a Career Rife With Emotional Labor

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When we are stressed out at work, we are encouraged to take care of ourselves more to de-stress. We should eat better, exercise, meditate, and find better work life balance. The first few are easy to comprehend and all have been proven to be beneficial to de-stress. The challenge is sticking with a program, especially as we juggle multiple tasks on a regular day.

What does work life balance mean? Is it even possible?

It sounds simple. Having a division between work and home life, but it’s become near impossible with connectivity. For women who are trying to do it all, it becomes even more of a struggle with our current work culture.

It is prevalent in the United States, to think of employees as replaceable cogs. My own career had me feeling that I should be grateful to have a job, to work for companies that are the top of it’s field, making a positive change in other’s lives, while battling the behind the scenes drama, tension, and lack of respect. The need to be close with clients and taking care of myself was insanely challenging and made it hard to step away from stress away from work.

Companies are giving more work to employees instead of hiring new people or laying off people to cut costs leaving those that remain more to do. This explains the rise in productivity in the US. Part of this increase is infused in company culture due to expectations that we work “harder” to make it to the next rung on the ladder. Think of a new lawyer who wants to make a partner based off billable hours. Americans are working on average 47 hours a week as a salaried employee despite being paid for 40 hours to meet the work demand and desire for more face time at the office as a sign of dedication.

The United States has less vacation time than most industrial countries. Yet, we forgo our vacation to prove our worthiness to the company or because we don’t have paid vacation time. I had a manager, who didn’t think my highly trained and capable team was up to snuff when they took over for me when I went away. That put pressure on me to not go away, even though I really needed the vacation to de-stress.

This culture of constant work with greater connectivity does not serve us well in separating work from life. Being able to receive emails and texts on our phones wherever we are contributes to high stress levels. Every message could be something we need to deal with immediately, so we check our phones constantly. This leaves us never really feeling present to what we are actually doing or who we are with. Just look at how many phones are out at family gatherings or restaurants.

How many of us are in a career where we need to be accessible 100% of the time? Most of us aren’t. A few hours typically won’t kill a deal unless you are on the East Coast and everyone else is in London. There needs to be some flexibility to change our hours. If we have to be up in the wee hours of the morning, that should be reflected elsewhere in the schedule.

I once had a conversation with an entertainment lawyer. He said that he never answered an email or text immediately. This was so they wouldn’t get used to him always responding quickly, allowed him to focus on what he was doing, and gave autonomy to the person asking a question. Most of the time, the person knew the answer or could problem solve it themselves. But he is a rare manager as most get upset when you don’t reply immediately.

With 80% of workers saying that they feel stress at work and 26% feeling as if they burning out, our health is in jeopardy. Job stress increases absenteeism, employee turnover, accidents, diminished productivity, and direct medical, legal, and insurance costs.

Companies are working on reducing stress by offering wellness programs, such as meditation and fitness classes, to combat the high stress rate. At the moment only about 9% of global employees have access to wellness programs, but there has been a 7.8% growth in the past few years. If the greatest stresses are workload, people issues, job insecurity, and a lack of work/life balance, a meditation class is just putting a band-aid on a gaping wound.

To really combat stress at work, we need to look at the institution and it’s practices. Having more swings, offering wellness retreats, or bringing in an empowerment speaker for a company event, is sugar coating an underlying broken system. It’s saying that we care about you, while also adding to the pressure, because we are encouraging your self-care so you can work even more for us.

Turning To Self-Care

In my career, I’ve worked at gyms, on a cruise ship, as a tour guide, and at retreats. All attract people trying to take care of themselves. Whether by improving their fitness to reduce their blood pressure, go on vacation to step away, explore nature, or have an intensive week of self-care.

I’d watch people make a shift from being exhausted and tired, to feeling rejuvenated and accomplished, to come back exhausted again. They would come back to recapture that feeling, because it was euphoric and they remembered who they actually were. For once in their lives, they were the ones being taken care of instead of the caregiver.

What I really noticed was how being free of stress, decisions, and having all of their needs taken care of, was what they truly needed. Being in the rested parasympathetic nervous system, instead of the stressed out sympathetic nervous system, is what enhanced their results. They would lose weight, their skin would clear up, and they would become alive in front of your eyes just like a neglected plant that you watered.

Then they would create this amazing swan dive to enter the world with enthusiasm, only to be dealing with the exact same issues and concerns they had before.

The Fusing of Thoughts

Our work culture needs to change to better support us in order to have any work life balance. But this will be a slower process. In the mean time, to bring us back to center, we need self-care. We need to step away from our negative influences, which is why vacation and retreats are so important. At home, we need to bring in other ways to take care of ourselves, doing something creative with a hobby, massages, meditation, and yoga can help.

After burning myself out, and knowing that I want to make sure that I never allow myself to get to that point, I’ve been making a conscious effort in that past two years to rediscover myself. Who am I outside of a company or work? I’ve turned down opportunities, because they didn’t serve what I wanted to become. My bank account may say that I made the wrong choice, but my heart, brain, and gut, tell me that I’m on the right path.

Work culture has been something I've thought about from the beginning, though it hasn't been needed much to date. I know how horrible it feels to be under appreciated, over worked, and under paid, to be so stressed out and have almost no energy, to lose yourself while taking care of everyone around you, and no one should ever feel that way. I want each employee to know they are valued, to be able to speak up, feel adequately compensated, and have some balance. I know there are times when more will be demanded of them, but there will also be times when the pressure will be less. I want a company that I want to work at and that people don't want to leave.

Because it is with my work culture, that AnamBliss can better serve others in their own quest for work life balance through self-care. To be a place that fosters the healing necessary and gives strength to those who need it to make the changes they need to discover their own soul's bliss.

Continue the conversation in Time to Soar: Developing a Company & Retreats That Matter.

Kate Hamm combines her 15+ years of experience in the fitness industry and high-end resort program development into sought after wellness adventures at AnamBliss. Visit www.anambliss.com for future retreat dates and locations.

For the past two years, I’ve been quietly pondering to recover and heal in ways that I didn’t know I needed. I’ve been a hibernating pupa, sheltered by choice, just waiting for my thoughts to come together and for me to emerge fired up and ready to go. This is my Eat, Pray, Love story. It is series that is part of a conversation that I want to have with the world to shift the way we think about wellness and self-care.

Start at the beginning of The Cocoon:

Introduction: The Metamorphosis: Finding Purpose
Part 1: The Candle Flickers: Work Burnout
Part 2: The Start of the A-Ha Moment: What is Emotional Labor?

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Learning about emotional labor had me thinking about the pivotal moments of my previous positions that to this day stick with me as situations that led to my burnouts. They include*:

• Being told by a client that my number two was going to represent the company at a large conference. Then having the CEO hide out and avoid me instead of speaking to me face to face to discuss why I did not hear it from them.
• Given two extra weeks vacation time and then had it taken away, because the CEO realized the added cost.
• Taking over a department. Finding out that the sales goals I had included a sub-department that was budgeted to be about 30% of my numbers, had all new sales switched to another department. Sitting in weekly meetings being chastised for not hitting my goals, while the other department is praised for being brilliant.
• Asking for help and being told no. Then asked why I didn’t ask for help if I really needed it or why I didn’t push harder.
• Being given a promotion to a management position on top of my current position and having my pay cut without being told, because the management position was commission only.
• Getting asked if I turned down a promotion by co-workers after the announcement that a colleague was promoted to a new management position.
• Reading a comment from a client that I was clearly knowledgeable, but had no business interacting with people or being a manager, after receiving a hug goodbye from them.
• Wondering if I was going to be fired on a regular basis for something trivial, because of micro-management by the CEO.
• Working an average 70-80 hours a week, being given more work to do, and then told that I wasn’t doing enough.
• Being told there was no money for a raise, then having an independent contractor who was paid for an hour what I was in a day be brought on to the team.
• Being understaffed, needing to cover the shifts myself, and not having time to hire anyone new.
• Being told that I was fat by a manager, when I had 20% body fat.
• Having a manager purposely working to break up friendships to create a more competitive cutthroat work environment.
• Receiving a bonus that was ¼ of the previous year despite taking on more responsibility with a dual role.

I won’t deny that I worked for some of the best companies in their respective fields with some of the most amazingly talented people, because I did. I was given opportunities that I never would have expected and lived in places that I never thought I would. There were high points also, but the fact that some of these sting years later is the point.

Looking at all these moments, part of me feels like I’m just whining. “Oh woe is me” and my hard work life. But isn’t that also disregarding my actual emotions and feelings? Something we are taught to do as women.

I was surprised when I realized how little most of these moments had to do around guests. You would think for someone in the service industry that the crazy customer stories would come to mind, but they didn’t. It was the corporate oversight and management that were the sources of much of my frustration. The treatment of employees as cogs, who are replaceable that should be grateful for the paycheck and to work for great and powerful company. One manager held Isadore Sharp and his Four Seasons philosophy as an ideal, yet frequently led through actions that opposed the principles Sharp emphasized as crucial.

I am in awe, of how much I really let myself put up with. Instead of feeling powerful and secure in my career, as one should, there are too many moments where my self-confidence slipped away. No, change that, was taken from me. Because help was rarely offered or given by management, I learned to stop asking and to just get what needed to be done completed.

At one point in one of my roles, I refused to be silent. I knew the game that was being played and how I was being manipulated, and I used that knowledge to argue and stand my ground. I flatly ignored things that were trivial to focus on having a solid team. I knew my days were numbered and it felt good, but I also felt like the shittiest employee. Typing this, I think I would have hated me as an employee. But my team had my back and I had theirs.

I was exhausted from the emotional rollercoaster of constant unattainable demands, long hours, battles that seemed like two kids fighting over a crayon when both have more than enough, of leaving a meeting pissed off only to cry with a client who shared a very personal story, and the feeling as if there were thousands of eyes watching me to wait for that one tiny mistake. The emotional labor was massive and hit so many factors that were prime for burnout and failure: frequent and long interactions that required a high level of attention, a deep intensity with a wide range of emotions, little autonomy, and a high demand from myself, clients and colleagues. Add in being a woman in a caregiver role and there is a recipe for disaster.

That is why learning about emotional labor made so much sense to me. Now I need to look at that more to determine what I can do to change.

Continue the conversation in Part 4: Work Life Balance and Self Care .

Kate Hamm combines her 15+ years of experience in the fitness industry and high-end resort program development into sought after wellness adventures at AnamBliss. Visit www.anambliss.com for future retreat dates and locations.

[1] Note: I purposely am using generic terms to minimize what job they came from.

For the past two years, I’ve been quietly pondering to recover and heal in ways that I didn’t know I needed. I’ve been a hibernating pupa, sheltered by choice, just waiting for my thoughts to come together and for me to emerge fired up and ready to go. This is my Eat, Pray, Love story. It is series that is part of a conversation that I want to have with the world to shift the way we think about wellness and self-care.

Start at the beginning of The Cocoon:

Introduction: The Metamorphosis: Finding Purpose
Part 1: The Candle Flickers: Work Burnout

---

 

I saw a post on my Facebook feed and the title of the article peaked my curiosity. I saved it and after a few weeks, finally went back to it. This was the start of my A-Ha moment.

The article was “Women Aren’t Nags, We’re just Fed Up” by Gemma Hartley for Harper’s Bazaar. In the article Hartley spoke about how all she wanted for Mother’s Day was for her husband to book a maid service for her. In the end, she received a necklace and her husband cleaned the bathrooms while she tidied up the house as the kids tore it apart. A situation that led to Hartley being immensely upset and her husband confused as to why after all the bathrooms were clean.

Now, I am not in a relationship or married. But I understood Hartley’s situation. I have three brothers and have been working for long enough to know that men and women have different expectations and view work differently. Sweeping for me is picking stuff up from the floor to get underneath it, my brothers go around the same items and feel accomplished.

I needed to know more about emotional labor and jumped down the rabbit hole that is Google Scholar. There are a ton of studies on emotional labor and I stuck to a few that were easier to understand the concepts, as that is what I was looking for. (Note, being a diligent student, I am summarizing here. For a full science article, click here. At the end will be a link to come back at the right spot.)

What is Emotional Labor?

The concept of emotional labor was first introduced by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in the 1980s, as a way to describe an aspect of customer service. Think about going into work on a day when you just had to put down your beloved dog and needing to act cheerful for customers. The projection of emotions that you aren’t actually feeling is emotional labor. Morris and Feldman give the much more scientific definition “effort, planning, and control needed to express organizationally desired emotions during inter personal transactions” in the 1996 paper in The Academy of Management Review.

A scenario: An aid at a retirement home is passing out meals to the residents. As she is helping one resident with his meal, the resident is upset by the fact that he has green Jell-O as he dislikes it and prefers the red Jell-O. The aid acknowledges the resident’s complaint and says that she will go get the red Jell-O after she’s delivered her final 4 meals. She is able to go to the kitchen, get the desired color and return to the resident, who thanks her profusely.

A second scenario: The aid pauses at the door of a resident. He is known for arguing, being unhappy, but he also needs to eat. She also had just been counseled by her supervisor on how she needs to smile more and be more attentive to the residents. The aid puts on a smile and enters the room. The resident is scowling at her. Ignoring the attitude, the aid sets up the meal. As soon as he sees the green Jell-O, he begins to go into a tirade about how much he dislikes it and he wants red Jell-O now. The aid says she will see what she can do. She leaves the room knowing that she can’t get the red Jell-O. She goes to her supervisor for a request to change the meal, but her supervisor is nowhere to be seen. If she goes near the kitchen, the chef will complain to her supervisor that she is bothering him with nonsense. She returns to the resident to let him know there is no red Jell-O and he yells about how horrible she is at her job.

These are two example situations that have two different levels of emotional labor. These will be used to begin the dialogue on how different factors can influence emotional labor.

We have expectations of emotions based off certain situations and jobs that we need to meet. Knowing the social constructs that give us cues as to how we should look and respond is first and most important influence. Being sympathetic and supportive is the correct way to act at a funeral, while it is expected to be excited and energetic at Disneyland.

It’s clear from the studies that I reviewed that there is a debate on whether emotional labor leads to positive or negative outcomes. Researchers have been going back and forth with certain factors being more influential to lean one way or another.

It doesn’t help that emotional labor is a very subjective field. Each person responds differently, which makes it more complicated to study. Yet, there have been a few aspects that have been documented and researched to determine their affect (Morris & Feldman 1996). These include: frequency, level of attentiveness, duration, intensity, variety of emotions, and emotional dissonance. All are influenced by additional factors that include autonomy, demand, resources, and gender expectations.

Work positions don’t usually lie solely with one or another of the aspects. Most are mixed and matched like personalized ice cream sundaes. Especially when you start to factor in other work factors that can further impact a positive or negative relationship to emotional labor.

The Effects of Emotional Labor

Emotional labor can be positive, when your feelings are genuine and the outcomes lead to a feeling of empowerment, especially when we are given autonomy and a number of resources. “To be successful, workers who engage in emotional labor must be aware of their own emotions and manage them, motivate themselves, recognize emotions in others, and respond to them in such a way that the relationship achieves the intended goal (Guy 2004).” In Scenario 1, the aid was able to help an upset customer have a positive experience through what she did. When we can empathize, problem solve, and be excited when we have success, we will feel good about the outcome.

Negative effects of emotional work come about for a few different reasons as demonstrated in Scenario 2. When we have to feel disingenuous, by putting on a neutral face or opposing feeling from our own, we tend to feel fake and as if we are acting creating a distance between us and the other people involved. This emotional dissonance, when how we feel and how we need to respond are vastly different, is the greatest influence on our stress levels (Zapf 2007). If we then add in a higher demand and/or reduction in resources, the liklihood of emotional labor impacting us even further increases.

Overall, emotional labor can significantly affect our psychological and physiological wellbeing through increased stress, lower job satisfaction, feelings of alienation, depression, sleeplessness, ill health, and burn out. Who wants that?

My Conclusion

If you have ever gone through conflict resolution with a significant other, "I feel" statements are a significant part. Facts can be disputed, but feeling can't. And emotional labor is riddled with feelings that are valid and undervalued. Our work environments don't acknowledge emotional labor in ways that we need when we are feeling stressed. More companies like to talk about being supportive, when they really aren't. It's almost as if they are gas lighting us. I would frequently ask my colleagues if what I saw and felt made sense to the situation just to add validation that I wasn't crazy.

For me, knowing that there was a term that existed that gave me even more affirmation of my own experiences created a sense of peace that I desperately longed for. It handed me a starting place to further address my own emotions and why I feel it is an important piece to a larger conversation on self-care.

Continue the conversation in Glimpses of a Career Rife With Emotional Labor.

Resources

Erickson, R. J., & Ritter, C. Emotional labor, burnout, and inauthenticity: Does gender matter? (2001.) Social Psychology Quarterly, 64(2), 146-163. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3090130

Guy, M. E., & Newman, M. A. Women's Jobs, Men's Jobs: Sex Segregation and Emotional Labor. (2004). Public Administration Review, 64(3), 289-298. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2004.00373.x

Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513-524. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.44.3.513

Holman, D., Martínez-Iñigo, D., & Totterdell, P. Emotional labor and well-being: An integrative review (2008). In N. M. Ashkanasy & C. L. Cooper (Eds.), Research Companion to Emotion in Organizations pp.301-31. Publisher: Edward Elgar.

Martínez-Iñigo, D., Totterdell, P., Alcover, C. M. & Holman, D. (2007). Emotional labour and emotional exhaustion: Interpersonal and intrapersonal mechanisms, Work & Stress, 21:1, 30 – 47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02678370701234274

Pugliesi, K. (1999). The consequences of emotional labor: Effects on work stress, job satisfaction, and well-being. Motivation and Emotion, 23, 125-154. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1021329112679

Wharton, A., (2009). The Sociology of Emotional Labor. Annual Review of Sociology, 34, 147-165. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-115944

Zapf, D., & Holz, M. (2007). On the positive and negative effects of emotion work in organizations. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 15(1), 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/13594320500412199

Kate Hamm combines her 15+ years of experience in the fitness industry and high-end resort program development into sought after wellness adventures at AnamBliss. Visit www.anambliss.com for future retreat dates and locations.