Emotions Are Messengers, Not Enemies: Learning to Use What We Feel
Dr Mark Bellamy PhD, CPsychol, AFBPsS
Chartered Psychologist | Founder, LegalPsych
For a long time, discussions about performance tended to create a fairly simple distinction between thinking and feeling. Rational thought was associated with good decision-making, while emotion was something that potentially interfered with it. The ideal performer could therefore appear to be somebody capable of putting emotion to one side and making a calm, objective assessment of whatever was in front of them.
I am not sure human performance works quite like that. Emotions are part of the way we process and respond to our environment, and they can direct attention towards things that may matter. Anxiety can alert us to uncertainty or threat, frustration may tell us that something is obstructing an important goal, anger can arise when we perceive unfairness or a boundary being crossed, while disappointment often tells us something about what we valued in the first place. None of these emotional responses necessarily tells us what we should do next, but neither are they simply unwanted interference.
This distinction is particularly interesting in law because lawyers work in environments where emotional material and rational analysis frequently coexist. Clients may be frightened, angry, grieving or facing circumstances that will substantially alter their lives. Opponents may behave in ways that provoke frustration, while colleagues can disappoint us and professional decisions can carry consequences that matter personally as well as commercially. Expecting lawyers to operate without emotional responses to these situations seems neither realistic nor necessarily desirable.
The more useful performance question may be what we do with the information contained within an emotion. Feeling anxious before a hearing could indicate that the matter is important, that uncertainty remains or that preparation deserves another look. It could equally be a familiar response to performing in an evaluative environment despite being thoroughly prepared. The feeling itself does not settle the question; it gives us something to examine.
I tend to think of emotions in this sense as messengers rather than instructions. We can listen to the message without automatically doing what the emotion appears to suggest. Anxiety may encourage avoidance, anger may create an urge to respond immediately and embarrassment may encourage us to conceal a mistake, but effective professional behaviour may require something quite different. The psychological skill lies in creating enough space between experiencing the emotion and deciding how to act.
That space matters because emotions influence attention. When we are angry, anxious or threatened, particular aspects of a situation can become more salient while others receive less attention. This is not necessarily a defect in the system; rapid shifts in attention can be extremely useful when genuine threat is present. The difficulty arises when we assume that what has become most psychologically prominent must therefore be the most professionally important.
Consider the abrupt email that arrives at the end of an already difficult day. A lawyer who feels irritated may immediately notice the criticism contained within it and feel an understandable urge to defend their position. If they respond directly from that state, the reply may be technically accurate but unnecessarily combative. Recognising the irritation does not require suppressing it; it allows the lawyer to ask why the message has landed as it has and whether an immediate response serves the client, the relationship or the matter.
There is another reason I think emotions deserve attention within LegalPsych. Changes in emotional response can sometimes provide an early indication that load and available capacity have shifted. A lawyer who is normally patient may notice becoming unusually irritated by relatively minor requests. Somebody who generally enjoys complex work may find themselves increasingly apprehensive about opening emails or beginning another matter. These changes do not automatically indicate a psychological problem, but they may contain useful information about fatigue, recovery, workload or what else is happening in somebody's life.
This is where emotional awareness becomes a performance capability rather than simply a wellbeing exercise. If I can recognise that my patience is reduced because I am depleted, I have information that may influence how I approach an important conversation. If I notice that I am particularly defensive about feedback on one piece of work, I can become curious about whether the reaction reflects the quality of the feedback, my relationship with the person giving it or something the criticism touches in my own professional identity.
There is an important distinction between regulating emotion and suppressing it. Regulation may involve slowing down before responding, shifting attention, talking something through, changing the interpretation of an event or allowing physiological activation to settle. Suppression is more concerned with trying not to experience or acknowledge what is present. In professional environments where composure is valued, people can become extremely accomplished at appearing unaffected without necessarily having processed what happened.
That can matter particularly when legal work repeatedly exposes somebody to distressing material, conflict or human suffering. Professional experience can help people develop appropriate distance and perspective, and we should not assume that exposure automatically causes harm. At the same time, professionalism should not require somebody to become emotionally impermeable. The ability to notice when something has affected us may be part of maintaining the capacity to continue doing difficult work well.
A practical reflection framework
I would keep the process deliberately simple. The purpose is not to encourage lawyers to analyse every emotional fluctuation during the working day, nor to suggest that every feeling contains an important psychological revelation. It is a framework for those moments when you notice that an emotional response is sufficiently strong, unusual or persistent that it may be influencing how you are thinking or what you are about to do.
1. Notice — What has changed?
The first step is simply noticing that something has shifted. Perhaps you are reading an email repeatedly, becoming unusually irritated with a client, avoiding a telephone call, continuing to check a piece of work or thinking about a conversation long after it has finished. Sometimes behaviour provides the first clue that an emotional response is present.
It can also be useful to notice whether this feels characteristic of you. Being frustrated by a genuinely frustrating situation tells us something different from becoming increasingly irritated by routine requests that would normally cause little difficulty. Changes from our own usual pattern can provide particularly useful information about current load and available capacity.
2. Name — What am I actually feeling?
The next step is to become slightly more precise. “I am stressed” may actually mean that I am anxious about an outcome, angry about how somebody has behaved, embarrassed about something I have done or overwhelmed by the number of demands competing for attention. Those experiences may require quite different responses.
Naming an emotion does not solve the situation, but it can create a little distance from it. There is a psychological difference between being entirely absorbed by an emotional response and being able to recognise, for example, “I am particularly defensive about this criticism.” The second position gives us slightly more room in which to think.
3. Understand — What might this emotion be telling me?
This is where curiosity becomes useful. Anxiety might be highlighting genuine uncertainty that deserves further preparation, or it might reflect the significance we have attached to being evaluated. Anger might be alerting us to inappropriate behaviour from somebody else, but it could also have been amplified by fatigue, accumulated frustration or something unrelated that has reduced our tolerance.
I would be particularly cautious about settling too quickly on the first explanation. Emotional responses are influenced by the immediate situation, previous experiences, expectations, relationships, professional identity and our current level of capacity. Asking what else might explain the reaction can prevent one interpretation from becoming prematurely dominant.
4. Decide — What does the situation require from me now?
Once the message has been considered, professional judgement needs to return to the centre of the process. The question is no longer simply what the emotion makes me want to do, but what response best serves the situation. Sometimes those will be the same; sometimes they will be very different.
Anxiety may lead you to recognise that further preparation really is necessary. Anger may tell you that a boundary needs to be established, although perhaps not through the email you were initially tempted to send. Embarrassment after an error may appropriately lead to disclosure, correction and learning rather than concealment or prolonged self-criticism. The emotion contributes information, while you retain responsibility for the decision.
Where possible, it is also worth asking whether a decision genuinely needs to be made at that moment. If emotional activation is high and there is no immediate deadline, delaying an important email or conversation for a short period can allow other information to become psychologically available again. This is not avoidance if there is a clear intention to return to the issue; sometimes it is simply good regulation.
5. Review — Is this a moment, or is it becoming a pattern?
The final stage becomes more important over time. An isolated emotional response may require nothing more than dealing effectively with the situation in front of us. Repeated responses can tell us something different.
If you are increasingly irritable at the end of every week, repeatedly anxious before opening emails, consistently carrying particular cases home psychologically or noticing that relatively ordinary demands now require much greater emotional effort, the question may no longer concern one event. It may be worth looking more broadly at workload, recovery, relationships, professional identity or other pressures affecting available capacity.
This is also where reflection can become developmental. Looking back at emotionally difficult professional moments can help us identify situations that repeatedly challenge our judgement, communication or confidence. Over time, this creates an opportunity not simply to regulate emotion better, but to understand ourselves better as performers.
The five stages do not need to become a rigid sequence, and nobody needs to sit at their desk completing a psychological checklist every time they become annoyed. With practice, the process may take only a few moments: notice that something has shifted, identify what you are feeling, become curious about why, decide what the situation actually requires and pay attention if the same response keeps appearing.
For lawyers, I think the value lies in preserving the distinction between emotional information and professional judgement. Ignoring emotion can mean losing potentially useful information about threat, uncertainty, values, relationships or changing capacity. Automatically following emotion creates a different risk because what feels most urgent is not always what matters most.
Good professional judgement does not require us to choose between being rational and being emotional, because both processes are already contributing to how we understand the situation. The more realistic performance skill is developing enough awareness to recognise what we are feeling, enough curiosity to understand what may sit behind it and enough psychological distance to decide what weight that information deserves.
Emotions do not have to become enemies of performance simply because they sometimes make professional life uncomfortable. They can tell us something about the situation, something about other people and occasionally something important about ourselves. The task is to listen carefully enough to understand the message while retaining responsibility for what we decide to do with it.