A room full of firefighters probably isn’t where you’d expect people to start talking about their emotions.

These are folks working in high-stakes, high-pressure environments, where they have to make decisions quickly, lead in unpredictable situations, and rely on one another to get the job done. The emotional impact of their work runs deep, but isn’t often named.

And, at one point, that’s exactly what was happening.

People shared stories that, from the sound of it, they’d never said out loud before.

It wasn’t because someone asked the “right” question, but because something in the room made it possible.

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I was in Washington, DC last month to join a Dignity Inc. workshop, hosted by Marcel Brunel. Tomomi and I have been in conversation with Marcel and Dan Newby for a while now - Dan is a fellow Newfield coach and trained me in emotion-centered coaching, and we’ve been orbiting similar questions in our work.

Like us, they believe that emotions deserve a seat at the table. What differs is where they’re working: in police precincts and first responder units where emotions are often unspoken despite their very real impact on burnout, addiction, family life, and overall well-being.

At the core of their approach is the emotion of dignity: the belief that you have inherent worth, and that this belief is essential to sustaining professions like policing.

They explore this in their two books, Dignity in Policing and Dignity in Leadership, with a focus on emotional regulation and its role in being an effective first responder and leader.

It’s a lens that resonates with how we think about this work at EAW: that emotions aren’t separate from our professional lives, they shape how we experience work, lead, and show up for the people around us.

One of the ideas they emphasize is that emotional intelligence is the starting point, and what matters now is something more demanding: Can you regulate what you feel, especially when it matters most?

When:

• you’re about to make a decision under pressure

• you’re avoiding a conversation you know you need to have

• your team is looking to you for stability, and you don’t quite feel it yourself

At Dignity Inc., they break this into four capacities:

• emotional intelligence

• emotional literacy

• emotional resilience

• emotional agility

Awareness on its own is important.

But the real question is: what do you do with what you feel?

We also unpacked some of the beliefs that shape how we relate to emotions at work:

That we can avoid them
That we should control them
That they’re positive or negative
That they’re a weakness
That they get in the way of clear thinking

The one that jumped out at me, since we see it so often is:

that emotions are a problem to solve, rather than information to work with.

We tend to say: Emotions aren’t good or bad. They’re data.

Which I believe leads to a more useful question:

Is what I’m feeling serving me right now?
And if not, what would?

Coming back to that room of firefighters.

What struck me wasn’t just what people shared.

It was how the conversation shifted in such a short period of time.

I don’t believe that kind of shift comes from theory alone. It comes from practice and context. And it comes from the conditions that make it possible to show up differently.

I noticed it in how people spoke about responsibility and what happens in the fire station - not just in terms of the job, but the weight of the work and what they carry, and how that accumulates over time (often without much space to process it) and impacts other areas of their lives.

I left the workshop feeling really energized. I was reminded of why this work matters, both the power of bringing emotions into these conversations and how willing people are to explore this topic when given the space to do so.

If any of this resonates, especially the question of what it looks like to work with emotions, rather than around them - I’d be curious what it brings up for you.

More soon on what we’re building with Marcel and Dan.

Oriana

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A strong finish can make a long, winding road make more sense. We’re ending the year at EAW on a high note, with a sense of accomplishment and forward momentum for the season ahead. In the past few weeks, I’ve leaned back in my chair more than once, slightly bewildered by how well things have unfolded.

For much of the year, though, it didn’t feel that way. It was a year of oscillation, of trying many things, riding highs of ideas and execution, then overthinking, rethinking, restarting. And being frozen for long stretches, too, scanning for threats. These are easy to find when our collective nervous systems are so tightly coiled, there’s little room for learning, let alone breathing.

Whether consciously or not, many of us are living with the implications of shifting beliefs about what makes work meaningful and legitimate. I often found it hard to tell whether one of our moves was a good bet or just a distraction. Oriana is better at remembering what we learned with each attempt, and we are slowly but surely learning to trust that coherence builds through movement and connection. I like to think it sneaks into the room, takes a seat on my shoulder, and waits for me to catch its eye.

So, at this moment in late December, we’re grateful to be able to pause with a clear mind and gratitude for our clients, collaborators, and peers.

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Themes from 2025

We ran the fifth cohort of our flagship program, Navigating Emotions at Work, which tackles the topics of:

• Emotions as data

• Effective requests and negotiating for what you need

• Expectations and trust

• Setting boundaries and saying no

• Confidence and professional identity

Through this work, we’ve seen a sharp increase in interest in learning how to grapple with other people’s emotions and value systems. At times, this interest is laced with resentment at having to do so, or anxiety about getting it “wrong.” There is a persistent layer of fatigue underneath it all. In response, we see people in our orbits seeking ways to sustain energy and presence, often framed as emotional regulation.

We responded by helping them identify the conditions under which they can—or cannot—stay present, connected, and responsive, both in the moment and as a capacity that can be built and grown over time. It feels important to do this not as an individual self-management challenge, but as something shaped by relationships, roles, and workplace conditions. This will most likely be a theme that we make more explicit in our team development work next year.

Outside of the NEAW program, we explored the emotions of using AI—not Emotional AI, but the emotions of me and you as users of AI tools. We looked at invisible expectations, enthusiasm and what dampens it, and the uneven learning curves people experience. The topic resonated so strongly with our alumni community that we expanded it into our first public workshop, centered on the question: When AI comes up in your team’s conversations, what’s the mood in the room?

While we initially expected these reflections to galvanize experimentation, we came to see that what team leads and individual contributors (ICs) alike needed first was space to form their own perspectives. Quiet time to think for themselves, away from the louder voices of leadership teams and industry peers, proved essential for more grounded engagement with AI at work.

Lastly, we kept returning to the topic of building professional connections in a fragmented workforce. With fewer stable structures and shared paths, many people feel the pressure to be networking and “putting themselves out there.” Beneath this sits a significant amount of emotional work: navigating uncertainty, managing hope and disappointment, and sustaining relationships over time. An opportunity to work with students at Western Washington University prompted us to develop programming around this topic, which we later deepened with our community and with alumnae at Scripps College.

Building Emotions at Work

Alongside the programs and workshops we hosted this year, we invested in the infrastructure of Emotions at Work itself.

A major milestone was the launch of our website. Having outgrown the one-pager focused on Navigating Emotions at Work, we built a site that could house a fuller range of offers, articles and event announcements. It also marked a moment of putting a stake in the ground, with an About page and a mission statement:

We shape more humane worlds of work by co-creating shared frames, portable practices, and provocative questions.

I wrote a bit about that process here and hope you’ll explore the site if you haven’t already.

We also tended to our capacity to sustain the work. This included:

• A now-annual hiking retreat, creating time to be in motion and open-ended conversations of possibility

• An invite-only session on systems for personal finance, examining how we spend and save, in relation to making money, and the emotions involved in real vs perceived scarcity

• New agreements for how we share work and responsibility, aimed at increasing individual agency

• A continued commitment to our mastermind group, which Oriana has written about here

And then there are the things that didn’t happen. We didn’t manage to launch a fall cohort of Navigating Emotions at Work. Our podcast is still in the works. And we wrote less than we aspired to. Trade-offs abound.

With that, we’ll close out the year. Thank you for being part of Emotions at Work.

Tomomi (& Oriana)

Next year, we’ll be supporting companies with team development, on topics like feedback, effective requests, and building trust. We’re looking for a few more teams to pilot this work with. Please reach out if it sounds relevant.

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In September, we spent a week in the Picos de Europa in northern Spain for our annual EAW retreat - a chance to step away from our daily rhythms, reconnect in person, and dream about what’s next for our lives and work together.

We intentionally chose the Picos as our setting because of our shared love for the mountains and the types of conversations they invite. Surrounded by open skies, crisp air, and winding trails, we’re able to drop into a different way of being and thinking - one that feels difficult to access when we’re sitting in a Zoom room. The mountains and steady pace of movement invite us into more imagination and “what if” discussions - the kind that meander and unfold naturally when we stop trying to steer them.

Taking this kind of time is not always an easy decision, especially when so many of the systems we’re part of are in fight-or-flight mode. The default impulse is to hunker down, keep pushing, stay “productive”. But a core part of our work is to open new ways to think, talk, and act on the emotional landscape of our working lives.

The whole body needs to be involved in that work. Not just the mind that plans and performs, but the body that holds tension, the heart that loves, and the gut that senses when something’s off. When those layers integrate, our sense of agency in how we show up at work and the climate we co-create expands.

And for conversations of possibility, it can really help to place the body in wide-open spaces and know that our conversation can take the time it takes. We’re looking at clouds, at sunsets, at the ocean horizon - and we’re not switching to something else at the top of the hour.

Our experience brought to mind something Tomomi once wrote in her essay “Retreats as a Strategic Move—A Reframing for People Who Find It Hard to Pause”, where she points to the dictionary definition of “retreat” as:

> to withdraw or retire in the face of or from action with an enemy, either due to defeat or in order to adopt a more favorable position.

She goes on to reflect:

> Withdrawal is a vital play to replenish our reserves, to stand a better chance when we go out again. Plan to retreat before you “need” it. Is there a more favorable position that you want to adopt, that bolstering your physical-mental-spiritual reserves would help make possible?

That’s the spirit we carried into the mountains, and we came back regulated and re-energized, with new ideas and a deeper commitment to shaping more humane worlds of work.

As we enter back into our rhythms, we’re weaving those insights into what comes next - especially our shared desire to dive into more team development work.

Speaking of which, we’re looking for a few teams to pilot workshops on feedback, effective requests, and patterns of trust in the workplace. If you’re interested, send us a quick note.

As always, thank you for being part of Emotions at Work, in ways big and small.

Oriana & Tomomi

We’re glad you found your way here. This newsletter is where we’ll share news, updates, and invitations - ways to stay connected with our work and the community around Emotions at Work.

If you’ve joined one of our programs before, this is the best way to keep in touch. If you’re new, welcome - we’re happy to have you here.

Oriana & Tomomi

Co-Founder of Emotions at Work

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