From Breakdown to Breakthrough: How Emotional Intelligence Transformed My Career & Life
(insights for anyone who's cried at work & any leader who's had a team member who feels deeply)
I have a confession - everything I talk about now, related to emotional self-awareness and regulation comes from having gone through really painful experiences that forced me to figure out a different way to lead myself.
Story time!
It was year four of working at my first corporate job. Because I had transitioned to a new role in Q4, my performance review was hosted by both my old manager and my new manager. Although I had spent most of the previous year in the old role, my new manager was the one who shared glowing 360 reviews and qualitative feedback only to then say that I’d be receiving a “meets expectations” with no salary increase and the same bonus as the previous year.
My body felt like that moment a cafetera gets ready to brew the espresso - boiling hot and about to burst. The mix of emotions bubbled up in my nose like the fizzle of champagne, a tickle that rose to my eyes and made them watery.
I wasn’t just flabbergasted; I was hurt.
By this point, I had seen colleagues with less time in a role, less overall work experience, less degrees and making less contributions to company culture get rewarded with higher pay and/or promotions.
Like the cafetera, my response started in a slow sputter, asking questions about the feedback. I thought I had worked hard enough, made myself more visible to senior leaders, volunteered for a project to increase employee engagement and more. It had been enough to grant me a lateral career move but not enough to receive a better rating or reward?
My old manager who still remains the worse manager I’ve ever had, only chimed in to say, “I know this isn’t what you want to hear,” in a tone that felt patronizing and like fake empathy.
I lost it.
The words felt a dagger right through my gut and my body was ready to pounce! The tears swelling up in my eyes stung. Because I didn’t have the tools to manage the biochemical reactions in my brain that resulted in my body feeling in "fight” mode and hijacked the rational mind, I excused myself and stormed out.
I rushed to the elevator - fists clinched, jaw locked, eyes misting over - down 10 flights, rush walked out of the corporate building then ran to the public bathroom by the food court. Once I was safe in a stall, I let it out a full-blow Kim Kardashian ugly cry moment. Then called a friend to vent in order to calm down.
Some context.
I am your typical ambitious, high-achieving, perfectionist first-gen. I was the kid in 4th grade who tallied up all of my assignment grades to show Mrs. Parisi that my final grade should’ve been a 98 instead of a 92 which made an A+ student, not an A- one. For so long my identity was tied to my performance therefore any form of negative feedback felt like failure.
At that point in my career, I felt behind because I spent the first 4yrs after college working in the non-profit sector, was laid-off during the financial crisis and spent that year of unemployment earning my master’s degree in HR. When this employer reached out, I jumped at the opportunity even though the pay was only $10K more than my non-profit salary (with new degree).
Beyond the pay gap, this corporate environment felt vastly different. At the non-profit, I felt comfortable with my Puerto Rican boss, among my black and brown colleagues, working to uplift the local Hispanic community. In this financial services space focused on ultra high-net worth individuals, I was one of very few brown Latinas and though in the HR Ops space my managers were Latinas, when I looked up to the HR Executive Team, no one looked like me; it was majority white-men.
No matter how well I dressed the part in my Meghan Markle pencil skirts, like her character in Suits, I would sit in my cube across the NYC skyline and felt like I didn’t belong. (I didn’t know it then but I was simply battling the imposter phenomenon, lacked corporate political savviness, and working at a company whose values didn’t align with mine).
As for the managers..
To be fair, the old manager was pregnant with twins and went on MAT leave before I transitioned to that role. By the time she returned, I knew I couldn’t stay in that role, I absolutely hated the “Call Center” concept for HR advisory. Naturally, because she was my leader, I shared my career aspirations and she pledged to help me get there.
Then one day she pulled me into a meeting and with an air of annoyance asked if I was applying to other internal roles. I hadn’t but she took it personally that I was networking and instead of helping me tried to block me. When I did finally get the offer to transition to the new manager’s team, she made me sit in the role for 2 more months until she hired someone new.
Luckily, my new manager was a strong leader (top 3 of the strongest in terms of skills, experience, and EQ that I ever experienced in a decade within Corporate HR). On that awful performance review day, when I eventually went back to my cube, she gave me the space I needed to keep cooling off. When we had a follow up, she balanced kindness with tough love - yes, my feelings were valid AND if I wanted to succeed in this environment, I had to learn how to navigate it with higher political savviness and gravitas.
Over the next few months, she addressed blind spots directly but with grace, gave me stretch opportunities but supported me through the process of improving, set high expectations but worked hard right along our side (the only manager I’ve ever had who would come to us before heading out for the day to ask if we needed anything before she left, every single day) and most importantly, she modeled that a leading didn’t mean leaving the emotions at the door, it meant learning how to manage them to meet the moment and show up our best.
2 years later, I was in a similar situation - receiving performance feedback from anew manager about the previous year. This time I was in a new role after a two- level promotion, only 8mths at the company. Because I had just been promoted and given a raise, my performance rating was defaulted to “meets expectations” which I understood; by then I had learned the unwritten rules and how these HR processes tend to work.
For the rest of my corporate HR career, I was considered a high-potential employee - promoted 3 times in 6yrs even though I wasn’t in a fast-track leadership development program. In my last corporate performance review, I earned an “Outstanding” rating, reserved for the top 10% of the global organization. That’s not a brag; it’s a testament to what can happen when you become emotionally self-aware and manage your emotions in order to show up as an intentional leader.
It’s also a powerful example of the difference an emotionally intelligent leader can make on their team members. I will forever be grateful to her (thank you Jess! ILY) because she didn’t just shift my perspective - those learnings led to significant career moves, economic mobility and ultimately to doing this work as a business owner; she helped me transform my life.
Besides your own, I encourage you to reflect on how many lives you can positively impact if you become a more emotionally intelligent leader. The ripple effect of that is limitless.
