Hello from me, your emotional holistic coach. I’ve been called angry, crazy, dramatic and worse. If it exists I’m experiencing the emotions of loss, happiness, revengeful glee when the asshat I worked with got canned, excitement, Grief, laughter and that was just yesterday.

Emotions remain a stigmatized topic in professional settings, despite their inevitability. As women—particularly working mothers—we assume the emotional responsibilities of our families, teams, projects, and broader communities.

Whether our “emotional backpack” is brimming with warmth and empathy or laden with the fatigue of perpetual productivity, we carry it with us into every professional interactions. We don’t compartmentalize like men- it’s biological.

Many clients articulate an ambivalence toward the work-life dichotomy, eagerly anticipating weekends yet yearning for the structure of work as early as Sunday evening.

This tension reflects the cyclical nature of emotional labor and the blurred boundaries between personal and professional fulfillment. Mothers, in particular, embody a paradoxical role—self-sacrificing caregivers and high-performing professionals.

We balance guilt with a healthy ego, pride in our career accomplishments with the emotional intricacies of raising children at various developmental stages.

This duality underscores the complex psychological landscape that working mothers navigate daily.

So what to do now, ladies? Use your emotions to your advantage.

Operationalizing Emotional Awareness

1. Recognize and Analyze Patterns

Women in leadership positions often exhibit heightened perceptiveness, attuned to subtle shifts in organizational dynamics.

Leverage this acuity to identify early markers of disengagement, morale issues, or operational inefficiencies, using these insights to inform proactive interventions such as team development or strategic recalibration.

Similar vigilance can be applied on the homefront. Moms tend to have a Birds Eye view of what’s at play. Pay attention to collective well-being—does your family need unstructured downtime, a pause from extracurricular obligations, or the establishment of new bonding rituals?

2. Develop Constructive Emotional Outlets

Emotional regulation is key to sustaining professional composure. Rather than displacing emotional weight onto colleagues, cultivate external mechanisms for processing—whether through somatic practices, mindfulness techniques, or intellectual engagement.

While occasional, authentic exchanges with a trusted peer can serve as a release valve, habitual venting fosters emotional contagion and diminishes overall workplace stability.

3. Employ Metacognitive Techniques to Identify Root Causes

Engaging in reflective practice—such as journaling or utilizing a digital note-taking system—enables the disaggregation of emotions, allowing for a clearer understanding of their origins.

By distinguishing between internal and external triggers, working mothers can mitigate emotional conflation and adopt a more measured, strategic approach to professional challenges.

Emotional intelligence in the workplace necessitates the ability to compartmentalize immediate affective responses, ensuring that critical decisions are informed by rational analysis rather than transient emotional states.

You’ve Got This, Mom: Leveraging Emotional Intelligence for Strategic Advantage

The capacity to experience and process emotions with nuance is not a liability—it is an asset. My aspiration for working mothers is to:

• Harness emotional intelligence as a competitive differentiator, enabling them to identify relational dynamics and opportunities that others may overlook.

• Integrate emotional labor as a form of leadership capital, fostering environments of trust, empathy, and resilience both at home and in the workplace.

• Permit emotions to flow without fixation, allowing for continual forward movement without being encumbered by their weight.

In this way, we can transform emotional labor from an invisible tax into a visible, strategic strength.

Lynn Mull Holistic Career Coach & Author

Career Coach | Author | WellNess Advisor | Reiki Master
I offer Clarity through Reiki healing sessions, and Holistic Career Coaching and Facilitating Teams to professional wellness. I use various tools and methods to speak, write, and provide 1.1 counsel to move out of the stuck into the actions that help you or your teams reach their goals.I found my way because I had to create it.
As a working parent and a sandwich caregiver in my early 30s, I understand the pressures to keep going, provide for my family and prioritize everyone else’s wellbeing.

I looked in many corners and could not find one coach to break into my inner blockages and move my career until Reiki and a Career Coach got me there. We can be all the things to everyone, but first, we must get aligned and intuitively move forward for our own .