Why university counsellors need to learn about emotional labour

It’s been a long day at work, and you’re worried about a potentially important phone call you missed earlier. However, a student meeting is scheduled soon – so you take a deep breath and let her in, suppressing your own anxieties and preparing to be a supportive counsellor.

Or you receive a deeply frustrating email from a parent that makes you doubt your career choice for a moment – but you stop yourself from typing an emotional response, and instead slowly draft a professional email. Maybe you run it through AI to see if it’s reasoned enough, and then hit “send”. 

Do these situations sound familiar? Emotions can run high with university applications – and facing this, college counsellors need to regulate their own emotions and emotional expression effectively and efficiently. 

This may look like responding with a measured tone in a charged situation, rewording our spoken or written responses or taking deep breaths to calm ourselves before calming down others. Whatever the action is, it all takes work, and that can wear us down. 

There’s actually a phrase to describe this part of our job: “emotional labour”. 

Coined by sociology professor Arlie Russell Hochschild in her book The Managed Heart, emotional labour has been studied in teachers and other caring professions. As college counsellors, we should learn about it too, to ensure that we are fully acknowledging the extent of our work. This can help us to take care of ourselves in a better way.

What is emotional labour? 

So, what is emotional labour exactly? Wikipedia defines it as “the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their personas during interactions with customers, co-workers, clients, and managers.”

Why is it important to learn about emotional labour? It’s because it can have a negative impact on workers. It can lead to job stress and dissatisfaction, as well as possible burnout if its effects are not addressed properly. And college counselling involves plenty of emotional labour. 

How emotional labour plays out in college counselling 

Learning the nuances of emotional labour may help us to navigate our work and workplaces better. 

First are emotional display rules: societal norms of how individuals should express their emotions in specific situations. In a workplace such as a school, positive emotions are expected, but also neutral emotions. More on this later. 

Second is techniques, which are the methods individuals use to process emotional labour. There are two types: surface acting and deep acting. College counsellors use both.

Surface acting is when one fakes or suppresses genuine emotions to conform. Think about the flight attendant always smiling no matter what he might feel internally or a time when you had to mask internal frustrations to resolve a situation.

Deep acting is when one modifies internal emotions to genuinely feel the required emotion. Think about how college counsellors remind themselves of their job’s impact on students, and display true compassion and empathy for them. 

Positive, neutral and negative emotions

It is worth exploring the types of emotions to understand emotional labour. Think about the types of emotions you are required to display as a college counsellor. 

Of course, there are the positive emotions, such as happiness, inspiration and pride. These kinds are often required from educators – think warmth and enthusiasm, resulting in approachability. Hope is a particularly salient emotion for college counsellors, given that we help shape students’ futures. 

There are also neutral emotions. These are characterised by calmness, stability and a lack of emotional extremes. Alongside positive emotions, these are the other emotions required by educators and college counsellors. Difficult conversations almost always require neutral emotions. 

Negative emotions are a tricky case. Most of them are prohibited at school. But certain emotions, such as disappointment or frustration, can serve as teaching moments, provided that they are expressed in a reasonable manner befitting the situation. Situations involving disciplining a student or discussing certain types of difficult topics (for example, conversations about predicted grades) can require the educator to express negative emotions to show that certain actions or assumptions are worth questioning. 

And, finally, it’s worth noting that not all emotions fall neatly into these three buckets. Much are complex, as in they involve all valences. For instance, disappointment arises from the existence of positive expectations and empathy involves acknowledging the negative situation. So resist the urge to always label your own reactions as positive, neutral or negative, but simply observe them with curiosity. 

High stakes – and high emotions

As a college counsellor, you are dealing with a relatively high-stakes situation. Unlike subject teachers in charge of a single grade, you are dealing with planning students’ futures and representing them to universities. When stakes are high, emotions run high, too. 

Also, college counsellors interact with a variety of stakeholders. With each stakeholder, the display rules for emotions may shift. You will interact differently with students, parents, colleagues and your immediate superior – and again with the school leadership team, a university representative or another college counsellor. This is a lot of shifting of emotional display rules in any single given day. If you hold a leadership position, that adds plenty of nuance to the stakes and stakeholders you are asked to juggle. 

The rewarding side of emotional labour

It’s important to point out that emotional labour is not entirely negative. There are positive effects associated with the deep acting component of emotional labour. Aligning your inner emotions with what’s required of the role leads to authentic expressions. This builds rapport and trust, leads to a sense of fulfilment, and contributes to a positive work environment. Furthermore, deep acting can actually lead to job satisfaction, organisational commitment and customer satisfaction. 

In fact, deep acting and its outcomes are probably why many of us are in the college-counselling profession. The rewarding process and outcome of drawing on empathy to support the futures of others is not as easily afforded in other careers.

However, deep acting can still lead to compassion fatigue, which is the “cost of caring for others or for their emotional pain, resulting from the desire to help relieve the suffering of others”. This can leave you feel fulfilled yet exhausted.

How to mitigate negative effects of emotional labour 

Emotional labour is an unavoidable part of our job, alongside its side-effects (positive and negative). So how can we mitigate its negative effects? Here are some tips. 

Acknowledge your emotional labour 

First, let’s acknowledge that emotional labour is an implicitly required part of your job, and it’s demanding. After a difficult conversation, a long day or an intense fall semester, feeling drained is a completely natural reaction. This is not only because you’re juggling tasks, but because tasks involving emotional labour are particularly taxing. 

Be less reactive and more responsive 

It is tempting to react immediately to a situation, but taking time to respond is essential. Emotions have a finite lifespan and will influence your perception of a situation, which means that your perception and reaction may change at a later time. To apply this tip practically, do not respond to emails or messages on the fly, if possible. And clear your schedule before and after meetings that you expect to be difficult. 

Take breaks – practise emotional self-care

Breaks are not a luxury – they’re a necessity. It’s essential to buffer the negative impact of emotional labour. Schedule mini-breaks of two to five minutes in between tasks, and protect your evenings, so you can take a longer break at the end of the day. It’s also essential to respect your summer and winter holidays. Actively practise emotional self-care. Some more suggestions are available here.

Sleep, exercise and eat healthily

Body and mind are deeply connected – some say they are one and the same. Whichever philosophical camp you belong to, the fundamental impact of physical health on mental and emotional health cannot be understated. Sleep, exercise and eating healthily will heavily impact on how you perceive and respond to the world, so do not neglect your physical health.

Increase emotional intelligence 

Emotional intelligence is the “ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways”. In everyday life, this can mean: recognising when you’re drained (and seeking to refill yourself); understanding your own emotional reactions to situations (not everyone reacts the same ways to the same situation); or realising the types of emotions you naturally gravitate towards and how those are shaped by upbringing and culture. Learning about the colourful diversity of emotions out there is called increasing emotional granularity – a feelings wheel can help.

Find a safe support group

Processing your reactions out loud to another person can be incredibly helpful. Talk to your partner, friends, a safe buddy at your workplace or maybe even an AI – but make sure you’re not simply dumping all your emotions on them without acknowledging the emotional labour it’s taking on their part. Also, venting is helpful, but after a certain point it may become cemented into a narrative that frustrates you even more, so observe how you’re processing and describing a situation. Might there be another way to describe and process it? 

Learn effective communication

Effective communication can alleviate emotional labour. When you express yourself clearly in difficult situations, you’re not bearing the burden of suppressing your own emotional reactions. Role playing and practising scenarios in advance may help with this.