Streaming Tears

Your Sensitivity Is A Career Superpower – I

Here’s How To Use It:

Being a sensitive person in the workplace can often feel like a double-edged sword.

Your colleagues likely appreciate your generous nature, depth of personality and sense of dedication. On the other hand, when it comes to tough realities of the workplace like receiving feedback, your emotions can run unchecked.

Maybe you’re completely crushed by constructive criticism or you’ve noticed that your attention to detail can slip into perfectionism. Perhaps your high attunement to surroundings has translated into being easily peeved by co-workers.

In a workplace that glorifies strength and power, highly sensitive people like you may falsely assume the ability to experience things more intensely is a weakness or personal failing.

On the contrary, you might be surprised to know that recent workplace performance research confirms what psychologists have known for years: managers consistently rate people with higher sensitivity as the best performers in their organizations.

As our society becomes more automated, the need for workers with intuition, creativity and empathy becomes even greater. The abilities of sensitive people can never be reproduced by technology. They continue to excel at everything from job interviews to leading teams and most everything in between.

If you’re a highly sensitive person and decide to fully leverage your unique gifts, you’ll bring a refreshing set of valuable contributions to the table.

Here are five ways to use your sensitivity as your greatest strength in the workplace.

1. Have confidence in your communication skills.

Most highly sensitive people display rare strengths in key areas of emotional intelligence, also known as emotional quotient (EQ)–the ability to recognize and understand emotions in themselves and others. These strengths including self-awareness and social-awareness.

Because you can become easily overstimulated, you may need help in the areas of self-management and relationship management. Your hyper-awareness of emotions might mean you need help acting on those emotions in constructive ways.

But whether you’re leading a team, motivating your colleagues or providing a sounding board for others, at the end of the day your sensitivity is a gift for communication that can help your workplace run smoothly and make your career blossom.

Highly sensitive people experience strong emotions that are easy to identify. They communicate so effectively because they don’t just hear the words coming out of other people’s mouths—they’re also attuned to subtle gestures and tone.