“Emotion is a word commonly used in a personal and professional context. It is a process that begins with a stimulus that leads to cognitive and physiological responses, and that leads us to patterns of behavior or action. An emotion can occur for a variety of reasons, and the cause or stimulus that provokes it is not always obvious. Sometimes it is a feature of the environment that makes us feel emotionally stimulated. Emotions must be differentiated from related terms such as moods, feelings, emotional dispositions or affect.
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Professionals tend to strongly resist breaking from their professions’ core cultural tenets and it is unclear how some may voluntarily break from deeply ingrained views. Through our study of French anesthesiologists who practice hypnosis, we aim to better understand this little-explored phenomenon. Adopting hypnosis, a technique that many anesthesiologists consider subjective, contradicted a core tenet of their profession: the need to only use techniques validated by rigorous scientific-based research. Drawing on interviews and observations, we analyze how these anesthesiologists were able to change their views and reinvent their work. We find that turning inward to oneself (focusing on their own direct experiences of clients) and turning outward to clients (relying on relations with clients) played critical roles in anesthesiologists’ ability to shift their views and adopt hypnosis. Through this process, these anesthesiologists embarked on a voluntary internal transformation, or reboot, whereby they profoundly reassessed their work, onboarded people in adjacent professions to accept their own reinvention, and countered isolation from their peers.
- Research
- Health Sector Management, Organizational Theory
