Seth Godin defines emotional labour as "The act of connecting to another human being and making a change even if its not easy for you to do in that moment". For me emotional labour is when you do something that you don't want to do and you fake that you are happy doing it to make someone else feel good. Some examples of people whose jobs require emotional labour are bank tellers or flight attendants. These people have to look happy every single hour of their shift because they have to deal with customers, and customers want to be treated good for the service they pay for. Even though bank tellers and flight attendants get pay for their jobs, there are some people who do emotional work and don't get pay right away but get attention to their job which leads to future jobs.
One sample of a person who does emotional labour is Corey Barker. Corey makes video tutorials for a website called planetphotoshop, which offers free tutorials and tips for photoshop users. Corey makes a tutorial every week for the website about effects that he discovers on his daily routine. Maybe he gets pay or maybe not, but by doing this he will get the attention of someone who will need a job done the way he does it and is going to contact him to do it. Corey is a very successful person because he shares his ideas with everyone through the website. Every time he shares new tutorials, more people come to visit the website and the more attention he gets back.
In my case I might not be doing too much of emotional labour in my use of social media. This is because I'm new to blogging and have a hard time getting use to share every idea that I have. On the other hand I have been doing some emotional labour by helping classmates with things that they don't understand in class. We get together every week to work on homework and whatever they don't understand I show them how to do it and in return I get more practice and knowledge.
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