Emotional Betrayal!
Analysis gave me freedom of emotions and fantastic confidence. -Hedy Lamaar (1914-2000), Austrian born actress most well known for her role in Samson and Delilah.
Pleasure or Pain?
Fear, Greed, Love, Trust and on goes the list of emotions we feel on a regular basis. They can well up in an instant and completely change the course of our direction. In a minute we can be headed down one path and then become completely moved down another by a change of heart. So is this a good thing? Well maybe we ought to step back and consider how significant this issue really is…
Let’s consider our last subject of deadly distractions and go searching for the connection. You see everybody wants to pretend that they can separate the challenges of surviving and making a living from the other aspects of their lives so let’s start there. Can you really focus at work if you have a kink in your relationship with your spouse, your kids, your parents or maybe even your best friend. Of course not! That deeply rooted desire to love and be loved is perhaps the greatest and most powerful emotion of all…just think back to how overpowered your common sense became when you fell in or out of love. What about greed? What happens to your life when all you focus on is hunting and gathering money at any expense. Do you wake up one day with nobody to love or worse be surrounded by people that no longer trust you or believe in you? How’s that feel? Not so hot huh?
Inaccurate Thinking
I guess we could even simplify this a bit more by simply focusing on a more Freudian slant that we are always moved by the emotions of pleasure or pain; but what are the implications of that emotional pursuit? If that’s all we did and had no intellectual oversight where would we be? Well there’s plenty of evidence that the pursuit of too much pleasure does nothing but rot us to the core like too much candy or that the avoidance of pain can render us useless as we retreat to the dungeon to avoid all risk.
So what’s the point? Our emotions are a force to be reckoned with. We must begin to pay attention to not only their positive effects but more importantly their negative effects. In his book Law of Success, Napoleon Hill broaches the subject of inaccurate thinking. I would argue that inaccurate thoughts can be the very result of our emotional over reactions.
Common Sense Rewiring
Think about any relationship that you might have been involved in…were you ever at fault for blowing it up because you reacted emotionally? Have you ever walked away from a good thing only to find that the other side of the fence was not only not greener but in fact it was down right frightening? Now what? Well here’s the problem…the same emotions that helped us get carried away and do something silly, now imprison us from returning to the starting point and trying to make it right. Why we find it so difficult to swallow our own prideful emotions and use our common sense is perhaps one of the greatest mysteries of human behavior.
So the conclusion is actually simple; we must wire ourselves to control our emotions. We literally need to develop the ability to have our common sense pull the fire alarm when we feel very emotional and force us to stop and think. Do your homework first. Review the evidence and simply question whether your emotions are leading you in the right direction or down the road to destruction.
