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Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement—along with a good cup of coffee!—to start the day. Today we discuss "logical."

Hopefully the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week.  Please feel free to forward the newsletter on to others that you think would benefit from the content.

Logical

Last week I wrote about emotions and challenged folks to take on the question:

• Are you embracing your emotions?

This week, I’m going to confront the “ying” with the “yang” of emotions: logical.

OK fair warning, you are about to read about emotions from a writer who is a trained engineer and values logic and data almost as much as Spock does!

I have taken to thinking of everyone as having two axes—one related to their emotional (feeling) side and one related to their logical (thinking) side. This mental model is MUCH different from one that has emotions at one end of the continuum and thinking at the other end of the continuum. To me, the “continuum” model is NOT accurate or indicative of most people. However, the “axis” model is, in my opinion, very representative.

Each person has (i) a natural “set point” on each axis and (ii) a current “state” on each axis. If you look at the combinations, you get:

• High emotional, high logical
• High emotional, low logical
• Low emotional, low logical
• Low emotional, high logical

No doubt, anyone reading this can recognize certain people they know as fitting into one of these combinations and, also, can likely recognize themselves as gravitating to one of the combinations.

Last week I made the argument that emotions are what make us human. While this 100% true in my opinion, it is equally true that the presence of logic is required to protect that humanity.

Without the constraint of logic, we can let our negative emotions run wild. Rarely does this lead to good results.

• A healthy individual is aware of their logical state and makes choices with full understanding of the likely impact of the choices they make.

We have to accept that there are logical, likely (not guaranteed) outcomes that follow from our choices. We need to recognize the likelihood the consequences—good or bad—of our actions. To ignore the likelihood of certain outcomes is foolish. Embracing or accepting the outcome of our actions is critical to making healthy decisions.

That brings us to this week’s question:

• Are you embracing your logical side?

Thanks for sharing a bit of your time with me this Monday morning.  

Have a great week!

Blog post from this past week:

Monday Morning Motivation - Emotional