Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially

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

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.

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Emotions

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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!

Actually, kidding aside, it is exactly this logical approach that makes emotions such an easy topic to write about. I have taken to thinking of everyone as having two axis—one related to their emotional (feeling) side and one related to their 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, this “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 thinking
• High emotional, low thinking
• Low emotional, low thinking
• Low emotional, high thinking

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.

While I LOVE the thinking side of life, I have to admit that if everyone in my life were in a “low emotional” state, then REGARDLESS of their “thinking” state, the world would be a pretty boring place! Emotions are what make us human.

Furthermore, as you take the time to study emotions, you’ll find that in most cases, they are perfectly explainable and 100% expected given an individual’s upbringing and current state in life. The key is NOT to question emotions, but to EMBRACE them. And, the most important place to begin this process is with YOURSELF.

• A healthy individual is aware of their emotional state and makes choices with full understanding of the influence of this emotional state.

Basically, what I am suggesting is that you do NOT need to “control” your emotions, but you MUST recognize them and alter your behaviors/thinking processes based on what emotional state you are in. To do any less, will normally result in sub-optimal outcomes AND situations where you end up looking foolish!!!

That brings us to this week’s question:

• Are you embracing your emotions?

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

Have a great week!

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Blog post from this past week:

Monday Morning Motivation - Curious