Your Emotions. Your Superpower.

We've spent the last four weeks learning about the importance of being in Growth Mindset Mode when you're on the path to development in a particular area of your life.

We'll spend the next few weeks talking about one of the biggest challenges you'll face when in Growth Mindset Mode: your emotions.

To be more specific, one of the biggest challenges you'll face when you're in a phase of growth and development is the threat of being derailed by your emotions.

Allow me to explain.

Let's start by answering a question: What are emotions?

Your emotions, simply put, are mental responses to physical states.  Put another way, feelings and emotions are a reaction we have in response to things happening in our every day life.

For example, you get good feedback on your latest blog post - you feel joy.  You hear a loud knock on your door in the middle of the night - you feel fear. Someone brings your coffee to you just how you like it.  You feel love.  And so on and so forth.

Interestingly, emotions can get a bad reputation.  How often have you heard someone say (or perhaps you've said), “I don't want to make an emotional decision.”  This implies that somehow, it's possible to remove emotion  from our decision making, and that we should remove emotion from our decision making so that we can, presumably, make a rational decision (one unfettered by our emotions).

This implies that emotions are not only unnecessary for judicious decision making but that they are a hindrance to it.

This could not be further from the truth.

Emotions are an integral part of decision making.  In fact, scientists postulate that the role of emotions is to help you evaluate the experiences you're having as good or bad (so you can make a judgment about them and act on them) as well as to help you remember your experiences and learn from them. Research on the role of emotions has demonstrated - convincingly - that if we didn't experience emotions we would be unable  to make good decisions.

For example, clinical studies have show that people with injuries to the parts of the brain that process emotions were unable to make good decisions, even though they were still able to reason.

The short of it is, our emotions have significant influence on our ability to make decisions and to make good decisions.  They're our human super power.  We can think of them as driving and directing our decision making.  We need them to make decisions.  There's no escaping it - we are emotional creatures.

This is a great thing in many respects as our emotions add depth and meaning to our lives.

But…emotions can also be inaccurate interpretations or reactions to the events we're experiencing.  That's the thing with emotions - they're vitally important but they can be very misleading, or, derailing, as we noted above.

So, what do we do?  We learn to appreciate, understand, investigate, and manage our emotions.  As Susan David puts it, we learn to become emotionally agile - so that our emotions can lead us to our goals and align with our values, as opposed to getting us stuck in places we really don't want to be, or leading us to do things  that we wish we hadn't done (when we're being honest with ourselves).

In short, we want to harness our emotions to keep us on track, as opposed to allowing them to derail us from our goals.

I know - it's a tall order.  But I also know that you can do it.  You will not be able to do it every time you experience a strong emotion (that is an unrealistic expectation for human beings), but you'll learn to do it much more often with training, time, and practice.

Emotional agility is a skill, and we're going to start practicing it next week.

For the rest of this week, I want you to practice identifying (or "labeling") your emotions and writing down what you're experiencing.  Frustrated with a colleague?  Write down the emotions you're feeling.  Stuck in traffic?  Write down the emotions you're feeling.  Got into an argument with your partner?  Write down the emotions.

Here's a few of mine:

-I took my daughter on a tandem bike ride, even though I hadn't ridden a bike in over a decade.  I felt joy, connection, and pride.

-I took a walk by the ocean. I felt awe and wonder.

-I sent an email to an unresponsive client.  I felt frustrated and disappointed.

Ok, it's YOUR turn - what emotions did you notice yourself experiencing this week?