Emotional Awareness

When you blame you are usually fearful, angry or hurt. Blaming robs you of your ability to think clearly. Emotional awareness is the key to freeing yourself from the restrictions made by blaming.

Emotion is energy. It can be both constructive and destructive. A passion for the possible drove both Gandhi and Hitler. Gandhi’s passion for peace and independence helped free his country from the yoke of British colonialism. Hitler’s passion for German dominance inspired hatred and violence. It is important that we learn how it is that we create our emotions, and how those emotions impact our decisions and behaviors. Emotion by itself is neither good nor bad. It is what we do with it that matters.

Most people tend to underestimate the importance of emotion. People joke about feelings and avoid talking about them. Our feelings, however, have more power over us than we realize. How you feel about someone determines if you will follow him, vote for him, hire him, buy products from him, sell to him, cooperate, compete, trust or not trust him. Emotion often determines these things outside of any reasoning, or sometimes, in defiance of any reasoning. Emotion sets the tone in relationships. The emotional tone of a manager affects the whole department.

What is emotion? Emotion is your body’s response to your thinking. It lets you know how you are doing. When you are listening to your intuition and following it, you feel good. When you betray yourself, you feel bad. When you are acting out of alignment with your stated goals and values, your emotion turns negative. When you are acting in alignment with your goals and values, you feel strong and confident.

Emotion provides immediate feedback. Emotion doesn’t lie, but we lie to ourselves about what is causing the emotion. We misinterpret emotion to mean that someone or something is to blame. I worked with an executive director who was highly intelligent and a great visionary. Yet, when one of her staff disagreed with her, or called attention to a contradiction, she felt threatened. Consequently staff members would receive the silent treatment, or in some cases, disciplinary action.

If you believe disagreement is disloyalty, then someone’s view about your decision is hurtful. No one likes feeling pain, so perhaps you learn how to shift it into anger. Anger feels better, at least for the moment. The anger drives you to react in a way that helps you to regain the illusion of control. The anger, if uncontrolled, becomes destructive, or can lead to violence. In the case of this director, it led to firings, disciplines, and unionization of her workplace. Intellectually she understood that she created her own emotions, but when threatened, she was unaware that she was creating her own emotion. In her view, it was always them. Her strength, the ability to envision with great emotion, was turned into a weakness when she envisioned herself as victimized by others.

If you know that your emotion comes from the story that you tell yourself; if you know that you are creating your own experience; and if you know that you can step outside of yourself, then you have significant emotional awareness. Awareness creates choice. Choice is power. Whatever the world seems to be throwing at you, you experience it on the inside, and the inside is determined by thought. If you feel stressed, stop. Stress is the gap between how you see it and how you want it. What can you control? Your thoughts. What can't you control? Outside events. Accept what is, and determine your best response. When you are calm and in control of your thinking, your influence on events tends to increase. In any situation, the person who is most in control of self will have the most influence on the situation.

If you are angry, first become aware. Accept that it is okay that you are angry. Anger is energy. What do you want to do with this energy? Are your present moment thoughts feeding the anger and growing it? Or, are your thoughts helping you to a place of calm and sanity? Be aware, but don't judge yourself. Think. What do you want to come of this situation? In your anger you may want to be right or to prove someone wrong. What do you really want? Respond in the best way that will lead to your goal. It's not wrong to be angry, but things can go wrong if you let it get out of control. If I am by myself, swearing helps me to let it out. Once it's out, I manage it and get myself to a place where I can think clearly. This usually happens at the computer or when I am driving. I don't swear at other people, because that can create another problem. If I am angry with another person, I express it but manage my intensity. Again, I want to get myself to a place where I can reason and make good decisions.

You cannot stop yourself from having an emotion. You can try to suppress it, but it is still there. You can train yourself over time to feel no emotion, and this will take you out of touch with yourself and others. The key is to be aware of emotion, acknowledge/accept it, and decide what outcome you want. Anger and stress often prevent us from thinking clearly. Awareness helps us to process the emotion and come to a place of sanity where we can make good decisions. We are not the victims of our emotions, but the creators of them. There is no one to blame when stress, anger, or hurt strike. These valuable emotions provide instant feedback which helps us to determine where we are in our thinking, and where we want to go.