📅 Thought for today:
‘If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.’
— Daniel Goleman
#thoughtfortoday #emotions #feelings #thoughts #selfawareness #distress #discomfort #disturbance.
A friend of mine often says, “Emotions are data.”
She is right, yet I can’t help feeling this is an accountants view of life.
Emotions are indeed guides, providing useful information.
So in that sense, they are data.
They are also a swirling maelstrom of thoughts, feelings, actions and physical responses.
They take control, they feel like something that happens to us as if an outside agent was painting us different colours.
Simply viewing them as data is not enough. The data approach can be helpful, however, we are not always at our most rational when subject to strong and distressing emotions.
I said yesterday to a friend that we can think of discomfort, distress and disturbance in emotions as an absence of something.
It could be the absence of a person, joy, money, love, empathy or safety.
Finding a way to replace the thing that is missing, and working towards that thing, changes our mindset towards emotions and can help us make the changes necessary to alleviate the discomfort.
