EMOTIONAL IS A GOOD THING

A while back at a Toastmasters meeting, a male got called “emotional” during an evaluation. The evaluator could have more accurately chosen the word “expressive” to refer to his body language during his speech. Emotional was an interesting word choice though, as it created a visible flinch in the male to whom the evaluator referred. Everyone in the room started covering it… “no, she meant expressive,” or “you did have great facial expression congruity today.” Why? Why was the response to the word emotional so negative? Why did people feel they had to apologize for using it?

Emotion does not get a lot of respect in our society today. On the heels of the Industrial Revolution, mass scientific advancement, and the like logic and reason are heralded as superior. “Facts, not feelings” is common in the engineering world — the intent being to make decisions driven by data, not emotion.

There are quite a few “anti-emotion” phrases out there today. A few are:

For a long time, I have both consciously and unconsciously squashed my emotional side. I have battled with the typical emotional nature of my female gender — so much drama, so little respect. I did not want to be emotional… at all. That makes me a “weak female”, right?

I started interrogating this thought process in detail a couple of years ago — and since then have felt more whole and able to properly express myself. I am a passion-driven person — something I have recently been able to not only admit to people but also embrace. Like most strengths, this is a double-edged sword, but passion is one of my strengths! It motivates me to keep pushing, even when I run into hard things. It helps me encourage others on projects. It lifts the mood in the room!

Emotion is messy! It is hard! It does not always make sense. However, it is what makes us human. Struggling with emotion is really struggling with humanity. We are not robots. Sure, it may be easier in some ways if we all followed the exact same logical programming. We would quickly tire of life that way though.

We like to place value judgments tied to morality on things. Logic is good, emotion is bad — right? I argue neither logic nor emotion is moral in and of themselves. There is logic used for evil and logic used for good. Some emotions drive good decisions and some emotions drive bad decisions. The key is learning to manage our thought processes for good.

The problem with emotions comes in how to understand them. We cannot deal with that which we cannot understand. How can we control emotions, how can we channel them in positive directions? This is an emerging area in research, and there are some great books available on the topic!

Check out these great reads on Emotion!

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