Cory Doctorow recently said that the internet is like an obnoxious six year old jumping up and down demanding attention (or something like that… I actually lost the link). There is so much violent anger on the internet in parts (i.e. youtube comments and so forth) it got me thinking why is there so much anger?

Not a day passes by where I don’t get a nasty comment or somebody spits venom at someone else on the web. What’s with that? I remember the days of chat rooms (yes I am OLD) when you would be moderated out of the room for being 1/10 as nasty as people seem to be today. It’s no wonder that you have some bloggers questioning the value of comments.

A friend of mine has the concept of people hiding behind the screen which I think explains it nicely.  It’s so easy to be the person you want to be on the internet because you’re invisible.  Nobody cares.   Yes I have had nasty comments.  I deal with each one in context and treat them on their merits.  If somebody doesn’t like what I have to say and have offered something constructive they get to comment.  On the other hand the people that refer to me as (and I quote), “a bow legged fat f***”, or “f***tard”… will not get a rise out of me.  My policy is and has always been “delete” to the senseless, unintelligent, non-constructive comments left by the trekking digger.  I find these kinds of comments a real shame because I really do enjoy a good debate… when I am not arguing the same point as the person I am arguing with!

So why are people so angry?   What do you think?

In life sometimes you find yourself facing failure. You may have tried your hand at something, had really high expectations and it just didn’t work out. It may be a marriage, a job, a business venture a partnership … you just never know what life can throw you sometimes. You can however begin to move forward out of the darkness by making some tough choices.

If nobody cares about you… care about yourself

Hating yourself for your mistakes is not helpful. As a matter of fact it’s dangerous. When you decide to take responsibility for your failure and own up to it… then yes it’s a time for understanding the failure and dealing with it. However, you don’t dwell on it and remind yourself of it. When through poor decisions or just bad circumstances you wind up in a ditch the first thing you must do is recognise that you may have been a dumbass but that does not exclude you from the race. It doesn’t mean you will win next time either. What it does mean is that you have to accept the fact that you tried. As I have said before… the problem with society is that we place such a high premium on success that we deride people who fail. As I have heard Edward Debono say, “There is no word in the English language which says perfectly acceptable venture that for reasons outside of the control of the individual went poorly!” Accept that you made a mistake but don’t hate yourself for it. Learn the day to day activity of forgiving yourself by remembering all the good things you have.

Look for the good in your situation

I know of people who have had kidney failure and lost everything during the recovery process. People have lost children and spouses. Is there any good to be gained out of that horrible situation? No there isn’t. What you can do over time however is begin to build an inner picture of your life that is worth something. When that cloud begins to settle in, why not think about the wonderful times you had with this person. When people die we miss them terribly and this is good because we should. However, as our heart begins to heal we need to fill our lives once again with positives and focus on what’s good. You may be having problems with money… you may not have a home. Are you breathing with the aid of a machine? How about your legs… do they still work? When you begin to focus on what you have instead of what you have lost… the good things you carry around with you that you take for granted have a new weight of importance.

Darkness breeds even more darkness

When the cloud settles in you begin to think a certain way. After a little while you begin to act that way. Soon, you are saying and doing things you didn’t think you would ever do. Darkness comes to all of us in one way or another. If we allow it to settle in our soul it will make a castle that fortifies and begins to rule our lives. We cannot be like that can we? Dark thoughts are the root system of the tree that poisons your soul. You must take those thoughts captive and replace them with more positive intentions. Easier said than done? Yes in the beginning. However, as you begin to practice you will find it easier. It’s so easy to be a critic. To pick on the efforts of others and drag them down. The internet is rife with examples of people picking on others from the safe proximity of the screenface (Thanks Alison ). What’s hard is to encourage people, to set them on their way and be a light to them.

Tragedy comes to all of us at some point. We should feel the pain of it and yes it should effect us. If it doesn’t then we are not humans. It’s what we do about that pain over time that counts. It’s the day to day thinking and acting that helps us to be what we eventually become. Remember, dark clouds are for a season, yet when the rain passes they disappear. Don’t let the dark clouds hang around you … for too long.

I got an email from Tristan at the synergy institute about the Think Different Challenge. A friend of his from I will change your life.com started the idea a few days ago. The rules of the challenge can be found here. In short I have to take something I feel negative about and change my thinking. I picked a person who I think represents a problem I have with authority in my life. I am not overly rebellious neither am I difficult to get along with but I sometimes am very suspicious of people in authority over me. I don’t think one person stands out as being ‘Nazi boss from hell’ and I really think this is a bad belief system that I am holding on to. So, I have decided to think differently about authority and learn to love my boss.

Our thoughts make up our being to a large extent. We are the sum total of what we spend our time thinking about. So, what do I think about authority? Here is a list.

1. I don’t like it

I hate people telling me what to do. Not a bad thing considering I have two failed attempts at business in the can. Yet this is a dominating thought pattern I need to overcome if I am to consider success.

2. I want freedom

Who doesn’t? In me is the inbuilt desire to want to do what I want and not be told by anyone what to do. A good belief to a point but I am employed and I need to respect the rules of that institution. After all they give me money!

3. A host of other reasons…

I think the majority of it can be explained by my heritage. My dad hates authority. There some excuses. Now for the real deal.  I am going to take this guys advice and avoid procrastination!

How do I change my perspective to allow me to have a better relationship with authority? I learn to love my boss. Firstly, what is it about my boss that I don’t like? Him or the position he holds. I thought he was a great bloke until he got the job. Now, I need to, in my mind, separate the position from the person and attempt to think in the same way they do. I start by surfacing my hidden assumptions about authority and deliberately challenging them. So here goes:

1. My boss rules me with an iron fist

Does he? How many times a day does he tell me what I can and can’t do? Only when he has to because he is being paid to. You would be surprised the amount of general and upper level managers are putting on the game face at work. I often talk to people in these positions and most of the time they are just doing what they think they should be in accordance with the wishes of management. They are playing a role and for this reason are under a lot of pressure. As a defense mechanism they are resorting to control because it’s there responsibility to. Is this personal… not likely so I can’t believe my boss is Hitler I have to move on.  This next one really stretches my comfort zone but here we go.

2. My boss is stealing away my freedom of expression

Really? Is your freedom of expression relevant to what you are being paid to do? Maybe you chose the wrong job and your boss isn’t the problem. My freedom of expression is only relevant to what my job is. If my job requires no freedom of expression then why should I be ‘free’ to use it? My perspective should be I am here to do the job I was paid to, not create a new job for which the boss isn’t paying me. I can do ‘me’ things when I have the ability to support myself. When I signed the contract that was it! I can bring my creative expression to my set tasks or make them better but this is not the place to get cute with creativity. I have a contractual obligation! Don’t burn out on it and quit your job because you will find the assumption following you to your next job if you do.

3. I have a problem with authority

Why? This is because in your brain you think authority is a bad thing. Authority is a good thing. Why? Imagine if your house caught fire and you wanted it put out but you needed to give permission to the fire brigade. Say you are being beaten and because there are no police officers you never get your case heard. What if the laws that are designed to protect your rights don’t work and your house is taken away. What then? What you are really saying is: I don’t want authority in my life I want it all my own way. Being under submission to other people is a good thing in the right circumstances. Remember, whatever you do that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

4. My boss never hears what I say

Really? Your boss never pays attention to you? That is a good thing! If your boss is watching you it’s because you are a problem. Managers only solve the problems they are engaged with. They delegate everything they can because it helps them in their jobs. Chances are your boss doesn’t want to hear what you have to say because you are not in his/her engagement space. People only ever solve the problems they have to because people perceive things to be problematic. That is, problems are perspectives.  A person in management is under pressure to make decisions, perform lots of boring routine tasks and make difficult and complex decisions.  Your issue is probably not as important as the one that they are currently engaged with.

These are the four key assumptions in my life that I challenged and you know what… I feel better already.   To do this for yourself find a negative thing you don’t like and write down the hidden assumptions it’s built on.  Then systematically challenge those negative assumptions by building positive alternatives.  Over time as you gently reinforce these positive assumptions they will come to replace the negative ones.  Tie your imagination to the process and see yourself being happy with the problem.  See yourself coping.

I hope you have enjoyed this article.  To learn more about the thinking differently challenge.  Click the link below.

Technorati Tags: thinking, belief system

A while ago I was involved in a small business that made software.  Each year we would have to fork over a massive amount of money in licensing arrangements to Microsoft in order to keep being able to legally make software.   After doing this out of my own pocket for several years I reached a point where it became obvious to me that if I spent in anymore money on making software that wasn’t paying for itself yet, then I would probably have to declare bankruptcy.  I was struck with a dilemma.  Do I continue in business and dig myself into even more debt or do I put my own financial considerations first?  The dilemma was a moral one.

I spent two months seriously thinking about what to do.  I tried everything I could think of to make the product sell more but people just weren’t buying it.  One sleepless night after the other I kept wrestling this through… what do I do?  Eventually as I thought painfully through my options I was left with an ultimatum by my business partner at the time.  Pay up your part of the share or get out.   Considering I was facing personal bankruptcy I chose the latter and not the former.  One of the statements made to me by my partner at the time was, ‘we always be friends but this is about business.’   I think I would have almost preferred bankruptcy though I am very thankful that it didn’t happen.   What I want to think about in this post, through these personal events, is why do we seperate personal values from business?

The split between emotion and greed

When you get right down to the meaning of the statement, ‘it’s not business it’s personal,’ you come to a contradiction in terms.  Business is built on the backbone of personal things.  Initially, it starts with a personal desire.  You then gain support through people who pay for (support) your goods or services.  You are then a success.  Simple isn’t it?  However, notice the most famous examples in recent times in entrepreneurship.  Richard Branson is all heart to the audience and he uses this to great effect.  Car companies are now becoming green and so on.  This is not a mere marketing ploy these things are personal.  I think the majority of business first thinking is flawed because it is simply a neat way to box things into a corner where the emotions of life are cut off.  That, last time I checked, is borderline personality disorder.   I am one of those people who believes that you cannot take your heart out of what you do.

If you split business and emotion you are seriously misguided in your understanding of how human beings operate.  Why?  If you cannot personally connect with people you will not be very popular in the coming ten years.  What differentiates loyalty in this current generations of web nomads is not the desire for personal success and wealth but what makes them feel satisfied.   I was sitting in my office the other day listening to some people bickering (as usual) about their grades.  One of them said that they couldn’t understand what the problem was with their assignment they had met the criteria and done this and that.  Then the conversation turned ugly.  One of them called the lecturer a nasty name and a fellow student another!  I was in my office, admittedly surprised and at somewhat amused by it.    It occured to me however that the calling of the name was an outpouring of emotion. He was hurt by the grade he had received.  I should have walked out of the office and said, ‘it’s not business it’s personal.’  Would he have felt justified by that do you think?  No.  He FELT wronged.

My story

While I felt terribly wronged by what happened to me in business, it is my fault.  Business operates under certain rules, obligations and concepts that are accepted practices.  That said, when the ultimatum was given to me I felt betrayed.  I had spent four years designing the product, marketing it (including once almost scoring a distribution deal), getting free offline media exposure at least three times.   All of which was a terribly hard for me to do because I am not really inclined to attention (moderate introvert on the Myer-Briggs typology).  I went through it though in the hope that my efforts would pay off.  They did, I scored a position in the local paper, Marie-Claire magazine and in various places online.   I spent hours asking people about the design of the product and brainstorming ideas with my partner.  Ultimately though all of that work, effort and planning came to nothing.  Why?  People didn’t want to buy it.

As the months wore on to years I became more and more in debt to this program that people didn’t want to buy.  Sure, I could have done more and I have learned a lot more about marketing since then.   I will say this though, money gets money and attention gets attention.  There is a common, all to misunderstood, idea that all you have to do to have success is think the right way or do this or do that to get in.  Let me warn you as a twice failed business person: don’t believe the hype.  I had more success with Guerrilla Marketing methods than with many of the so-called new ideas in the early part of this century.  Concepts like ‘viral marketing’ really only work for people who have a product people want to talk about.  It only works when you have access to the ’sneezers’ and they are willing to endorse what you have done.  I am sorry but most of what you read online about marketing a business doesn’t apply if you have a product that will never get the level of saturation required.  Read the Guerilla Marketing stuff, it’s a lot more helpful than the crap being dished out by popular marketing myth makers of the day.

When I was told cough up or get out I could see this was a business decision.   The line it’s not personal it’s business was thrown at me and since then I have reflected on the dichotomy it causes in people.  It’s like when people try to strip the emotion out of religious debates.  You just don’t get it.  Faith and personal beliefs are felt.  It’s like saying to a leper, ‘Hey put aside your leprosy and look at it objectively.’ Tell me how to remove my emotions.  Tell me how not to fell the sting of failure.   Business is personal.  In my situation though there really wasn’t much that could be done.  I had borrowed to capacity and I had to leave.  There was no choice for me.  I could have sought venture capital but I had lost faith in the product and in my partner.   Especially when I had seeded in a great deal of my own money to begin with.

The problem with creating silly paradigms

To say it’s not personal it’s business, means that you have no heart.   I am the first to admit business decisions are often the hardest to make and they do involve people.  But there is a false paradigm that comes with business that I want to address in this post.  You can’t separate your heart from what you do.  If you do have that ability then you must be a borderline sociopath.  I am not talking about receiving constructive criticism because that only improves what you do.  There is no better way to test your ideas than to show them to your enemy.  The devil’s advocate is a strong ally in business.  I am saying that business decisions often involved choosing money over people matters.  Business is often portrayed as being all about the dollar at the expense of people.  What then is social entrepreneurship?   Money and wealth are good things.    Disaster couldn’t be avoided in my situation because it was too late for me.  I had to make a choice.  I didn’t want to get divorced so I picked what I picked and I am content with that decision.   In the time since leaving the business I have reflected on that, the choice of words, and realised that this is a big problem.  We really need to bring some heart back to business.  The two are not mutually exclusive.  They are just “not talking” at the moment!

When we create ideas to believe in our subconscious mind supports us 100% of the way but our heart (or inward person) will give us tell tale signs that we have made the wrong choice.   An idea the world and especially the university system believe in is the separation of emotion and mind.  This is a huge mistake.  We have educated the mind but altogether pushed aside the role emotions play in such things.  What a tragic mistake.  By doing this we have taken the heart and soul out of business in favour of decisions that are in essence evil.  We have let greed dominate our thinking instead of making responsible moral choices.   If you ever get the chance to see a movie called the Parable of the Sadhu you really should watch it.  It explains the story of a man who was trekking through the Himalayas with a colleague.  Along his path he met a Sadhu from the local village.  She had wondered onto the mountain become dehydrated and lost.   The mountaineer made the choice to leave the Sadhu with another group and move forward to the summit.  After returning to America the events troubled him and made him think he made the wrong choice in choosing his own objectives over the need presented to him as the Sadhu.   What I learned from watching it was that people often say they would do the right thing but often make the business choice first.

The road forward

It’s very easy to sit here in my little rental listening to the wind blowing through the besser brick structure of my run down house and say these things.  I mean why do I really care?  I care because I see, day after day, shallow people who have plans for success coming into my courses and leaving again.   Things aren’t getting better. I have been stepped on, stabbed in the back and for what?  For a few thousand dollars?  I mean c’mon.  The road forward is for us who desire to be leaders in the entrepreneurial sphere to begin to bring back discussions on ethics and the role of values in business decisions.  Especially in the technical sector where all we do is get larger, wider and less coherent.   In particular, we need to make a place for emotions and understand the role they play in decision making.  You can’t turn them off.  You can’t say, ‘well I will put these aside for now.’  Again, if you can do that they you are sociopath and you need treatment.   The road forward in business is to learn from our past ethics stuff ups and begin to make better decisions that are informed about emotions and their role in the workplace.   Even the stuff I had to read for my research on emotional engagement is about making people becoming emotionally hooked into their work so they will become more productive!  That’s brainwashing!

So what have I learned from my failure?  Lots of things.  Two major things… how to market something successfully and how not to.  More than that I have learned that business is good and I love it but it has no heart at the moment.  I blame myself for failing in business and I do not point the finger at my partner.  He did what he had to do.  I have overcome my feelings of hurt and betrayal which really were uncalled for.   I have learned this: it’s not ‘business’ it’s ‘personal’.  The heart and the mind cannot be separated to suit what we think business should be.   Every time I read it’s not personal, it’s business.  I think of how shallow people like that are.  How selfish they are and how they really don’t know how human beings work.  These are just images we have floating around in our heads.  Who said business had to be tough? Donald Trump? That’s just the way HE chooses to do it.   You may think, ‘well he gets results.’  So what?  Where’s the heart?  I know people who have spent their lives putting on the ‘tough guy’ image and they are alone, miserable and indifferent.  Is that what you think success is?  Just having money?  You are much poorer than you realise if you think that.

In closing I would like to say that I consider myself as an entrepreneur.  Even though I am employed as a academic I am still at heart and will always be an entrepreneur.  I just so happen to be one who leans to the right side of the brain.  I am emotional you might say.  That said, I am not a basket case neither am I suicidal.  I recognise the place and needs people have and choose to put them first where I can, instead of chasing the almighty dollar.  I just wish I could find people who were like me so they world could become a better place.

Technorati Tags: small business, business, heart, subconscious mind

In a previous post I have been dealing with underlying emotions. In this third part I want to talk about 5 ways that you can recognise underlying emotions. These techniques are well known but they are worthy of repeating here. Here goes:

1. What do others (family, friends and so on) think about you?

I know this seems counterintuitive when we are talking about underlying emotions but the reality is what other people think really matters. If you think I am making this up or it’s not important then you have tunnel vision. If you cannot accept or at least understand what others think then you are not seriously considering the impact you have on others. Knowing this is very important because it can highlight an underlying emotion that dominates your personality. Think for a moment about a bad boss you have had. If you cannot think of a bad boss think of a person who annoys the living crap out of you. Now what’s the first thing, besides insults, that spring to mind when you think about that person. I bet it’s: He is so angry all the time, why is she so pushy, I cannot understand why he is always so surly and so on. This is the first step… knowing what others think. If you don’t know… go ask someone who doesn’t like you. Then you can say: am I really like that?

2. Knowing the outputs from the inputs

Another way to find these underlying emotions is to think about how you feel when something hurts you. Say your daughter says to you, “I hate you” or your mother in law calls you a nasty name. What is your reaction to that? How does it make you feel? Angry? Hurt? Why is that the case? I think a large percentage of the world’s problem’s can be solved through the ‘why is that the case?’ question. People are rational (most of the time) they often act according to some kind of bias or something that acts as the input which leads to the output, in their decision making process. When you observe yourself getting angry … ask yourself why is that the case? You will instantly recognise something deep and underlying that is belting away in your mind. Write it down and study it from every conceivable angle.

3. What makes you feel?

Sometimes you might be watching a television show and something sets off within you and you feel something. It could be a past hurt or something else but you are feeling some-thing.  Whenever I hear about a successful entrepreneur something goes off in me.  I love shows about business and especially stories of personal success.  That’s me, I love to hear that kind of thing because I am made that way.  I think there is something in you that makes you feel a certain way.  Like the dog who points at the bird, you just need the right set of conditions to draw it out.

4. What do you spend your day thinking about? 

One of the key ways you can recognise the underlying emotions  is to pay attention to your thoughts.   Have you ever seriously listened to your thoughts?  No, I mean really have you?  I am not talking about thinking about your thoughts I mean really paying attention to the conceptualisation of your thoughts.   When your thoughts are forming are you paying attention.  Are you really?  Have you ever noticed what it is that forms within you.   This is a big topic and it’s worthy of a lot more discussion than I have allowed for here.  When your thoughts form, the real you is speaking.  The words or feelings that emerge from this interchange are really the output of what’s formed on the inside.  See if you can learn how to do this… I will be discussing this in a later post in the series.

5. What is it in others that drives you nuts? 

The last one in my list is what is it in others that makes you nutty?  I know myself that when I see a trait in somebody that I absolutely hate… it’s something that I hate about myself.  On the other hand, when I notice something I like in people it’s usually something I like in myself.  I find most of the time that when I see traits and characteristics in others that I either admire or despise it reflects some underlying emotion.

In closing this post I want to ask you the question: why are underlying emotions so important?  The answer to that is far too broad for me to answer here.  What I can tell you is that the more you study the underlying condition of your being the more you will learn about the way you are and what you should be doing with your life.  I believe that every person has a purpose in their life that can be found if enough time is spent finding it out.  I am not talking about running around the streets beating your chest crying out for your mother… no I am talking about not ignoring those inward emotions that underly our actions.  Having children, a love of reading or whatever it is that turns you on is connected to a deep underlying emotion of some sort.  The discovery of these things is the beginning of understanding who you are and what you are here for.

Technorati Tags: emotions, personality, hurts, feel, thoughts, feelings, emotion

Yesterday I spoke about the first part of how to recognise underlying emotions. The second part to recognising underlying emotions is to understand that what comes out of you starts from a place inside. What do I mean? Think about the following scenario:

It’s 5pm and you are on your way home after a long day of work. As you leave work you slide effortlessly into traffic. The more you drive the slower things go until finally you hit a solid stop two minutes drive into your journey. Up ahead all you see is a long row of cars, banked up for miles, with no real hope of escape. How does that make you feel? To be honest it makes me feel mad. I have waited for a long time to get here and now I am basically stuck because everybody leaves work at the same time. No matter when I leave work I ALWAYS encounter traffic. Now I am getting angry.

Is it really the traffic making me angry or is it something else? I think it’s something else. When we are faced with a situation in which things aren’t going our way we often display outwardly emotions that are reflections of our inner thoughts. What ever we are displaying on the outside is what we have built on the inside. As you recognise patterns in your life, like anger, worry and so on. You will begin to notice that these things are deep down in you and that they build themselves into perspectives in your mind. How do you feel when you have been picked on for something you didn’t do? Has anyone ever forgotten your birthday? How did you react? Those reactions come from the inner needs that are usually expressed as emotions, thoughts, ideas or deep down suggestions.

The key to recognising underlying emotions

The key lies in watching how you behave. For children we might use a behaviour diary to check on what our kids are doing wrong. I think for some of us we need to reflect on how we act. For instance when you are sitting in traffic, ask yourself why traffic bothers you so much. Try this:

1. Recognise the feeling

Notice the style or quality of the feeling as it arises.   Then:

2. Question why

Reflection begins with asking why?  Why do I feel this way?  What makes me angry when I am stuck in traffic?  Why do I feel this way?  One of the key things I suffer from is setting silly goals for myself.  These ‘benchmarks’ are things like: ‘when I have enough money I will be happy’ or something like, ‘unless I do this or that I am not cutting it’.  The only place that goal exists is in my head.  For me it’s like I need to be something special in order to feel pleased with myself.   These benchmarks are total fantasies that are basically connected to my brain in someway that I can’t really explain.  What I am learning at the moment is to shift these perspectives I have set by creating new things to believe in.  That doesn’t mean that I live with my faults… but it does mean I reduce the expectation I have on myself to over perform.  Why do we strive for so much anyway?  I mean what’s the bloody point?

When I see people speeding in traffic and running red lights I wonder… what’s the rush?  What thing in them tells them that they have to perform.  What set of ideas floating around in their brain says, ‘you have to be there on time so get there now as fast as you can.’  This is madness.  One day all this rushing will come to end … along with your life.  So why worry about it?  If you are always rushing ask yourself why?  If you are always late… why are you always late?  There’s a reason.  Maybe you just like people looking at you.  Who knows?

3.  Begin to understand the underlying tensions that create the emotions

As you ask why, you should be able to identify what emotion is coming out of you at that time (I will discuss this is more detail in the next post).   There are things that create in us tensions that force us to act in certain ways.  The western society is filled with pressure to perform.  We have a huge crisis of materialism at the moment that is driving people to work harder, faster and longer without seriously thinking about the consequences.  We all know stress is a killer yet we continue to work more and more and more until we explode.  Why?  What tensions are in us that make us do this?  Why are they there?
In the next post in this series I am going to talk about some techniques I find helpful for recognising underlying emotions.    The key thing to remember from this post is you are human and you will have outburst of emotions.  It’s a part of life and you need to be aware of this as you travel along life’s road.  Remember, you have them whether you acknowledge it or not.

Technorati Tags: emotions, perspectives, thoughts, ideas, suggestions, Reflection, life, tensions, emotion

Yesterday I spoke about the deep things that underlying what we do. In that post I spoke about the need to recognise the deep things that reside inside us that lead us to act. What I want to do today is begin the deep things series by talking about how to recognise the underlying emotions in situations that you may be familiar with. Feelings like superiority, happiness and joy are all deep level emotions that we need to recognise.

People don’t come up to you and said, ‘you know what I feel angry because of something that happened to me once and whether you like it or don’t I am going to dump it all on you.’ What really happens is the person explodes, you cop the blast and then all things from there stem forward to a messy conclusion. Why is that? I think personally that this occurs because we don’t really know how to recognise the underlying emotions that dominate us and why we feel the way we do. We all have them. Why is it then that we systemically set about ignoring what the inner person is telling us. The language of that inner person is not words: it’s thoughts, ideas, pictures, symbols and suggestions.

Often when we think about emotions, we think about preferences. Such preferences I think are stored on the level of our mind. A preference towards Lasagne or KFC is a mental decision based on a external sense. The sense of taste and the sensation we enjoy when we eat such things stimulates in us a desire. That desire eventually becomes a preference towards certain predilections in the area of ’sense’. What happens when the area of our emotions is stimulated by something beyond our immediate sense? What of those things that we notice about ourselves but simply do not like. Such as: anger, criticism, hatred and the like? Where do such things come from?

Foundational Perspectives

Say for a moment you have working class values. If you don’t think about what your values are and imagine that you thought about work and it’s value in your life. I am plagued with working class values. I cannot see a way around it. Almost everything I do has to be work. One day I sat back and questioned this after reading an earlier version of Richard Branson’s autobiography. That person worked hard… but he worked smart. He, with the help of thousands of other people, built the Virgin empire which despite it’s critics is very large and very successful. He now spends his time flashing that toothy smile for the cameras and evaluating business plans (reminds me of the e-myth … not not e-commerce). The reality is this simple: the rich don’t make money from hard work… they make money from having a good idea, making it work through collective mobilisation and so on.

I know people who work as long and hard as Bill Gates and they as broke as broke can be. Why is that? I was bought up in a house where both parents worked hard and made very little money. That is not their fault. It’s a deep ‘foundational perspective’ that flows out as a underlying emotion causing actions. We need to recognise these foundational things and be aware of them. These deep things we believe have feelings attached to them. They are so real and powerful that they make us think and act in s ways that we often don’t understand.

The first step: knowing how you feel

These foundational perspectives are the basic set of ideas that we hold to that help us to make sense of the world. From these we can deduce that there are emotions that build from these perspectives that are part of us. We often identify ourselves with certain things like work by attaching our emotions to them. We cannot help it. When I say I am an academic it makes me feel something. Something deep. That deep thing that I feel is a sense or a ‘knowing’ of what I think an academic is. I think of ideas, papers, teaching, marking and so on. Each one of those activities raises within me a certain level of  ‘feeling’ that I really don’t understand. When I think of the amount of administration I have to do in my job… I have feelings of dread! I hate administrative work though it’s necessary. Those underlying feelings are incredibly important because that’s how we can know what we are like not what we think we should be.

The question for me is why do I hate administrative work? I can tolerate it, I can use positive thinking to cope with it but essentially I hate it. Deep down there is some feeling arising out of the real me, the inner me, letting me know that I am not like this. This doesn’t mean I quit doing it… but I probably should not pursue a career in it.  If we think about this from another angle.  Why do I feel the need to avoid the work?   What is it in me that makes me want to not do it.  It could be that I simply hate it.  On the other hand it could be because I am lazy!   If you have inclinations towards certain kinds of things (I am not talking about nasty things) like sport, writing, reading or whatever that’s you coming out.

I really like to write.  There’s something in me that feels the need or desire to do it.  I cannot explain why.   Ever met someone who just sends you batty and you cannot work out why?  That’s something in you that sends you nuts.  I met this guy once who just had to be the centre of attention.  He would make loud jokes and remarks and no matter what he would always have to be the centre of attention.  It got the point where I felt like strangling this guy because I am exactly the opposite.  I don’t like to be loud or to be the centre of attention.  At heart there was a personality conflict.  Neither of us could really help it… it’s just our core personality floating to the surface.

Before we move on to the next post I would like you to think about something.  Think for a moment why you are the way you are.  Why not in the interim take this personality test to get you started.   If you would prefer a funnier test why not take this one that helps you see what kind of Simpson you are!  By the way I am a moderate introvert. Thanks for reading.

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