The most prevailing beliefs about emotions are they cloud rational thinking, they are signs of being unprofessional and they are disturbances that should be excluded in decision-making. However, these beliefs are wrong and misleading.
Under these beliefs, for decades, the attempt in dealing with emotions is to be “emotionless”, as if emotionless is achievable and is the ultimate solution to right decision-making. Emotions hence are not taught in our educational system or professional development curriculum. The knowledge of emotions is astonishingly little, not to mention the skills of being able to manage them. We know more about aliens and foreign planets, and understand the ups and downs of sales trends more than the ups and downs of our own mood.
However, avoiding knowing about emotions doesn’t prevent them from playing their roles, more significant than we believe, in our thinking and decision-making. On the contrary, the lack of understanding emotions deprives us of the ability to make the best use of them. It is this ignorance about emotions that often turns them against us and makes us slaves of them without being aware of it. If we could only understand a little bit more about emotions and how to manage them, we could gain enormous power that could help us significantly in our work as well as our life.
My study about emotions started 10 years ago. I was amazed about how much I gained when I understood more what was going on emotionally and managed them. When I applied the knowledge about emotions in my coaching of hundreds of executives in the professional world, I was further convinced about the power of emotions and the urgent need in learning about them.
From senior leaders to new managers, what blocks talented individuals from reaching their goals and performing at their best is not the shortage of subject knowledge or technical skills but the aspect of emotions—be it the fear of failure, lack of confidence, and the issues of motivation, stress management, speaking up, being open, empathy or handling difficult relationships, etc. Once the elements of emotions are sorted out, we gain much more clarity in our thinking and decision-making, and we unlock a new wisdom that we never accessed before.
That is why this book is written. I can’t stop the urge of helping more people gain knowledge about emotions and guide them to let emotions help effective decision-making. The book focuses on mastering emotions for career excellence as that is the domain in which I tested the theory. Moreover, job excellence is pivotal to a person’s overall satisfaction about life. Doing well in career lifts the spirit of a person and brings positive feelings that are closely linked to happiness.
