You Can't Escape It!

Stuck with the counterpart of positive emotions? Rather than trying to develop a thick emotional skin toward beating off fear; a more effective (and emotionally healthy) approach is to seek an understanding why positive emotions are eaten into by fear. Our imaginations often and easily amplify our fears and can spring up from an immediate stimulus. A young mother is excited and displays strong positive emotions about her young daughter attending her first day in kindergarten. Once the young child has been dropped off, and is out of sight, the mother’s excitement and positive emotions begin to erode. Feeling of worries and concerns about her child rain down on her like a cloud burst opening up in the sky.

The imagination begins to conjure up horrific thoughts and pictures that we are exposed too most often by the media and personal life events. The visual image of a place or surrounding sounds can bring on an amplification of negative emotion that seems to spring up out of nowhere. In the case of the mother, after returning home, can have a negative emotion erupt upon hearing on television the news of a child that was kidnap that morning. It's commonplace to find that for every positive emotion there is a negative counter part. The difference between what may be a normal day and a bad day is due to the emotional causes in our life. Fear and its relentless brother, anxiety, is the core to emotional disorder. Fear and anxiety bring about ongoing problems because the conditions that create them are ongoing. The question we all face is how we can cope with negative emotions if we can’t control all the conditions around us. Perhaps the best way is differentiating between rational negative emotions and irrational negative emotions: Rational negative emotion is based on an objective understating of a situation and is normal.

You have been selected for an interview by a new employer (your excitement brings about a positive emotion). But, then the negative emotions set in when you aren't certain how to deliver an opening of your presentation to your prospective employer; you'll most likely experience fearfulness. Not being able to handle specific objections from your prospective employer may cause you to retreat from moving through the interview successfully. These negative emotions, many times originate from a simple lack of preparation, knowledge and experience.

Overcoming rational negative emotion is to plan, prepare and practice every step of the interview process. Including knowing as much about your prospective employer objectives and potential objections so that there is absolutely no area where you feel uncertain. Irrational negative emotions are the most damaging when developed into clusters such as:

• Fear of rejection


• Fear of self-promotion


• Fear of the unknown


• Fear of authority


• Fear of change


• Fear of being foolish


• Fear of being harmed


• And a host of others

Irrational negative emotions are inner emotions that have little rational and require a different approach to resolving. However, don't blame your feelings when the emotions of fear start to bubble up inside you. Your feelings are the symptoms of your problem. The real perpetrator is in your behavior or mismanaged emotional energy. What is most important is that you consciously recognize the fear when it occurs. Then seek to understand its root cause. That awareness alone will often minimize the fear and will also help you determine the most effective way to approach your problem. Unfortunately we are stuck with the negative counterpart of positive emotion. The best we can do is to learn how to manage emotional energy more effectively.