13d (edited) • 💯 Value
The Act of Thinking
For many people I’ve known throughout life, thinking was something that, if it happened at all, only did so after their emotions did all the work upfront.
I’ve come to notice that if you watch and listen to people you’ll see many times our emotions are what decide our words, reactions, thoughts, and decisions. Often, we don’t even know how or why we came to the conclusions we did; we just feel very strongly about them.
It’s only afterwards that we then justify our conclusions by attempting to bring logic into the equation. My first mentor, Dan Lok, would always say, “People buy with emotion and justify with logic.”
He would explain that people will always purchase an item inside their emotions before they ever purchase it physically. I believe we do this in other areas of life too. We feel a certain way about someone or what they said, buy-in to those emotions, and then justify our emotions with what seems like logic.
How we interact with others on the job, people who cut you off in traffic, church members, and friends, are all interactions that we purchased emotionally first. I’ve seen people get offended by a compliment because they “felt” like it was an insult.
Their feelings got in the way of their ability to think.
I’m convinced that many of the people we encounter are letting their emotions do about 80% or more of their thinking for them. And yes, that can include you and myself. If we aren’t intentional with choosing to think, our emotions will do that for us.
Ironically, emotions come to very strange conclusions. Things that will never make sense no matter how much logic you try to justify it with. It’s just simply wrong and far from what’s real. But, we will swear by it, becoming even more emotional and justify harder, using anything and everything we can to validate ourselves.
You see this with couples when they argue about something and each brings up past issues from irrelevant moments, all to validate themselves. However, it’s almost never about the things that are brought up and it's almost always about the emotions people are feeling.
This is the tricky part, because we don’t communicate our emotions, instead we communicate-in our emotions. When you have two highly emotional people communicating, there’s little to zero thinking going on, all the communication is coming from their emotions.
Examples of this can be seen in road rage videos; a small interaction can blow up into a yelling match between two guys getting ready to fist fight all because of a minor misunderstanding. They are too emotionally driven to pause and think logically. These are the common outcomes of people who allow their emotions to do all their thinking.
Nicolo Machiavelli, author of The Prince, writes:
“Minds are of three kinds. One is capable of thinking for itself; another is able to understand the thinking of others; and a third can neither think for itself nor understand the thinking of others. The first is of highest excellence, the second is excellent, and the third is worthless.”
I’d say the emotionally reactive person is of the third kind. No thinking is going on up there, therefore their understanding of themselves, others, and circumstances are all worthless.
John C. Maxwell writes in his book, The Self Aware Leader, “To be a good leader, you must be able to not only think for yourself but also understand and learn from the thinking of others.”
The ability to coherently understand, and learn from ours and others thoughts is a skillset that brings great dividends to us. What often gets in the way of developing this skillset are the emotions we purchase before we begin thinking.
One of my close friends once said, “When emotions are high, IQ is low.”
So, if we want to increase our ability to process information, understand ours and others thoughts, and effectively articulate them, we need to lower our emotions, and raise our IQ.
My wife once asserted, “It’s ok to have those big emotions that need to be expressed, but when they start to interfere with you reaching success, that’s when you need to take steps to breathe and get back to where you can be successful.”
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The Act of Thinking
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