(Morris Albert/Louis Gasté)
I’m an accountant. An insolvency and forensic accountant.
Through my training and work experience I’ve been told and taught to critically analyse, measure, consider, compare etc. To more objectively assess a position, consider options and develop strategies. To make a “proper” assessment in order to correctly advise and make good decisions.
However, over the years I have had to accept in others, and acknowledge for myself, how often we actually make assessments and decisions (big and small) based on emotions or feelings. And I’m talking about all of us; the really smart ones among us as well as the not-so-smart or savvy.
In an amazing number of instances, feelings, not logic, will guide our decision making, from product choices to politics. We often make decisions based on what ‘moves’ us. For better or worse.
Why is this? We certainly seem more comfortable implementing or acting on our emotional, rather than logical, response to a situation. I sometimes wonder if with information and advice overload, we get confused by opinion and counter-opinion, resorting to accepting the emotional response as our default position.
There are significant implications in this realisation, affecting almost every area of human endeavour, activity and relationship.
For me as principal of my practice and professional service provider, three main areas affected are:
- Providing professional advice: It is usually very important to generate and maintain a positive emotional response in clients and contacts in order to get those clients and contacts truly to listen and hear.
- Building a professional team of staff: Team building requires understanding people’s motivation, engaging people, and a shared sense of purpose. Learning operational awareness and developing good social and emotional instincts, to create an environment for creativity, collaboration and balance.
- Marketing: Learning to tell one’s “best story” that creates interest, credibility, confidence and trust.
All of us trying to “deal with the world” have to evoke the best emotional response we can from those we are dealing with. If we use a purely practical and rational approach we will fall short. If we try to operate merely on a theoretically logical basis, professionally and personally, we will be operating in the wrong context. We will be applying the rules of one “game” while unwittingly being involved in a quite different game.
When the text and the subtext don’t match, the consequence is confusion: misunderstandings, surprising and disappointing outcomes, and missed opportunities.
The machiavellian among us instinctively know only too well how to manipulate the emotional response to disempower and take advantage of others.
For the rest of us, we need to learn to be aware of the emotional response in others, and ourselves, in order to make more authentic connections, be heard, be more effective and to get the response and outcomes that emotionally we long for.
The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.
Oscar Wilde