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Emotions are colorful,
dramatic, fascinating, and essential dimensions of every person’s
experience. These primitive mechanisms send a constant stream of
powerful signals that can guide us along
the difficult path of survival, or quickly send us off on
destructive and painful tangents. How well do you understand these
essential and universal signals? Many believe that living life to
its fullest requires experiencing and enjoying the full range of
human
emotions. Yet so many of us are
uncomfortable with emotions; we don’t
recognize what they are, what they are telling us, how they can be
helpful, or the choices we have in how to respond to them. Many of
us were taught to ignore, suppress, diminish, or deny our own subtle
feelings and vivid passions. Do you know how you feel? What emotions
can you
recognize and describe? We may have
mistakenly learned to overreact to various negative emotions while
suppressing positive ones. Unfortunately some of us are prisoners of
anger,
hate, guilt,
sadness,
fear, anxiety,
shame, humiliation,
envy, pain, and
violence without understanding what has
consumed so much of our lives. Others endure a lonely and sterile
existence without experiencing genuine feelings or passionate
emotions.
But
passion has logic. Emotions obey their own peculiar rules that we can study, understand, listen
to, learn from, master, and even enjoy. How well can you interpret
what your emotions are telling you? The purpose of these web pages
is to help you recognize, interpret,
learn from, and make constructive decisions based on the information
emotions provide. Constructive
and authentic human interactions
become possible. Listen carefully to what your
emotions are telling you. Don’t ignore them, deny them, or try to
drown them out. Sharing these web pages with
the difficult people in your life can increase your common
understanding and improve your
relationships; perhaps even with your nemesis.
How successfully do you respond to emotions in yourself and others? Improving your emotional competency can provide important benefits
throughout many aspects of your life. It can increase the satisfaction
you have with relationships while it
increases your gratification and
contentment with the many simple events in your life. It can give you
greater insight and help you better understand the
motives and actions of yourself and
others. You can free yourself from anger,
hate, resentment,
vengeance, and other destructive emotions that cause hurt and
pain. This will reduce much of the stress in your life. You can feel relief and enjoy greater
peace-of-mind, autonomy, intimacy,
dignity, passion, and
wisdom as you engage more
deeply with others. Increasing your
tolerance and compassion can lead
to an authentic optimism and a well-founded confidence, based on your
better understanding and interpretation of
what-is.
Passion + Reason = Constructive Action. This is the essence of
emotional competency.
As your emotional competency increases, you may experience a
variety of positive transformations in your life. Destructive behavior
patterns of the past may transform into more constructive behavior as you begin to solve
the mysterious puzzle of human interactions
and gain a quiet and confident understanding of them. Anxiety may
yield to more peaceful, tranquil, and contented feelings as your
understanding increases. You may become less isolated as you learn
authentic expression and become
more engaged with others you now enjoy relating to. You may feel more
confident and powerful, and less confused, frustrated, and powerless.
Overall you can transform from confused to confident; from clueless to
comprehending and enlightened, from fragmented to coherent, from
shallow to deep, from cold to passionate, and from oppressed to liberated as you become your
authentic self.
A study guide provides a guided tour through the pages of this website.
We hope this information helps
increase your emotional competency, enhances your life experience, and
contributes to your humanity. Please visit our
Emotional Competency group on facebook. We welcome
your comments
on this work in progress, and invite you to consider these quotations: “Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.” ~ St. Augustine
“He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his
reason is weak.” ~
Michel de Montaigne
“Unexpressed feelings of appreciation
and commendation are like undelivered letters.” ~ Michael Josephson
“Lasting peace will come only from a profound understanding of
violence.” ~
Leland R. Beaumont
“Treat others as you want to be treated.” ~ The
Golden Rule,
paraphrased from a wide
variety of sources.
“There are paths of progress
other than growth. There can be more to life than more.” ~ Leland R. Beaumont
“Nothing gives one person so much advantage
over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.” ~
Thomas Jefferson
“All of
history is the quest for
dignity.” ~
Leland R. Beaumont
“Unresolved emotional pain is the great contagion of our time—of all time.” ~
Marc Ian
Barasch
“First-person viewpoint
is the fundamental asymmetry of
humanity.” ~ Leland R. Beaumont
Passion is the spice of life
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