Letting Your Emotions Lead

Cutting Through the Noise to Live with Purpose, Meaning, and Fulfillment

Written by: Michael Tighe, PsyD Student

To be human is to experience emotion in all forms and intensities. Great when we win the lottery or achieve a long-term goal. Less so when we are struggling.

Our relationship with emotion shapes our lives. We aren’t born fearing snakes; we learn adaptive, sometimes unnecessary, fears through our caregivers’ reactions. The same modelling happens with emotions. How caregivers respond to their own emotions, and to their children’s, contributes to the “emotional operating system” their child grows into. Stephen Covey illustrates this in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, recalling how his fears about his son’s baseball skills may have fueled his struggles. To counter this, he showed excitement instead of fear. The next time he went up to bat, he hit a home run.

Despite emotion being a key factor separating what we’re capable of relative to Artificial Intelligence, it can feel surprisingly elementary to explore how or why we feel. To be human is to experience the full emotional kaleidoscope of human existence. And yet, many of us can barely name a feeling beyond the primary-colour equivalents we learned on a floor mat in kindergarten. Emotional intelligence may seem less marketable than STEM skills, but understanding what you feel, why you feel it, and what it is telling you about your subjective experience is essential. Accurately interpreting our emotions reveals what truly matters to us and serves as the very vehicle through which we experience life’s enjoyment.

When we learn to trust what emotions tell us, they act as a compass that guides us toward meaning and fulfillment. They even provide us with anticipatory clues about how we’ll feel on the other end of a leap of faith. Learning to trust our emotions helps us uncover our values. It’s how we learn to know ourselves. It’s how we develop a gut sense, learn to trust it, and move beyond relying solely on our logic-bound prefrontal cortex. It’s how we live with more depth, meaning, and presence in the lives we choose to lead. From this place, we can jump in with both feet, recognizing that sometimes fear is part of the formula when you’re pursuing something deeply important.

Emotional knowledge can enrich your life. Stay tuned as I expand on this monthly at Toronto’s Centre for MindBody Health. If you’d like to start your own journey of self-discovery with me, I look forward to meeting you.