Dale Carnegie was once quoted as categorizing humans as creatures of emotion and not logic.  It makes sense.  When we are born our brains lack the ability to reason or use logic.  Logic is a trained function that comes with time and development.  Our emotions, however, are apparent from the moment we enter this world.  We cry when we’re hungry and smile when we’re content.  All good things must come to an end however, and as we grow up we have to start acting more logically and learn to check our emotions at the door.  Crying for our food just doesn’t cut it anymore.  The question becomes, now that we are older and held accountable to social rules, how do we balance the logic we have learned with the emotions we innately feel?

Fear not my fellow bleeding hearts that live to wear your heart on your sleeves.  I am not waging a secret war to hollow out our emotions leaving us as blank shells of logic.  As you will read further in the article, emotion is extremely important, but there is a time and place for everything. The only way to see life through every color of the spectrum is to feel it from within.  If you’ve ever felt joy and in those moments of beauty succumbed to your tears of happiness, the feeling becomes that much more intense and real.  When you begin to experience life from the inside out you can say you have truly experienced what the world has to offer with some of your deepest senses.

However, every situation is not as relaxed and open as our Saturday night chat sessions with the girls.  Sometimes we are in the presence of professionals during business meetings and our emotions need to be displayed with more poise and elegance.  Use good judgment to determine what you feel would be an appropriate display of emotion.  Often, the more relaxed the situation the more relaxed you can be in expressing your emotions.

An important thing to remember is that while there may be in situations in which it is inappropriate to show your emotions, there is never any situation in which it is inappropriate to feel your emotions.  If you are at a wedding, for example, and feel overwhelmed with sadness as you have just gone through a bitter divorce, withhold from showing tears of sorrow or depression during the ceremony.  This is a happy time for the couple and it would be an inappropriate situation to begin crying tears of sadness.  However, when you get a free chance excuse yourself and let your emotions flow in private.  Suppressing your emotions because you feel it is inappropriate or feel embarrassed will only cause a whole new set of emotions to grow within you.  With some of them resulting in anger, stress and depression.   

Everything we do is usually out of some sort of emotion, whether it be fear, anger or happiness.  Being able to flex a little logic when operating on emotion, at certain times, will only make the experience of those emotions that much sweeter.  For it will be at the right time and right place that we show them.  In truth, no emotion no matter how small can be concealed, but we can control them as to show their presence at the right place and time.

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Written By: Andrea Spitznogle