Emotions sometimes play a vital role in a decision making process. A person may make an irrational decision especially if he has a negative attitude and is hot tempered. But what will happen as a consequence may not bring in good results. When emotional intensity takes over rational decision making, your brain may not work anymore because you shut it completely. You let your feelings influence your decision making capability.
Anger and stress usually turn out as negative emotions. These negative emotions can affect a person’s decision making capabilities. The result would be an irrational and not so sensible decision.
What a person can do is control the intensity of these emotions. He can then slowly convert these negative emotions into positive ones. By having the ability to cool down, relax and absorb everything around you, you can then have time to do some intellectual analysis. You’ll have time to think and plan on what the sensible decision to make.
Your ability to recognize and manage emotions can be a good coping mechanism in handling these negative emotions. Using humor and the ability to connect with other people’s emotions through non-verbal communications can easily bring you towards attaining positive attitude. These can lead you to give a more logical analysis on things before making the decision-making.
Getting emotions override your logical functions may not give you good decision results. A good example would be if you are interviewing an applicant for a certain position in your company. Don’t get emotions overrule your intellectual rationalization. If you have gut feelings that this applicant cannot be your brilliant employee because of his appearance or the way he conducts himself in your presence – you might be wrong.
Perceptions may not give you a good decision result. You may see an applicant and perceive him to be successful because of the way he talks – you may find out later that he is lazy. You have to base your selection on what his qualifications are, and how the selection process really turns out. Your decision must not be based on emotions or just your gut feelings.
Emotions can really get in the way of your decision making process if you let it override your logical way of analyzing things. Remember that emotions use only your heart and how you feel for a particular thing. Your brain was not given the opportunity to weigh the facts in order for a logical decision to be made.
A person may have a high ego and not readily accept that he can make a wrong decision. His line of thinking would be that his giving the decision was the more logical decision that can be made. What people should remember is that the brain is way over his heart. Therefore, it commands the better logic than his feelings.
Author Katherine Thompson enjoys sharing on topics including boot camp teens. Learn how to be a better parent by visiting her website about my problem child.
