Are you a slave to your emotions, or are you cool, calm and collected in all situations? Do you react, or are you proactive? Does life happen to you, or do you happen to life?
I’m guessing that, like me, you probably fall somewhere between the two extremes of each of these instances, with different stimuli causing varying degrees of reaction, some of which you comfortably control and others raising reactions which can even cause you to be surprised.
The dictionary definition of emotion is (taken from Oxford Dictionairies):
- a strong feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others
- instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge
The first definition I think we can probably accept without argument, although I find the second definition slightly more challenging as it suggests that we are victims of our emotions with limited capacity to control them, and that’s a notion that I find difficult to accept.
Sometime ago I seemed to come across different versions of the following quotes almost on a daily basis:
“Our lives are not determined by what happens to us but how we react to what happens..” Wade Boggs,
and this one from Mia Hamm:
“Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.” [Read more…] about Using My Emotions!