Emotional Unconsciousness and the Vulnerability

As I begin to share the 4th mistake, I hope you have gone through Mistakes 1, 2, and 3 and are ready for a deeper dive within. As always, read this article for self-realization. Don’t waste your time reading it to accumulate knowledge or to examine it critically. Just go with the flow and try to correlate. Do share your realizations if you like.

The greatest human tragedy is to pass away from Life without having realized “Who you are.” The ultimate objective of the human quest is to find this answer. The mere accumulation of knowledge, without the answer to this question, is a life that is not lived well. The first step towards this journey is to understand “Why we are the way we are.”

One of the greatest obstacles to realizing your full potential is your lack of control over behaviors, attitudes, and emotions: your own and that of others. Many great minds have attempted to find ways and means to master this aspect. Hundreds of tools, techniques, and models for mapping Emotional Intelligence, Abilities, Competencies, and Behavioral Traits have been unable to help us arrive at a definitive framework to understand “Why we are the way we are.”

Let us take the example of Sandy, a successful manager, who was entrusted with a new goal to scale her company’s business. In this quest, she articulated the goals, designed the organizational structure, worked out budgets and strategies, and documented the processes and ideas for upskilling her team.

When she presented her plans to the management, she received full support and enthusiasm from all her leaders. They gave constructive inputs and earmarked the resources required to achieve the goals.

However, after all the efforts, the results at the end of the 1st quarter were way below expectations. Many things must have gone wrong. And there will be consequences of such a failure as well. Let us deep dive into the finer aspects of getting your plans to work and examine what really goes on in human minds.

 I am Upset

While Sandy was upset about the results, the thought of confronting her team members triggered multiple emotions inside her. She was flushed with stress, anger, depression, anxiety, comparison, competition, confusion, and fear. All of these made her upset. Consequently, she started avoiding her people and shuddered at the thought of how some of them would react when confronted. These emotions were being compulsively produced, and Sandy was not compulsively upset!

Vulnerable, Numb, and Coping but not “Emotionally Conscious"

Since Sandy was compulsive about her emotions, her behaviors too were compulsive. This made her quite vulnerable. She became numb towards her own emotions and to those of the people around her. Unable to live like this, she resorted to using strong and wide-ranging convictions. From “I am going through a bad phase in life” to “others are out to get me” and “others are not interested in their own growth.” In this state, she started justifying her actions (like avoiding performance reviews) and inventing excuses to justify the team’s inability to achieve the goals. To deal with this state, she first needed to become Emotionally Conscious.

In general, the lack of Emotional Consciousness is due to:

1. Living in Denial

Emotions have been categorized as good and bad or negative and positive. Since early childhood, we learned that people with bad or negative emotions are “bad people,” and we are not supposed to be such. Consequently, we mastered the art of hiding these so-called negative or bad emotions. Today, most people live in denial, believing that such emotions do not even get produced in them. (Have you heard people say, “Angry? Who me? Oh no, I never get angry.”)

When Sandy was growing up, she was asked to be kind and caring. Whenever she got angry with someone for not listening to her, she was counselled to bottle these emotions because being angry was “not good.” Soon, she was conditioned into believing that anger made her a bad person, while she had to be a kind and generous person.

2. Getting Stuck with Symptomatic Emotions

Her anger was invisible, but her helplessness was not. While Sandy learned to hide her anger under the pretense of her niceness, she kept growing in her helplessness.

All of us tend to arrive at sweeping conclusions and generalizations while avoiding the effort required for deep thinking. In fact, due to endless distractions created by multiple crises and pleasures in our lives, most of us do not even have the time for deep thinking.

3.  Inability to Connect and Communicate

Due to our vulnerability, trust remains a huge obstacle. Experiences of hurt have forced us to stay untrusting and always on guard. “People are there to get us… we need to save ourselves all the time.” This is a deep conviction set in us, and we remain disconnected from all our relationships. Consequently, we only build pretentious, superficial, and transactional relationships.

Sandy had not been able to build deeper meaningful relationships. All she would talk about was transactional aspects like goals, results, performance, and achievement.

4. Need for Quick Results

Everybody wants results - fast, quick, and efficient. The prevalent mindset is, “A lot is at stake. There is no time to engage and indulge in the emotional and softer side of people. Just use fear or incentive to get the desired results. Speed is the essence. We need to hurry.”

With this mindset, we keep running endlessly, only to realize that we are running on a treadmill, not getting anywhere!

5. Inability to Sit with Ourselves

We all experience varying degrees of Loneliness. We never really sit with “ourselves,” do we? Probably because we do not know how to! The moment we try to sit with ourselves, we start confronting ourselves, our thoughts, actions and inactions, and start mulling over their consequences. We jump to blame someone or something and immediately find a reason to get into action mode, to set people and things right.

Does Sandy know how to stop reflecting and start introspecting and contemplating instead?

Emotions are our reason to be alive. As we attain higher states of Consciousness, we create a million conscious reasons to live, leading to a fuller life. In the absence of this consciousness, we suffer due to our own emotions.

When emotions do not get fulfilled, we suffer. No one wishes to scale up their suffering. Finding reasons for scaling up, such as fame, pleasures, gains, etc., do not hold good in the long run. Hence the desire to scale up takes a hit. Such people soon talk about scaling down, selling off, retirements, sabbaticals, “travelling the world.” All of these are different forms of “escape.”

Emotionally unconscious and vulnerable people lead half measured lives while emotionally conscious people live full lives, allowing them to Keep Going… Keep Growing.

The mistake of remaining Emotionally Unconscious must be avoided, at all costs.