Real Leader don’t need to hide anything, even their emotions.

You surely must have heard these famous quotes:

DON'T SHOW YOUR EMOTIONS PEOPLE THINK YOU ARE WEAK

And

Don't show your emotions, people will take advantage from it.

OR

Don't let your emotions make your decisions. You can make bad choices that you may regret later.

All such advices and suggestions are wrong and also dangerous for your health.

Emotions, or psychological states, are our natural responses to the world around us. The many different types of emotions, include happiness, sadness, surprise, contempt, anger, fear and disgust. There are lots of different emotional states that we move in and out of as we go through the day.

Scientific research has uncovered 27 varieties of reported emotional experience. But we don’t usually fully express every emotion we feel. We often down-regulate, change, or even fully suppress feelings.

It is well known that suppressing emotions has a physiological impact on the body. Much of the time this is short-term and causes no lasting problems. But longer term, the continual suppression of emotions can have detrimental physical and psychological effects.

Decreasing your outward expression of felt emotions is called emotion suppression.?Many adults, even children are very good at suppressing their emotions and do it frequently in their day-to-day lives in order to avoid controversy or in order to stay within social norms and most of us strongly believe that, this is the best thing to avoid conflict or a controversy.

"Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions." --Elizabeth Gilbert.

?"What worries you, masters you."

Emotional suppression happens when uncomfortable thoughts and feelings are pushed out of mind. People do this in a variety of ways, from using distraction (i.e. watching TV), or numbing (through drugs and alcohol), to overeating or controlling food intake. People often channel strong emotions into physical activity (i.e. boxing, running, going to the gym or pretending to work aimlessly). Focusing our minds on something else helps us to forget what is really going on inside.

Evidence suggests that reappraising emotion (not the same as suppression) can be a good thing. Psychological flexibility is, after all, essential for coping. But emotion regulation is not aimed at eliminating emotions from our lives; it rather means using them flexibly and intelligently. This is to some degree essential. Imagine if we acted out every time that we felt angry! There would likely be many undesirable consequences in relationships at home and at work. Reappraising means we temporarily suppress feelings, but process thoughts later. When we don’t revisit – when we push feelings down – this is suppression.

Repressed emotions are those which don’t get processed and are pushed into the subconscious. These often relate to traumatic childhood experiences. If children experience trauma and aren’t given the space and care to process feelings, or if they are shamed or told they are wrong for expressing themselves, emotions become chronically suppressed.

In many of the social situations, it seems necessary to hide what you are feeling.?Take, for example, that you hate your boss or may be and elder or a senior in your family.?Just because you hate him doesn’t mean you can openly express your feelings of dislike for him, because that would leave you, in all likelihood, jobless or a breakup resulting into homelessness or at least create an emotional drama or a controversy that might lead to making you answerable and guilty of something.?In this situation, suppressing your emotional expressions looks very beneficial to you.

Research has shown that although emotional suppression decreases outward signs of emotion, it does not actually lower the emotional experience of the person. For example, if a person is saddened by receiving a poor grade or poor work performance but, suppresses their sadness and acts happy to their peers to avoid embarrassment, then they are successfully hiding their feelings from onlookers, but it does not change the amount of sadness the person is actually feeling at all.?

Hiding one’s feelings does not make those feelings go away.?In addition, emotional suppression actually increases the physical symptoms experienced with the emotional experience, such as sweating or increased heart rate.?Psychologists, Richards & Gross completed a study that investigated the effects of emotion suppression on cognitive functioning.

If you’ve ever had a deep tissue massage, you’ll know how stress can manifest itself in the tightening of muscles. Suppressed emotions stay in the body. The effects of suppressed emotions include anxiety, depression, and other stress-related illnesses. Such suppression can lead to alcohol and substance abuse. (Read more about the link between childhood trauma and addiction here.)

Individuals often suppress what they perceive to be ‘negative’ emotions as a way of avoiding distress. But continual emotional suppression requires effort and eventually this ‘effort’ can take its toll. The effort increases sympathetic nervous system activity which can have unhealthy consequences.

Research shows that bottling up emotions can make people more aggressive. Studies also show that effortful suppression of negative emotion has immediate and delayed consequences for stress-induced cardiovascular reactivity.

Evidence for links between emotional suppression and mortality appeared initially in a Yugoslavian cohort study conducted in the 1970 by Grossarth-Maticeck. Long lasting hopelessness was independently associated with cancer, and anger with heart disease.

There are many reasons why people suppress emotions. It can be to avoid a potent or explosive feeling that is deemed socially unacceptable, or to replace an uncomfortable feeling with a more acceptable one. We are influenced by expectations from other people in our lives. Anxiety and depression commonly develop because of narcissistic abuse. Trauma victims often find past experiences too difficult to process or are told they are wrong to do so.

Emotional suppression or inhibition is a necessity for most people, some of the time; it enables us to cope. People are expected, for example, not to spend the day crying from sadness at work. Modern society demands that we suppress emotions. We must put a lid on feelings so we can perform, whether that be at work or to survive in a dysfunctional family. In public spaces we are expected to act respectfully. Shouting with anger is frowned upon and most people don’t have the tools or confidence to express anger in a different way.

So, we suppress emotions to cope, to conform, because we are told to, to survive, because we are shamed, or because a trauma is just too painful to process. Any person can reach a point in their life at which it seems they can no longer go on or they face great challenges.

Traumatising childhood experiences, losses, separations, psychological or physical abuse as well as chronic stress can all be reasons for developing fears, depression, burnout, addictions or eating disorders. Sleeping disorders, flashbacks, weight problems and serious health risks can result. As shame, guilt and helplessness are difficult to endure, addictive substances like alcohol, tablets and drugs are often used to suppress painful emotions and thoughts.

Controlling and channeling emotions is the biggest challenge for a true leader. Don't let your emotions distract you from doing what needs to be done. Control your emotions so your emotions do not control you.

We all are emotional creatures. Our emotions have a great influence on the decisions we make, at work, in life and in relationships. Emotions help us choose our friends, those whom we fall in love and stay with for our entire lives…also those whom we’ll leave behind.

Emotions have power. Emotional intelligence is the ability to harness that power. Learning to control one’s overwhelming emotions is a great lesson to be learned, so that you can take the right decisions that are in harmony with your principles to achieve inner happiness and peace in relationship, work and life.

This effort aims at building personalities who seek a highly realistic and original leadership concepts and its qualities, meant for a complete personality rehabilitation program, with a focus on natural atmosphere and environment.

Every true leader has his share of mood swings, believe me. But it’s a powerful thing when you realize that you have dominion over your behavior and your passions, thoughts and inspirations.

When you complain, even to yourself, you make yourself a victim. It is only self-pitying. Quit or leave the situation, face it and change the situation, or just accept it. All else is madness. Reshaping your network, updating your social circle by adding people better than yourself and engaging in meditative self-reflection and gaining increased control of inner experiences provides a person with a sense of control over fear and trembling and the chaos of life.

Leaders know that managing emotions doesn’t mean you don’t express yourself; it means you stop short of hurting others by overstepping their rights and boundaries and also sabotaging yourself.?They take control of their consistent emotions and begin to consciously and deliberately reshape your daily experience of life by upgrading and improving their circle of friendships.

And by the way; Patience, endurance and tolerance is not remaining quiet and allowing anger to build up inside you. It means to talk about what’s bothering you without losing control of your emotions and after, tolerance becomes a crime, when applied to evil and you are what you tolerate.