Emotional Capital Needs to Work
Elena V. Amber
Founder, doctoral researcher (sustainability transformations), award-winning author / The Gift of Sensitivity / Emotional Capital for the Triple Win
Read on my website/ Reading time 7 min.
Think about capital like an entrepreneur
Why do so many people start with capital first and end up with nothing? What must we know before thinking we need capital to move forward?
Many would wait for the magic moment or keep saving for a future life, only to lose it all in the first round. It could be a bank crisis or a business collapse, health problems due to sacrificing for wealth accumulation, or anything else. ?
What is the one magic thing that is deadly needed at the beginning of our entrepreneurial lives?
It is straightforward: understanding that capital is nothing. Seriously, if you want to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, you need to start by knowing this.
If you wish to think like an entrepreneur, start by asking yourself how good it is to get capital you don’t know how to apply for. Or, even better, how to apply it fast.
In this case, getting capital seems even more dangerous as it depends on the rate you get it for. If you obtain this capital from your savings, it could feel secure: you don’t owe any percent on that capital, you think. However, it is just not true. Your efforts and lifetime are resources you invested in savings, so there is a considerable hidden cost that will be unfair to forget.
Therefore, just capital is nothing.
Working capital is everything.
The ability to manage it is everything because it lets you create healthy business cashflows, which is the path to business success. This motivating factor should drive you to master your management abilities to generate and curate cashflows today without any waiting time.
From that moment, it will be helpful to think of yourself as an ongoing manager, as you will manage your capital and not as an owner because owning means nothing – any capital is a finite, limited resource that always seems insufficient unless you know the management trick. Stuck capital is precarious and unfair for energy exchange as you hold treasure without giving it desired freedom, so one day, it will backfire. ?
Apply that understanding to your emotional capital
It must be the exact straightforward regarding our comprehension of emotional capital.
Let's challenge conventional beliefs and empower ourselves with a new perspective.
There is an opinion that we are here for the experience.
This limited belief about experience capital, or I would better call it to experience baggage.
It is considered necessary because we must rely on the known to be most efficient and react quickly in daily circumstances.
This is correct for understanding how we remember the most effective reactions.
Yet, there is no place for known reactions if we want to seize opportunities.
Opportunities are related to exploration in the same way that exploration is related to the unknown.
The exploration mindset must be free of any emotional baggage. Therefore, emotional capital is not the accumulation of your old emotions, which makes it useless (if not harmful) emotional baggage.
Any emotional accumulation, therefore, will never lead us to a breakthrough.
Your task is to make emotional capital work for you.
Develop beyond survival emotional mindset
The less baggage you have, the faster your path will be.
Survival helps us keep information memorable and repeat or recall it quickly once necessary. However, how much does a good learner know?
It must be a lot.
How much does the best learner know?
Nothing.
This non-linear thinking, such as “the more I know, the more I unknow,” never helps forecast a future as a linear function deriving from past experiences.
If you want a known future, rely on a known past.
If you want changes, you must step into an unknown future; you don’t like the past there.
However, if we know how to take care of our emotional capital, we could start to create from change and stop trying to cope with it.
Let’s think big: what is the purpose of evolution?
Is it a development of resilience and the ability to survive?
Or is it a creative process of constant change where adaptability allows us to transform?
It is both because resilience is excellent for a short-term change that could pass away, and adaptability is the end goal for a long-term new norm.
Most of us would think of adaptation as an evolutionary North Star.
Adaptability means the ability to accept and become renewed following changes as new possibilities.
Those who adapt faster benefit more than those who hold on to the past.
Think about that in terms of emotions.
It will be the ability to create fresh emotional responses without attachments to past experiences, the role of which is to generate pre-judgment.
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Fresh emotional responses serve evolution, opening opportunities for change.
Any emotional accumulation, instead, will never lead us to a breakthrough.
Emotional baggage is related to the known, and emotional emptiness is associated with the unknown.
Knowing makes us comfortable, yet unknowing makes us capable.
Know your emotions and make them work for you is not the same
Let me use an example of knowledge accumulation. Indeed, we need to collect as much information as possible before we understand anything. Therefore, knowledge is a power.
Imagine mastering your ability to become a pathfinder—a person who goes ahead of a group and finds the best way to travel through an unknown area.
Once someone shares his path, you absorb that knowledge.
Then, another shares his path, and you also understand and learn new from it.
Once you understand many paths, a breakthrough happens so that you can become a pathfinder yourself.
However, knowing how to repeat and find the exact path doesn’t make us wise.
There is the ability to find the best possible path in any given circumstance, whatever happens, to make us pathfinder masters.
First, we need to know to see a path. Next, the ability to navigate through existing knowledge toward the opportunity (touching the unknown) became a pearl of wisdom.
This ability applies to emotions, as we need to know our own and others' emotions to navigate a social world.
However, accumulating knowledge alone only leads to wisdom once you apply it.
More than merely understanding your emotions, mastering their processing is crucial.
The ability to get rid of unprocessed emotions fast enough is a treasure.
It is so because non-attachment lets us see the world without the lenses of the past and follow the discovery of opportunities.
Make it your inner emotional resourcefulness
Imagine you have nothing but can access what is needed at any single moment, so you don’t keep anything yet can reach everything.
I found this ability magical.
Think about mastery as a process to achieve inner resourcefulness and not accumulate external resources. Not get the capital, but the ability to create it from nothing and support its flow.
For example, if you don’t know how to initiate a fire, you would keep supporting it every second on an ongoing basis, fearing it would lose its unique power (and) wasting your time and effort.
However, once you learn how to produce the fire, you may relax and make it whenever you wish. Emotional capital is not the accumulation of unprocessed emotions but the mastery, quality, and ability to make your emotions work at any given moment without storing them.
The cleaning and transformation work is not limited to what is possible.
Emotions bring color to our lives, and emotional engagement keeps us connected to life. Emotional power is an invisible string indicating the energy level available to us.
Apply your emotional capital to change your state
A master of emotions is capable of regulating personal energy.
Therefore, gaining emotional capital is a big deal.
However, we need to transform our states to change our lives, right?
Old emotional reactions will not open new doors, so we must transform our emotional state before anything new happens.
Think of anger converted to energy for personal achievement, pain becoming a power, or vulnerability transformed into intuition.
We could alter any of our emotions.
Emotions are like a lump of clay for creation, so why throw clay with a pot in mind?
Why not try mastering it now by considering your emotional capital level and how you can make it work for you?
That’s all for today.
We'll talk again in two weeks.
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