Trust Your Feelings!

As part of my college education, I studied philosophy. Its focus was on intellectual training and developing my ability to explain things logically and rationally. Feelings were often considered unreliable and thus of limited value. However, in real life, my feelings have been the foundation for some of the best and most durable decisions I have ever made. My long-term commitments have my feelings written all over them. To get in touch with one’s feelings, one could even begin by asking oneself questions such as, “Why have I woken up feeling tired this morning?” The next step would be to ask, “When do I wake up tired?” It could be that I have a staff meeting every Friday afternoon, and this meeting is often contentious and emotionally draining. I believe this is the beginning of a person’s self-awareness and gradual development of the ability to understand the range of one’s feelings. This is the manner in which an expert functions. An expert is a person who has a reservoir of knowledge and experience in a particular field that they can always turn to in order to be able to make the necessary associations and interpretations. People who have mastered their feelings can examine their life experiences and learn to make associations, differentiate patterns, and interpret situations to get meaning out of them.