Passionate people are among the most powerful on earth. They are great salespeople, entrepreneurs and philanthropists. But the truth is most people don’t know how to separate logic from emotion, or how to use each to their benefit. The result is left brain, logic-based thinkers tend to minimize the power of emotion; while right brain, emotion-based thinkers tend to overuse emotion and blend it into every decision they make. Both personality types are one-sided and relegated to middle-class thinking and decision making. I’ve spent the last 14 years teaching Fortune 500 sales teams how to use emotion for motivation and logic in decision making, and the result has been hundreds of millions of dollars in increased sales. Knowing when to use emotion to drive yourself as well as when to remove it from your decision making is critical to achieving world-class success. Watch this video and see what you think. As always, I want to welcome all the new subscribers from around the world to the mental toughness blog. All of us look forward to reading your comments and having you become an active member of this very talented community. Steve Siebold (12:00)
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Dude – Just when I start to get really mad at you, you do something awesome like recommend “Courage & Consequence!” Take care : ) My mom met him, and he was very kind. You remember his nickname from Bush was “Turd Blossom?” Take care.
Bottom line for me: I make informed decisions.
good stuff steve. you do more than present utopian hogwash for people to feed on. Real knows real; we’re adults and we have limitations. Critical thinking accepts that and allows for mature growth..
I am thinking on emotions and logic. You all know emotions have its own power. Then why should we separate ourselves from emotions? If we become emotionless person to become logical person, then i must say we will not able to sense anything in future.
Ravin
This is thought on a different level! I find myself looking at things from a perspective that I did not know existed.
“Study smart people.” That’s why we study you, Steve.
“Critical thinking is not emotional.” BUT tapping into that emotional lava driven by past experiences and strong feelings – tapping in is a mental toughness skill – can ignite action, inspire others, and be laser directed by critical thinking.
“Critical thinking is making decisionsn on greater criteria.” meaning putting more information and knowledge to work for you.
In my early 20s I had an experience that appeared to happen spontaniously as I was in a comparative literature class. One of our exercises was taking a piece of literature and looking at it/interpretating it from different perspectives.
Ond day I dozed off and in a dream found myself sitting at a table with six other people discussing an idea. Each person had a different perspective than the others. As the dream morphed itself I became aware of each of the people being a persona of myself – then I woke up.
From that day I began to look at everything from multiple perspectives which also caused some signigicant intellectual and emotional conflicts for a few years – I was living in between the gaps of every idea I encountered, would stay in one for a while, then move around it.
A second illuminating experience came when I was stuck trying to complete a Master’s thesis. I called my mentor and he said I had two weeks to finish it or forget it: No more extensions.
In a panic I took hundreds of pages – the old onion skin typed mechanically AND I was a terrible speller – shoved them in a drawer, and for the next two seven days took the opposite approach to the poem I was doing my thesis on – I went from critical praise to critical criticism.
I turned it in and got the grade.
“Hey Friend, why don’t we just for the sake of critical thinking, problem solving, AND maybe even solution finding do a couple of novel things: 1. make a list of our assumptions – what we base our conclusions and quary on and 2. suspend those judgments and play free form with these ideas at hand.”
How to get many people looking at a thing objectively, that is the question. It’s even more daunting – as you know, Steve – when the arguments and conclusions are belief driven in an absolute sense whether religions or political or something else.
“OK company XYZ – your life and death is on the line and you may have only a small window of opportunity to live and not die. Are you willing to put everything on the table – holding back nothing – and challenge everything you do and stand for with no pretensions and delusions? Can you do that?
If not, then I can’t help you.
Thoughts?
Mike
As a fitness professional, I spend my days helping people to shift their attitudes and beliefs about diet and exercise. In my profession, I help people separate logic and emotion every day when it comes to helping them choose healthier food choices and / or encouraging them to develop exercise habits that will serve them, rather than hold them back.
Critical thinking is paramount in every successful decision we make. Separating emotions from logic for some can be a very difficult thing to do. Because of this, coupled with my deep personal desire to help people, I take time out for my own personal growth and development by reading books or listening to authors on audio books. Like Steve, I am very interested in learning from smart people.
I think it is a form of critical thinking when we allow ourselves to be open to the possibility of higher learning and greater expanded awareness when we care more about seeking knowledge from smart people rather than letting our emotions, or said another way, our ego, get in the way and stunt our vision simply because we have personal emotional issues about someone or something that keep us stuck.
Because I work with a lot of people, I have a great opportunity to observe a vast array of thinking habits and one of the most interesting things I have found is, for the most part, I see a lot of people who choose to spend their day looking for reasons to be offended. Sadly, that is a great example of what it means to operate from a place of emotion. There is no logic in that.
One of the best things my grandfather said to me when I was a teenager was “you should try to learn one new thing every day of your life.” I am so glad that I took the lesson and let his words of wisdom take root in my heart. Because personally, I think life is so much sweeter when we explore our world with the heart and the eyes of a child.
For me, I love the joy and excitement I get out of discovering something new. It’s true that we all have the ability to pick and choose what feels right for us. So it doesn’t make sense to me why so many of us choose to stay stuck in our own fear based thinking laced with our personal opinions and biases, and never explore anything new from someone else out there who might turn out to be a wealth of great knowledge and resource!
If anyone might want to figure out “what” I am by reviewing my personal library, I think they would have a difficult time coming up with a label because the authors who make up my library are quite diverse, and that’s a great thing!
That’s right about reading something from someone I don’t really care for. It’s easy to read about something from someone I DO care for, listening to people with my same beliefs. It’s like being in the “mutual admiration society”. It’s really mind expanding to read something from someone I didn’t care for; it really opens my mind.
What a daring way to live- considering the beliefs of others!
Isn’t that called learning?