What Is Emotion?
We talk about emotion a lot here on this blog, as do many wealth creation experts. There’s good reason for it, too; emotion rules many of the decisions and outcomes of your life, including matters of money and finance. After all, as it’s been said, if wealth were just about the numbers we’d all be rich—but we’re not, so there must be more. At any rate, considering so much time is spent discussing emotion’s effects, it makes sense to talk a bit about what emotion is.
And Wikipedia Says…
Wikipedia explains emotion in this way (it also goes on to explain more about its history and theories):
“An emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and behavior. Emotions are subjective experiences, or experienced from an individual point of view. Emotion is often associated with mood, temperament, personality, and disposition.”
So what we have is an individual, subjective reaction to life’s experiences. We all agree there is a bit more to it than that, and that there is some biological/physical component, but I think we can also agree that to a great extent emotion is controllable in most situations.
Here’s another interesting bit of trivia regarding the word’s root from Wikipedia:
“The English word ‘emotion’ is derived from the French word émouvoir. This is based on the Latin emovere, where e- (variant of ex-) means ‘out’ and movere means ‘move’.[1] The related term “motivation” is also derived from movere.”
Hmmm…..that’s food for thought. So we now have a subjective, individual response (sounds a lot like attitude) that we can control that is closely related to motivation. In other words, our emotions can be motivating, either negatively or positively. There’s a lot that this can imply, but I think this supports our discussions about gaining control of our emotions and choosing our own views of life. Yes, we are emotional creatures, but we can just as easily make that play in our favor for developing wealth and building a better life for ourselves.
Sean Rasmussen
Success Communicator
Aussie Internet Marketer © 2004 – 2009
Tags: developing wealth, emotion, Motivation, Wealth Creation, wealth creation experts, Wikipedia