Be a Daring Leader Through Recognizing your emotions.

Christian Rodriguez
3 min readNov 22, 2020

“Stop crying and behave. Go to the bathroom and fix yourself up, don’t let our guest see you this way”. Even though my mom never said it, her underlying message was clear, showing your emotion is a weakness.

Photo by Tom Pumford on Unsplash

It was Sunday morning. I was twelve and excited to meet up with my friend Fredrik in the park. My mom on the other hand had other plans. Friends of hers were over at our place for a visit.

I wanted to go to the park, she wanted me to be a good boy and stay home. I got upset and started to cry.

For some damn reason, crying was something that I did, a lot. I had friends till this day that I’ve never seen crying. It’s like I was born with oversized lacrimal glands (the part of your eyes that produce tears).

Boys don’t cry, boys get angry, and that’s the only acceptable emotion you can talk about. All other feelings are weaknesses.

From elementary school up to college, I hid those emotions from people I didn’t trust. And rarely did I share how I was feeling. If something frustrated me in a school project, or I felt worried, I sucked it up, I pushed through.

Why is it uncomfortable to talk about emotions?

Talking about your emotions might not come naturally for numerous reasons. As for me, it was a cultural obstacle, my mom was raised in a household were expressing once feelings were unusual.

In high school, we aren’t taught the tools to recognize, express, and regulate our emotions. Don’t you find that a bit odd?

As a society and educational system, we encourage IQ over EQ. Hard skills over soft skills.

You can have a high IQ, but what does it matter if you’re not able to recognize your emotions and see if it’s affecting you. All that IQ won’t do you as much good as you might think.

As Brene Brown says is: “We are not necessarily thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think.”

The Mood Meter

In the past, jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains, but in the future they’ll be about the heart.

We don’t have the vocabulary and emotional language to identify what emotions we are currently feeling. In order to be a future daring leader, you need to regulate and be aware of emotions.

Before being able to regulate and control our emotions we need to first recognize and be aware of them.

Enter the Mood Meter, which is an evidence-based road map to your emotions. It’s based on the Circumflex of Emotions by James Russell. He mentions that emotions have two core properties or dimensions– energy and pleasantness.

It is represented by a colorful grid that measures the energy and pleasantness of a feeling, to give you the “coordinates” to your current emotional state. These coordinates locate your emotion in one of 4 Zones, each one representing a group of emotions that have similar levels of energy and pleasantness.

Examples of emotions that belong to each Zone include:

Yellow Zone (high energy, high pleasantness): pleasant, happy, joyful, hopeful, focused, optimistic, proud, cheerful, lively, playful, excited, thrilled, inspired etc.

Green Zone (low energy, high pleasantness): at ease, calm, easygoing, secure, grateful, blessed, satisfied, restful, loving, balanced, comfy, cozy, carefree, mellow, thoughtful, serene, etc. Links to Heart-Mind quality Secure & Calm.

Red Zone (high energy, low pleasantness): peeved, annoyed, irritated, worried, frightened, jittery, tense, troubled, angry, furious, panicked, stressed, anxious, etc.

Blue Zone (low energy, low pleasantness): apathetic, bored, sad, down, uneasy, miserable, depressed, disheartened, exhausted, hopeless, alienated, despondent, despair, etc.

Conclusions

The better you can identify how you are feeling and label that feeling, the better you can find a suitable strategy to regulate it.

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