Nowadays, we usually listen to people boasting about the fact that their behavior is a result of “pure rationality”. Can that actually, be achieved and does it have the desirable effect on us? Why nobody refers to the contribution of one’s emotions to the way they behave? According to the Cultural Iceberg Model 1 , our behavior is a combination of our values and beliefs, our spiritual strategies as well as our emotions. The following analysis will help us delve into each notion and better understand it.

 

 People’s values and beliefs are bound to their personality, as they are gradually formed since their childhood. The latter, depend on a child’s experiences and education. Due to the fact that one’s values and beliefs are gradually developed, people have difficulty in recognizing them, as they are hidden in their unconscious mind.
Rarely, do we define and name them, while we refer to them with a view to highlighting our integrity.

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 The term “spiritual strategies” can be defined as our way of thinking, as well as our attitude towards life, which is unique like each and every one of human beings. For instance, there are people that face everything that occurs to them in an optimistic way, believing that they can solve all potential problems. On the contrary, there are others that perceive pessimistically every obstacle and that results in overstating it and having difficulty in disengaging themselves from it.

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 Last but not least, emotions constitute a major component of human behavior. Taking into consideration that emotions are a psychosomatic experience, because they comprise a combination of
hormones and mental process occasioned by a stimulus, we ought to ask ourselves the reason why the majority of people tend to ignore the significance they have in their lives. Some of them, probably underestimate their importance and their acknowledgement as a sign of “weakness”, contrary to others that are incapable of recognizing their emotions and as a consequence, they ignore them.

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 Contemporary psychologists and coaches reject both the above perceptions of emotions, marking them as detrimental to people’s psychosynthesis. Denying our feelings may lead to suppressing ourselves that will result in temper tantrums and outbursts. The aforementioned will eventually, destroy people’s relationship with themselves and their surroundings.

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 As a coach myself, I approve the above point of view and I encourage all of us to name and describe the emotions we feel, every time something happens in our daily life. To those who find writing down their feelings a difficult endeavor, I suggest they begin their “journey towards their world of emotions” by means of using a scale from 1 to 10. Number 1 is used to express the most negative emotions someone can feel, while 10 the most positive ones. This way, we can achieve the first step to the recognition of our
emotions, which will help us better handle them and increase the level of our self - knowledge.

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 To sum up, it is noticeable that human behavior constitutes a classic case study for all scientific fields, as it always offers valuable knowledge, as well as various dimensions that we have never thought of before. As for the emotions, I would like to quote a phrase of Daniel Goleman’s book, called “Emotional Intelligence 2 : The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain”.

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1 Beyond Culture, Edward T. Hall, 1976

 

2 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence Why it Can Matter More Than IQ,

1996, Bloomsbury Publishing.

 

*First published in the newspaper 30 th Update.