How Emotional State Impact Your Personality Development

An emotion is your personal meaning of an event that could be conscious or unconscious, it triggers responses such as facial expression, cognitive processing, and physiological changes including physical sensations, attitudes, moods, and even traits. 

Emotions are often described into different families of emotions, like love, joy, anger, and fear, and conceptualized in two categories i.e., positive, and negative respectively. 

“The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.” ~ Daniel Goleman

Impact of Emotions 

Emotions have a strong impact on us, they impact your attitude and behavior. Positive emotions impact your mood positively as they motivate us to engage with the environment and continue to do what we are thinking or decide to do. Negative emotions impact negatively by unmotivating us to engage with the environment and cut down on people, objects, and situations. 

The theorists and researchers who named the different emotional states often link an emotion with the specific action or the psychological and physiological state of mind and body. 

For example, Fear is linked with the tendency of mind and body to escape. Anger is linked with the urge to attack. Disgust is linked with the urge to expel.  

Similarly positive emotions also invoked specific action tendencies, these actions are difficult to name, like, joy creates aimless activities, interest invoked to attend something. They create an urge to do something. The action tendencies triggered by positive emotions and effects on survival. 

With positive emotions, for example Love, Confidence and Strong we perform our best. With the negative feelings of Fear, Anger and Depressed we perform worst of us. So, emotional state impacts your personality development whether you consider it or not.

Emotional State 

These emotions, positive or negative, are the states in which we live and experience all day. It’s not only the blood flowing in our body all the time but the emotions as well, we always live with an emotional state. We experience multiple emotions in any situation but one or two could be the most dominant so that we can identify and name them. Sometimes we can’t identify and name the emotion we are undergoing, but the fact is we always experiencing an emotion. 

Is your emotional state support you to achieve goals you set or not? 

Everybody wants to experience or live with the feelings of Love, Respect, Confidence etc. The good thing about emotional state is, we can choose the emotional state we want to live with for the goals we want to achieve in our life. We can choose the emotion we want to experience and feel. The key to success is to keep your mind on the state which is supportive to your goals, and we want to live with. 

Emotional State and Personality Development 

So now you have understood that how Emotional State plays a major role in how you think and behave. The emotional state you feel can induce actions within you and influence all the decisions you make about your life. These decisions and actions make your personality. A positive emotional state urges you to make good decisions and take actions that move you towards living a happy and healthy life and achieving your goals. So, your personality will develop like a vibrant one that inspires others to live like a happy person. Emotional states help you to grow every aspect of your personality at its optimum level because of its action evoking stimulus and thoughts that keep mind positive and growing. These emotions reflect in your personality and emotional state impact your personality development.

How Emotions Develop 

Emotions are construct in any human body by its three steps of development, that tells you the importance and individual characteristic of emotional states and your emotional responses: 

1. Individual response: How you experience the emotion 
2. Physiological response: How your body reacts to the emotion 
3. Expressive response: How you behave in response to the emotion 

How to Develop and Live in an Emotional State 

You can emotionalize yourselves and remain in the required emotional state by understanding its phenomena and the activity you undergo. 

It’s a two-step phenomenon, in the first step you create an emotional state by using your thoughts on a specific event, situation or goal. And then your perceptions about that event, situation or goal. And then the time you spend continuously thinking about that situation. This process creates an emotional state in your body. 

Step One: Following process diagram of step one will help you to understand the phenomena 

Then, how to keep yourself in the favorable emotional state is depend on your action or the state of body that went into the emotional state. For example, you sit down with down shoulders and stop all the work during the sadness, or you keep giving new challenges during your hike to reach the destination while feeling happy. And how much time you spend in that body condition. 

Step Two: How you allow your body to act in that emotional state 

Let’s Explain in Detail: 

Assume a situation: If you are working as team leader on a project and its completion deadline is near, and one of your team members came too late. Which emotional state gets dominant on you, why and how? 

Your Thoughts 

During the time of his late, some thoughts came into your mind, these may be: 

• He may get stuck in traffic 
• His vehicle might get some problem 
• He might get stuck in an urgent work at home 
• He might still sleep 
• He slept late 
• He doesn’t understand the importance of work 

So, you might have these kinds of thoughts in your mind 

Your Perceptions 

How these thoughts translate into your mind to create an emotional state is dependent on your perceptions/experience, like if your perception is “the person is careless or generally people are careless”, then you may only pick the thoughts that support your perception. So, you may pick one from these, he may get stuck in urgent work, he is still sleeping, office is not the priority for him etc. 

Time you spend to think about 

After choosing the thoughts due to perceptions, you start thinking and go into the cycle of those thoughts and start getting emotional, the more you spend time in thinking, the more you create links with previous experiences. 

Emotional State 

If your perception is positive then you pick positive thoughts and will create emotions of care and trust, and with negative perception your thoughts will create anger and doubt etc. 

Body position 

Emotional state tells us to go into specific body positions and if you adopt that body position or action then you will completely go under that emotional state. In the emotional state of care and trust you keep doing your work, and when you receive that person, you welcome him and ask for the reason with showing care and trust that get him close to you. In the emotional state of anger and doubt you might withdraw from your work sometime and on receiving that person you may shout or blame and show distrust that make him away from you. So, either you are welcoming or rebuff. 

Time duration 

If you keep your body or actions in the same position, then you keep yourself in that emotional state and you keep thinking on the same pattern and went into deep emotional state and stay long time in that emotional state, until external stimuli help you to get out from that state. 

From this example you get to understand how an emotional state came into being and how you kept yourself in that emotional state that impacts your personality development. In further discussion we will examine both mind and body level activities that kept yourselves in different emotional states and how we get the emotional state that are supportive for personality we want and to achieve your goals and get the success in a role or life. 

Why is your thinking pattern positive or negative? 

It might be due to many reasons, but there are two main factors that impact your thoughts and define your behaviors. You must just consciously observe and identify what is happening with you. 

The mind and body both are connected and engaged in any action or behavior, so if you want to identify your behaviors you just need to observe what is happening at mind level and what is happening at body level. 

The Mind 

If your boss always gets worried and become angry on late arriving of employees, and start blaming them and don’t trust them, maybe you consciously or unconsciously start believing that this is the way to respond in that kind of situation and start acting like him. 

Secondly, in which circle you spend your time, and what kind of discussion you undergo, and what kind of happenings you discuss, and how you see the world. These perceptions and thoughts impact your attitude. 

So, your beliefs, attitudes, values and past experiences all play their role in creating perceptions for other’s behaviors. Most of the time it is due to someone whom you unintentionally start following or living in an environment that impacts you to behave similarly like them. 

The Body 

How we see our world, how we think and how we interpret the happenings around us depends on our body’s position and condition. For your body, it depends on what you eat, where you breathe, how your body posture is, how you keep your appearance/look, how much mental pressure you have, these all impacts your mood and perceptions. 

Are my attitudes and behaviors according to my own thinking or are they just auto drive by following someone or a group? 

How to get rid of from negative thinking  

If you want to get out from negative emotional states, then you must do two things: 

1. Consciously select your thoughts that are helpful for what you want to achieve in life or want to build your personality. 
2. Consciously watch your body posture, don’t act like a person in anger, or a person in feeling down. Think why your elders told us don’t put your hand on your head, and don’t put your shoulder down, or rub your shoes on earth while walking. Instead, you have to keep your head up, shoulder back and keep yourself in movement and in winning position.  

It’s your responsibility to find out whom/environment you are following unconsciously. 

“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” ~ Oscar Wilde

Conclusion 

If my body is in a relaxing position and I am feeling resourceful, and I don’t follow a negative mind person, then the late coming of any employee will keep me relaxed, cared for, and have positive thoughts. 

If I am feeling tired and I generally follow the pattern of a person having negative behaviors, then I will take the situation negatively, and will get stressed and think negative thoughts. 

Finally, if I consider a situation too difficult and negative, my body went into an emotional state of fear, and if I feel confident for any situation and thought that I can easily handle it, my body went into the emotional state of resourceful. Both emotional states impact your personality development.

Now the decision is in your hands, if you can change your emotional state, you can change your behavior, if you can change the emotional state of others, you can change their behavior