Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

• Do you believe that emotions are a unified whole, where what affects one part of your life, affects all the others?
• Or, do you believe that emotions are compartmentalized, where you can stop caring about 1 thing (that`s still very valuable), but care very much about another thing in your life?

Ey! I love that catchy phrase: "rollercoaster of fear and excitement".

It`s that what it is. Life.

Sorry CraigL, I don`t have that polished english you have to express myself, I`m still learning this new language.

I agree with your post. But look at it in a slightly different way.

There is not way to avoid fear, because the feeling fear is a defense mechanism built in our guts.

You can sedate a person to avoid it.

Yes there are way to minimize it or kill it, also drug and alcohol (and...why not? rock&roll! haha, just kiddding).

But I think is the wrong way to get anything. Because, as a defense mechanism, it`s not bad, IT IS GOOD.

What fear is intend IS GOOD. Far away from what we`ve learned in our society, isn`t it? But how many things are wrong or useless in our society?

Fear will keep knocking our occipital bone (that "pain on the neck"?) until we DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, it`s that what fear is good for.

We rather should say THANKS GOD, I HAVE FEAR, because IF I PAY ATTENTION to that fear and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, I will get out of the pain/s or that problem/s.

The idea seems to be against what we think in general, and it might be hard to `drink` it, but when that happen, your whole idea how to approach things change.

The same happened with many others (considered) bad feelings.

God put them there with a purpose.

Not to blame us, not to suffer this live. Just to learn of ourselves and grow.

I believe that Tomas Edison, one of my favorite "example to follow", might had fear, like anybody else will or did `suffer` in one way or another.

But fear wasn`t an obstacle for him, he succeded.

Because his idea, lets say, to find that light bulb for example, was so pationated so wonderfull, that fear never blocked him to find what he was looking for.

Actually his fear might rather be in a level of questioning himself  `what other element, product, convination of material can I use to get there?". Keeping him on the right path.

The feeling of fear feels bad, small almost unnoticed (such as worry) to be in hell (such as panic)

But the level of that feeling it might be the level of how important is that problem or thing you are fear of.

If we DO something about it, fear just dissapear because we fix the origin of that fear.

And when we get `expert` how to fix it, Never you wonder "why people get fear on that situation?".

The answer is, those people didn`t CROSS yet that bridge you did.

If you don`t care. You loose what you don`t care. Even life.

: )

o.k.  i am jumping in...

"On the other hand, is it possible to simply not care anymore about a business, but to care very much for your spouse, your children and family, your pets, your health? Can you target your apathy? I don`t think so....but maybe other people do."

My feelings on the above are very straighforward.  It is easy for me to not care about my business...but to CARE VERY MUCH for my family, husband, children.  They are humans, they have a soul and I have this connection to them that words cannot describe.  When a hurricane or any disaster strikes us, I will reach for their hands, NOT MY COMPUTER.  I have a very strong sense of what really matters.  I can almost always calm myself down when business/financial fears set in by reminding myself that nobody will die or suffer based on any business decision I am making. And at the end of time, it just won`t matter.  But my children will.   I am going to check on them right now, and give them a big ol` nightime hug. Is is just a matter of keeping things in perspective? 

just a simple ol` answer, from me.

This discussion makes me think about the challenge: build up a life you care about, or just live in the moment and not be building? Difficult question, and one I`m still working with, both through my own thinking and learning from the clients I coach.

I like this definition of fear: fear that you won`t be able to handle the upcoming situation. I fear losing my job not so much because of the job, but of the situation losing my job would bring. Would I be able to handle the shock to my self-esteem, the free time, the lack of finances, etc? I`m paraphrasing, but this definition comes from an excellent book, Feal the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers.

Whenever I feel paralyzed by fear, I try to ask, what would I need to do to prepare myself to handle the situation I`m afraid of? Often that leads to some productive thinking, and some resulting action, that helps.

Chris

This has been discussed as a philosophical choice, but if you`re talking about a "live in the moment" trend, how much of this is really due to a generation that hasn`t experienced much delayed gratification, and therefore hasn`t had much practical experience with planning things out.  Like most skills that get fully developed, I assume this one begins with a lot of small experiences that lead to increasing mastery, so that bigger and bigger risks can be managed wisely.  I was born in 1961 and definitely grew up as part of the TV generation.  Compared to the World War II generation, I suspect my generation might be a little less capable of handling delayed gratification - and I think that`s probably even more true of the the computer game generation.  Since an acceptance that things won`t come immediately is part of any planning process, I wonder how much this impatience for immediate results stunts the ability to plan effectively.