You proceed to the register, pay the bill and your four hundred and thirty bucks is now down to less than seven. What!! You haven't paid rent (due Monday), you still need to put petrol in the car (the needle is on 'E'), and somehow, you need to repay your friend that thousand bucks she loaned you to get yourself established. Oops.

Runnin' on empty

You drive home with the petrol light flashing and the car coughs and splutters it's way up to the curb outside your place. You're officially on empty - in more ways than one. You carry all your unnecessary and expensive acquisitions into the apartment and sit in the dark feeling sorry for yourself. You have made some stupid decisions and you have not invested wisely. You certainly haven't got the best return on what you had. Not even close. Now you're under real pressure. The elation and excitement have made way for anxiety, misery and the reality of your situation.

An expensive habit

Amazingly, this destructive and illogical pattern of spending continues for months (with the help of your newly-acquired credit cards) and pretty soon you find yourself in a seemingly hopeless and desperate situation. You slip into a depressive state as the gravity of your dilemma hits home. You don't sleep. You tell lies to cover your tracks. You don't answer your phone because you're scared of who's chasing money on the other end and you become incredibly lonely, miserable, pessimistic and anxious.

The only thing that gives you a momentary reprieve from your misery is more shopping. Of course. So you continue to shop with money you don't have and continue to dig yourself into a deeper and deeper hole.

You've wasted what you had and invested poorly.

Now...

Imagine that this (much longer than intended) story is a metaphor for how and where we invest our emotional dollars (emotional energy). How we spend what we have. How we waste and misuse our emotional assets. And as crazy and as unlikely as the above story might seem to some of you (although it's actually pretty common), in many ways it parallels how many of us manage (or don't manage) our emotions.

Wasting our emotional dollars

The truth is that many of us waste our emotional dollars every single day. We are constantly making withdrawals from our emotional bank account and investing that currency without thinking or planning. We are reactive, self-destructive and irrational, and we spend those emotional dollars on things (people, situations, conversations, problems, arguments, relationships) which not only give us a poor return, but ultimately make our life an unproductive, frustrating misery.

Finding the bad

We get angry, we blame, we criticise, we judge, we resent, we envy and we even hate, all the while having an enormous capacity and potential for love, joy, kindness and generosity. We major in minors. We focus on one or two negatives while being surrounded by hundreds of positives. We find the bad when there is so much good. When others see opportunities and lessons, we only see problems. While others are moving on, we're stewing and brooding. Plotting, planning and scheming revenge and retribution. Making ourselves sick, wasting our potential, hurting others and getting deeper and deeper into emotional debt ourselves.

And all for what? Does giving ourselves over to those negative emotions help in any way? Nope. Is there a positive outcome? Never.

Investment and return

Let's pretend for a moment that you have a finite amount of emotional currency to spend each week (just like the wage in the above story) and that you need to invest those dollars wisely to ensure the best possible return, to manage your emotional health (stay happy, content and productive) and to improve the quality of your life and hopefully the lives of others. Of course, we could argue back and forth about the notion of having a finite amount of emotional dollars to spend each day or week, but I think we can safely say that our emotional bank account is not some bottomless pit. It can run out from time to time. And for many people it does - sometimes for months or years at a time. I think we all know people who have invested their emotional dollars poorly and have suffered the consequences of living on or below the emotional poverty line.

Emotional beings

At our core we are all emotional beings. Virtually every decision, reaction and behaviour comes (on some level) from an emotional need or trigger, and while we love to see ourselves as essentially logical, rational, pragmatic creatures, the truth is, so often we're not. For the most part, we are overwhelmingly emotional beings. This can be good and bad. Amazing and terrifying. Positive and destructive. And at it's most extreme, life and death.

Every day, consciously or not, we're investing our emotional dollars somewhere; sometimes wisely, sometimes not so much. And while anger, resentment, jealousy, bitterness and even hatred all seem to make perfect 'sense' (a logical investment) at the time (as did the clock, the stereo, the towels, etc. in the above story), the sad reality is that they only ever lead to emotional bankruptcy, pain and destruction. Destruction of physical health, relationships, businesses and ultimately, lives.

We all want the same thing

When we dumb down the whole personal development thing and bring this particular discussion back to what we all want - happiness, peace, fulfillment, meaning and love - it becomes apparent that real success is far more about how and where we invest our emotional dollars than it is about what we can accumulate in a financial or commercial sense. Show me a millionaire who doesn't spend her emotional dollars wisely and I'll show you someone who's miserable and wanting more. Living a life she really doesn't enjoy.

And no, being financially and emotionally wealthy do not need to be mutually exclusive. We don't need to choose one or the other, but if it's real happiness and joy we seek then we should invest heavily into our emotional portfolio.

Postscript:

* Over the last two weeks I have watched with both interest and despair the enormous human tragedy unfolding in Burma and China in the wake of their respective natural disasters. Watching a broadcast last night brought a tear to my eye; a mother draped over her lifeless child, wailing in uncontrollable emotional pain and looking to the sky in absolute despair. Humanity at it's rawest. As the camera drew back from the woman and panned across the landscape, the magnitude of the devastation and suffering became apparent. At that moment sitting there on my comfortable couch, in my comfortable house I truly became aware that I have no real problems. And that if I can get out of my own way, stop sabotaging myself and do good despite my (numerous) issues, then maybe I can be part of the change in the world that Gandhi spoke of.

While we all have our individual challenges, the truth is that you and I are privileged and have much to celebrate. Even though we might not always feel like it. If you're using a computer now, then you're rich compared to the majority of our six billion brothers and sisters. If you have food, shelter and education then you're in the global minority.

If we want to find our way back to misery we can.

I choose not.

Labels: motivation, personal development, self help