Emotional Cues

Imagine between 50 and 400 people dancing for weeks, day and night, with some dying from exhaustion. This is what happened in the dancing plague of 1518 in Strasbourg. I stumbled upon this story randomly, and what I found interesting about it is that the most popular theory behind the cause of this phenomenon is stress-induced mass hysteria.

Just as stress possibly triggered the dancing plague, we often underestimate how our hidden feelings can push us to act, sometimes in strange, irrational ways. Yet we rarely consider them consciously when making decisions, instead emphasizing the rational side through pros and cons. The inherent risk in this life decision process is that we take emotional decisions and post-rationalize them, given that, for most situations, it is quite easy to assign almost infinite pros and cons to a choice.

The reality is that how we feel about the scenarios of any decision is something to take into account. We should not follow any emotions blindly but acknowledge and incorporate them as helpful information to consider (or to work on). Emotional intelligence is determinant in the success of any venture since it is a key part of executing a good strategy.

Even Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, one of the most data-driven companies in the world, states that:

“If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition, taste, heart.”

Another quote of his is about stress, and I find it to be a great example of how analyzing a feeling can lead to its resolution:

“If I find that something is causing me stress, that’s a warning flag. It means there’s something that I haven’t completely identified - perhaps in my conscious mind - that is bothering me, and I haven’t yet taken any action. I find that as soon as I identify it and make the first phone call or send off the first email message… Even if it’s not solved, the mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it.”