As humans we all experience the five basic emotions of fear, love, sadness, anger and joy throughout the course of our lives.

When it comes to harnessing your emotions to further your personal success, there are several strategies which you can implement to this end. To help you in this important endeavour, let’s examine each one of these emotions separately in more detail below, and how you can turn them to your favour.

Using Your Emotions To Reach Success

Fear Can Be Motivating!

Fear can be debilitating, even causing you to freeze up altogether. However, it can also be a strong motivating force for success, if you view it properly. How can you do so? Rather than letting the fear build up inside, until it eventually weighs you down, you must use the object of your fear to push you towards action instead. For example, if you’re having trouble with mounting bills, then you may be afraid that you’ll run short of money. This is perfectly natural, and trying to will this fear away simply isn’t realistic. Rather, you need to embrace this unsettling feeling, and use it to rocket yourself towards success!

Fear can make you push harder at work, so that you’ll earn more money. Perhaps you’ll strive for a promotion, which you otherwise wouldn’t dream of aiming for. Or, you may volunteer for tasks that you’ve been too intimidated in the past to consider, like giving a large sales presentation to a client. These types of actions will be spurred on from fear, but they can all have a positive effect upon your situation. Another way you could look at this dynamic, is to use your larger fear to allow you to tackle something which you fear less. In our example, you would use the fear of running out of money, to overcome your discomfort with public speaking.

Love Can Be Compelling!

Love is typically thought of as a positive emotion, but it isn’t often associated with success. While it will help you to create strong relationships with people around you, how will it help you rise to the top? This is an excellent question, but the truth is, having a love for your profession, occupation or business can be essential to achieving your dreams. After all, you can’t expect a straight road ahead, as everyone experiences setbacks at one time or another. Yet, if you truly have a passion for what it is that you do, you’ll be able to persevere through these tough times!

How to Spin Sadness.

Sadness is a bigger challenge, and spinning it to aid you in your drive for success, can be a more difficult task. That being said, if you are sad about a specific failure in your life, this can be turned into an advantage. First of all, you likely never want to feel this way again, giving you the impetus to do whatever it takes to succeed the next time around. Secondly, sadness is itself a reflective emotion, and if you use this period of thinking back upon a particular event constructively, you can come out ahead. Think hard upon what you could have done better, and how you’ll improve when you’re given another opportunity.

Anger Can Be Positive?

While you may see how the above feelings can be used to achieve success, you may wonder how anger can be positive. Typically it isn’t and anger can be very destructive – if you allow it to affect your better judgment. However, when properly harnessed, it too can be a force for good. For example, if another business or colleague has beaten you out for a new client account, you might be furious. Rather than blowing off steam at home or around the office, you can put that anger to work instead. Let it drive you to make more sales calls, hone your presentation skills or learn more effective ways to communicate. In other words, you’ll be striving to show whoever beat you who really has the upper hand, and furthering your own success at the same time!

Joy Livens Up Life!

You’ve probably heard the saying, “follow your bliss.” This applies to both your professional and personal life, and it can yield fruit in each area. While it must be taken with a grain of salt, and you must continue to be responsible in your choices, chasing your passion is a great road to take. Why is this true? As we already covered in the section on love, passion is a potent type of inner drive. Also, if you truly enjoy what you are doing, then you won’t have to force yourself to work long hours or put in the time necessary to see success. These will come naturally, and you will find yourself wondering how your day went by so quickly! In sharp contrast, if you count the minutes at work every day, then you are probably in the wrong profession. You’ll always be fighting an uphill battle, as your heart isn’t really invested in the business at hand.

Conclusion.

You now know how to use the five basic human emotions, to achieve your own success! Rather than letting these feelings control you, or hold you back, you can choose to turn them to your advantage. Trying to deny them, or push them aside, can be a losing struggle. Instead, you should recognize that these are powerful forces, which you can use to further your dreams. When taken in this way, emotions can be your secret weapon, for realizing the success which you’ve always imagined!

Article By Joel Brown