What Is Your Goal In Driving A Car?
By Steven Stosny
What is the most important thing about you? What is the most important thing about your life, your relationships, and the next thing you do?
If you can answer these questions with conviction, purpose, and passion, and if your behavior is consistent with your answers, then your life, no doubt, feels completely genuine. You are one of the fortunate few who continually grow, learn, produce, create, and care. You never question your own value or anyone else's. You routinely regulate negative emotions by investing interest and creating value in the world around you.
Those less fortunate have to think long and hard to answer the most crucial questions of their lives and often become appalled at how little their behavior reflects what they deeply believe to be important.
The negative emotions that we blame on stress, bad days, excess weight, society, coworkers, neighbors, and family come largely from ignoring or violating what is most important to us.
For instance, when the most important thing about driving is to get to a destination as quickly as possible, people tend to drive aggressively. But in doing that they are devaluing their own emotional well being, not to mention their safety and that of every person - every child - in every car they pass.
They ignore both the general warning that comes from their emotional discomfort (of not valuing self and others) and the specific message to be developing solutions to any problems that being late might cause.
Their anxiety is a signal that they are out of alignment with what they value and what is important.
But if they blame their feeling of discomfort on other drivers, the design of the highway, the boss, getting up late, or their "own stupidity," their discomfort gets worse.
Their emotions can no longer guide their behavior back into conformity with what is most important to them. Instead, they seem to be vehicles of punishment, unfairly controlled by situations or other people. The result is a sense of powerlessness that impairs thinking, performance, interest, and concentration. They will work less efficiently, become exhausted more easily, and be less than sweet to their kids when they get home.
When it comes to staying true to the most important things to and about you, it's the small emotions that matter. Subtle, moment-by-moment emotional experience motivates the vast majority of our behavior. The great passions of life, which seem to have the most significance, never spring from flat emotional landscapes. They rise and fall like waves on a continuous stream of small, unconscious emotions.
The primary function of the stream of emotions is the same in humans as in all mammals, to motivate and energize behavior on the most fundamental level of "approach, avoid, attack." By habit and default, this unconscious stream of small, everyday emotions greatly influences what you will see, think, feel, and do next. If it flows from what is most important to and about you, your life will get better. If not, it will get worse.
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Steven Stosny, Ph.D., treats people for anger and relationship problems. Recent books: How to Improve your Marriage without Talking about It, and Love Without Hurt.
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God bless your family and your marriage.
Jim Stephens
