I'm afraid to tell you...

Those who can act with a natural disregard for emotion are my heroes.

Giving advice to others is easy. Taking that advice is hard. Fear gets in the way. Without ownership in the results of decisions, the advisor can give logical, rational reasons to do something.

The hardest decisions require rational thinking, yet emotions creep into the thinking process. These emotions take an equity position in our decisions. We make decisions based on emotion rather than rational reasons.

Roy Williams of Wizard of Ads has seven laws of advertising.

One of them is:
"Intellect and Emotion are partners who do not speak the same language. The intellect finds logic to justify what the emotions have decided. Win the hearts of the people, their minds will follow."

This blog isn't about advertising. It's about that emotions that wander into the decision making process.

I'm no better than the next person. Fear enters my consciousness regularly.

Some say I'm fearless.
Aline will tell you that's not even close to the truth.

Some say I have an infectious confidence that everything always works out.
Although I am extremely confident to my own detriment, I also know things don't always work out as planned.

Fear works on me everyday.
Some days it wraps its slimy fingers around my throat and slips me into submission.

Those are tough days.

Other days, when I win the round with my emotions. I kick it in the groin and work through the problem.

Those days, I use my secret weapon.
The weapon has nothing to do with me and more to do with the process I use.

Tell a person to calm down when they are mad and you know what happens. They get madder or resentful.
Tell a person to not feel sad, and they start to cry.
Emotions are not logical.

When I'm emotional about an important decision that needs to be made, I use a lifeline like in the TV show "Who wants to be a millionaire".
I call the most rational, logical person I know.
I talk it out loud.
I hear myself speak the irrational thoughts as they leave my tongue.
It is those moments that wake me up from my emotional induced dream.

In my friend's logical Spock like voice, he lures me away from the cliff. He rationalizes the problem. Being unaffected by my decisions, he can look at my problem logically. He helps me see the world a little clearer.

The best way to eliminate fear is not to avoid it. It's to face it head on. It's to act despite it. And most importantly to talk to a logical left brained person who can separate the emotion from the decision.