KATHMANDU: Zig Ziglar, the legendary author, salesman and motivational speaker, said, “People don’t buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.” Let me go one step further to tell you that people do everything for emotional reasons. What we call ‘human beings’ are basically ‘emotional beings’. An emotion is the drive that makes us take a decision or act in a particular manner. It is basically ‘energy in motion’. Deep within us, there is a storehouse of emotions — both negative and positive — that drives us to perform certain actions in a certain way. Positive emotions include love, compassion, courage, loyalty, forgiveness, tolerance, peace and cooperation. Similarly, envy, pride, sloth, greed, lust, anger, guilt and fear are examples of negative emotions.

What is an advertisement? Where does it hit you? An advertisement hits our feelings and propels our emotions to take certain actions. No advertisement directly forces us to put our hands into our pockets to buy a product; it cannot do that. It touches our feelings first based on how we perceived the communication and its message. The feelings then stir our related emotions into action. All this happens at an unconscious level, which we may not be aware of. As a result, we unconsciously make the decision to buy the product.

Emotions swing us into action; they are responsible for everything that is happening in the world. Love or war — an emotion is always at work.

“If you don’t manage your emotions, your emotions will manage you,” warn Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman in their book Transforming Anx-iety. Certain emotions prompted Hitler to kill millions of people; certain other emotions exhorted Mother Teresa to save so many lives. Gautam Buddha needed an extraordinary level of compassion and fearlessness to encounter Angulimala. An important point to be noted here is that success in life depends on the intensity of our emotions. Great people have extraordinary emotions, and the mediocre ones specialise in limiting the surge of emotions.

So, how do we use our emotions to create the life that we always dreamed of? The answer is simple: identify your positive emotions and do everything required to increase its intensity. “All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and distorts you,” says Rainer Maria Rilke.

There is an inexhaustible source of emotions within you. Find reasons to increase your positive emotions and create the right circumstances that will automatically foster their growth. For example, if you are interested in going for higher studies, meet people who have done extraordinarily well at studies. Talk to them, find out how they are motivated and make them your close friends.

Do not try to overcome negative emotions directly.

You cannot do that. Instead, work on intensifying your positive emotions, and you will find that negative emotions evaporate in no time. There is only one fuel for achievement: positive emotions. And the good news is you can harness your emotions yourself. Charge yourself. Charge your emotions today.

(The author is the president of Jeevan Vigyan Kendra, a modern spiritual organisation, and principal of Apex College. He can be contacted through bhanu@jeevanvigyan.com)