{"id":7061,"date":"2019-05-16T16:10:29","date_gmt":"2019-05-16T14:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/?p=7061"},"modified":"2021-09-22T17:31:45","modified_gmt":"2021-09-22T15:31:45","slug":"should-you-always-follow-your-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/2019\/05\/should-you-always-follow-your-heart\/","title":{"rendered":"Should you always follow your heart?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI always follow my heart\u201d said the swimming champion to the reporter.<\/p>\n<p>In the background her coach is standing with a stopwatch in his hand.<\/p>\n<p>As it seems she also makes decisions based on the facts. However she values her feelings higher than her reasoning.<\/p>\n<p>It reflects the spirit of the times. Emotion is <em>hot, <\/em>ratio is not. Because, as we say, people are irrational beings.<\/p>\n<p><b>That is a fallacy<\/b><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not that we have to follow our <em>heart<\/em> because we are irrational beings, we have to use <em>reasoning<\/em> because we are irrational beings.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s for good reason that we have a left and right part to our brain. This ensures a counterbalance to our emotional impulses. To protect us from decisions we may later come to regret.<\/p>\n<p>But in the word <em>regret<\/em> people see a reason to follow their instincts. Because, as they say, it is better to regret something than not to have done it at all.<\/p>\n<p><b>That is a fallacy too!<\/b><\/p>\n<p>You wouldn\u2019t mention this statement to someone who was on the point of committing a serious crime. Such a ridiculous one-liner could only have been thought up by someone whose reason had been switched off.<\/p>\n<p>But just wait a minute\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Now it\u2019s me who allows my feelings to take over. I\u2019m upset. It happens as easily as that.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently it\u2019s this emotion-hype which makes me feel misunderstood as a professional thinker. It concerns me that the heart overrules any reasoning, analysis, justification and logic, all of which I hold so dear.<\/p>\n<p><b>I understand where it is all coming from<\/b><\/p>\n<p>It derives from marketing, which aims to sell products and to earn money.<\/p>\n<p>Marketers do <em>not<\/em> want us to use our heads. They want to tap into our desires and not our sense of reality. And as such they make full use of the fact that people are indeed irrational beings. In that scenario everybody accepts, strangely enough, that the product is better presented than it actually is. After all we have the Consumers Association when we need a reality check.<\/p>\n<p>Since we consider Marketing and Communication as one field of study, allurement techniques have crept in to Change Management. For change agents this results in the pitfall to be being primarily concerned with arousing people\u2019s yearnings. Rationale then becomes the old ball and chain. It is boring and dull. It generates no energy.<\/p>\n<p>However when you tap in to people\u2019s desires without them understanding what they are saying \u201cyes\u2019 to, then the change process will eventually stagnate, namely when reality kicks in. In the field of Marketing this is relatively unimportant as by that moment the money has already been spent. But in change at that moment the most difficult part of the process still has to start.<\/p>\n<p><b>But I do get that vice versa isn\u2019t necessarily true either<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Emotion without reason leads to daft decisions, reason without emotion leads to empty decisions.<\/p>\n<p>Of course it\u2019s necessary to use both emotion and reason when making a decision. Because your emotions tell you if you seriously <em>want<\/em> to change, your rationale tells you if you <em>are able<\/em> to change.<\/p>\n<p>The trick is to find the point in every change where the sense of yearning and the sense of reality meet each other.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-7146 size-thumbnail alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Annemarie-Mars-150x145.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"145\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Annemarie-Mars-150x145.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Annemarie-Mars-300x291.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Annemarie-Mars-768x744.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Annemarie-Mars-45x45.jpg 45w, https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Annemarie-Mars.jpg 803w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m Annemarie Mars: speaker, author and advisor on change.<\/p>\n<p>It is my job to get people thinking about the way they give room, direction and guidance to organizations in motion. So that they can look for the essential conversation to change together.<\/p>\n<p>Want to know more about my presentations? <a href=\"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/services\/presentations\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Click here.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<h6 style=\"text-align: center;\"><em><strong>Photo credits: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/46286575@N00\/418819109\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">&#8220;Canada Geese Landing at Sunset&#8221;<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/46286575@N00\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Pen Waggener<\/a>\u00a0is licensed under\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/?ref=ccsearch&amp;atype=rich\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI always follow my heart\u201d said the swimming champion to the reporter.<\/p>\n<p>In the background her coach is standing with a stopwatch in his hand.<\/p>\n<p>As it seems she also makes decisions based on the facts. However she values her feelings higher than her reasoning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7102,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nieuws"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7061"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7249,"href":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7061\/revisions\/7249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.forachange.nl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}