Your Goal

The previous exercise allowed you to pull together your thoughts about the situation and decision. This exercise is designed to allow you to pull together your emotions about the situation and decision.

You probably have quite strong feelings about this situation. These feelings can either be appropriate in which case they can be a royal road to what matters in the situation. But they can also be inappropriate, making you misperceive the situation like the fox in Aesop's tale who says that the out-of-reach grapes are sour.

You will want to assess their appropriateness as later in the procedure these emotions are going to be crucial for getting at the values you wish to realise with your decision.

Try the following tasks

• Review the list of emotions you recorded earlier
  
  
• Remove any emotions that you no longer experience and add any that are missing
  
  
• If the strength of any of the emotions has changed alter this
  
  
• If you now believe the emotions are about something other than what you originally recorded change this.
  
  
• Add an "appropriate " column and write down whether you now think the emotion is an appropriate response (yes, partly,  no or '?' if you are not sure). If you wish to record your reason why you think your emotion is or is not appropriate you can do so as well.Your emotion is appropriate if :
  
  
  1. The judgements and beliefs that underlie the feeling are sound.
     For example, if you feel anxious about losing your job, this would be inappropriate if there really was no chance of you losing your job
     
     
     
  2. The strength of the emotion is proportionate (not too strong or too weak) to the situation.
     If you feel 90% anxiety about losing your job, but you really don't need the job, very much, then it would be the degree of the emotion rather than the emotion itself that was inappropriate.
     

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