Interdisciplinary Commerce Studies Course Reflection

Part 1

In this section, I learned that having emotional awareness is important for anybody regardless of their profession, their interests, or their lifestyle. One way to think about emotions according to Chris Delaney of Employment King is by how much heat they generate, the color they represent, or the part of the body that they effect. Delaney suggests that a counselor ask their clients to draw a human body and then use one of those three methods to describe the emotion (Delaney 11). So, some people may feel sorrow, for instance, as blue, cold or located in the heart, where others may see it as black, hot, and located in the eyes that shed tears when there is sorrow.

Understanding that other perceive and experience emotions differently than one’s self helps leaders in any industry sector to understand those who follow them. If they can understand how their followers may be experiencing emotions, that gives them some way to work with those they supervise. An understanding of another person’s emotions can lead to an understanding of what motivates a person. It can hel to understand what sort of work motivated them and what sort of work feels purposeful to them. Knowing how emotions affects another person also provides a greater understanding about what type of praise or rewards motivates a person. These are all useful tools for being a leader and being able to inspire followers.

Having an understanding of the emotions that others feel can provide insight into better ways to communicate with employees also. Knowing what affects employees helps to create an environment that is conducive to their happiness and well-being while in the workplace, which will make them loyal and willing to work hard for a boss who undetstands them. It also helps to generate a culture of cooperation and collaboration, which is important for successful teamwork.

Part 2

In this section I learned that having knowledge about how emotions affect others can be beneficial, but also knowing how they affect one’s own self is also important. For instance, understanding how one makes decisions and how emotions affect that process is important especially for leaders. The website, Psychology Compass, explains that the same part of the brain that is responsbile for expressing and experiencing emotions, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is also involved in the decision making process (Psychology Compass). Some think that decision making should be a rational, logic and objective activity, but emotions must enter into the process too. If a person were to always make decisions without considering his or her emotions, there would eventually be a negative impact and it would probably come sooner rather than later.

One part of making sound decisions and including one’s emotions to do it is knowing that there are two types of emotions. The first type are incidental emotions. They occur in the background and probably have no relation to the actual decision. A good example is the happiness a person feels when their dog greets them at the door after work. That emotion may fade into the background while the person makes a decision about whether to punish their child for not doing his homework. The other type of emotions are integral emotions. These emotions are those that are caused by the decision making itself such as anxiety over whether or not making the decision to punish the child is a good example of parenting.

Incidental emotions are constant and may have nothing to do with decision making. A leader should be aware of this and should not let it affect decision making if the emotion is not related to the decision. Being aware of how one’s mood affects the risk one perceives in making a decision is also important (Psychology Compass). Being aware of how one’s mood affects one’s outlook is important in leadership.

Part 3

In this section, the message was that being a leader means asking one’s followers to do things. Asking, according to Edgar Schein, who wrote Humble Inquiry “temporarily empowers the other person in the conversation” and temporarily makes the asker of the question vulnerable. Asking another person a question implies that they know something that the asker of the question needs to know. “It draws the other person into the situation and into the driver’s seat; it enables the other person to help or hurt [the asker] and, thereby, opens the door to building a relationship” (Schein 9). So being vulnerable and asking questions, even if one already knows the answer, is a good way to develop a line of communication.

Socrates used the teaching method of asking questions. Usually Socratic questions are in the form of a directive. When the responder asks a question in return, Socrates would