Truth Bomb Tuesday: They told you your superpower was a curse…
Are you sitting on a hidden super-power?
Are you squashing it?
There’s a good chance you are.
When I first got into the game, an older investor once told me that women don’t make for good property investors because they’re ‘too emotional’.
You needed a good, logical head on your shoulders. You needed to be able to meet the numbers on their merits. You needed to focus on the property’s marketable features, not whether you like the colour of the curtains in the kitchen.
(I got so emotional and upset that I kicked a hole in his car door with my Blundstones.)
This is obviously nonsense. In my experience, men are just as emotional (=likely to make bad financial decisions on impulse) as women. They just get ‘emotional’ about different things.
(I’ve never heard a woman say she wanted to buy a property because “look how close it is to the skate park!”)
But the other thing is that, regardless of gender, our emotions are our super-power. If they’re harnessed in the right way, they become the only star we can reliably navigate by.
This isn’t just the opinion of an opinionated woman either. This is hard science.
Back in the 1990s, the neurologist Antonio Damassio studied people with damaged orbitofrontal cortexes.
These people had lost the ability to feel any emotion at all. There was no impact on their intelligence. Just the complete absence of emotion.
How do you think those people went?
You might imagine, like my old mate, that their curse was actually a blessing. Surely without the baggage of irrational emotions, their life would be nothing but an easy road built on calm, logical decisions, right?
Surely they’re just gliding through life, right?
Wrong.
Their lives were a mess.
Without emotion it became impossible to make decisions. Every decision had to be evaluated on its metrics.
So a question like, which café should we go to, became a nightmare. They couldn’t default to something like “I like the vibe at that place more.”
They had to compare prices across the full menu, or scan the reviews at Yelp to see which one got the best score.
Every decision became like this. And it became completely exhausting for them.
The thing we don’t appreciate about our emotions is that they are the source of all our drive.
Our desire to build a better life, to attain financial freedom, to help our friends and family and be an anchor in our community – all of these things are emotional considerations.
They tell us where we should be going. They are the only star we can navigate by.
And once we’ve decided where we want to go, then yes, cool-headed, rational, logical thought is super useful.
But without emotion, it’s useless.
And that’s why I say that emotion in your super power.
Even though at some point (probably a man) has told you that it’s a burden – a character flaw.
And even thought you probably thought you should squash and smoother your emotions away, so you could make it in this cold and rational world.
This is the tragic story that we’re all waking up from.
Your ability to feel – that is your superpower.
Don’t let anyone take it from you.
DB.