Minding Your Mind: How to moderate your emotions when making big career decisions

Based on the popular podcast of the same name, Minding Your Mind by Ian Hickie and James O’Loghlin explores all aspects of our amazing mind and our mental health. Our mind can do wonderful things — think through problems, come up with creative ideas, and feel happiness and love.

It can also cause make us anxious and depressed. Minding Your Mind explores everything, the good and the bad, that our mind can do, the different types of mental health issues we can experience, their causes, how they affect us, and what we can do to get help and find solutions.

The following is an extract from Minding Your Mind by Ian Hickie and James O’Loghlin, published by Penguin Random House Australia. Out now.

Big career decisions

When we make big decisions — moving house, changing jobs — we often weigh the pros and cons in a logical way, but we also ask ourselves if it feels right. Even if a new job would be a good career move and pay us more, if it doesn’t feel right, or we are emotionally drawn to something else, that can often be the deciding factor, even when the final decision seems counterintuitive or irrational.

Sometimes the best decisions combine both the emotional and rational. As James was about to embark on a career as a lawyer, he saw a night of stand-up comedy and immediately knew it was for him. It was an immediate, powerful emotional feeling of connection, but it would have been very risky for him to turn his back on a stable career before he knew if he would be any good at comedy. So (rationally) he hedged his bets, doing both jobs for several years, then going part-time as a lawyer, and eventually, when his comedy career seemed viable, giving up law completely. The emotion came first, followed by a series of logical steps.

Animals that live in groups, like dogs and apes, struggle between group cohesion and the desire to get to the top. So do we, in our corporate, organisational and political cultures. People certainly make rational, strategic and tactical decisions to help them get to the top, but why are they doing it?

The television show Breaking Bad tells the story of Walter White, a bored, mild-mannered high school teacher, who, after being diagnosed with cancer, gradually becomes a ruthless drug dealer. His initial justification is, “I have a son with a disability, a wife and a baby, and I need to make sure they will have enough money after I die.”

However, it slowly becomes clear his deeper motivation is his emotional need for power and excitement. In the final episode he admits his motivation was more emotional than rational: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And, I was really . . . I was alive.”

Justifying emotional decisions

Humans often downplay the extent that emotion drives their decisions. We like to think we make decisions rationally. So, when you are analysing a decision you made that turned out badly, think about why you made that decision. Not just the surface desires you were trying to fulfil, but also your emotional impulses or deeper needs. Say tasks were being allocated at your workplace; you thought it was being done unfairly and decided to argue.

You thought you would be calm and composed, but when you started talking, you were upset and angry. You may have had rational points to make,
but what happened had much more to do with your feelings of being ignored and left out. Often the rational explanation has very little to do with it. It
is just an elaborate attempt to explain what was impulsive and instinctual. We are often drawn to certain things, even though they would predictably result in chaos. People frequently start new sexual or other intimate relationships despite the likelihood that they will wreak havoc on their existing world. Then they try to justify it in some rational way: “Me and my partner lost our spark. I’ve found my soulmate.” However, their decision-making is usually much more emotional than rational.