Four or more years of math, logic, science, and engineering can turn anyone into an automaton, and I was no exception. I had a lot of contempt for the soft side of life. Emotions and feelings were not real, just some figment of someone's overactive hormones acting up.
In the last several years, I have done a lot of work with therapists and self-help through reading to get my head on straight and have a better life.
In the process I had a few realizations:
1. There is a lot of sound work and theory behind psychology
2. Emotions and feelings are very real to people. You have to acknowledge that.
3. Most self-help books have some really important nugget to take away, but...
4. The good nuggets are at a very low density in most of the reading.
5. It might be useful to someone if I attempted to explain some of these soft concepts in terms that an engineer (or maybe just a guy) could understand.
In putting together the posts, I want to emphasize that I am still learning a lot of this stuff. I try to do things right, but often I fail. So if I talk about what good communication looks like, it doesn't mean that I am an expert at it. Like everyone, I'm just trying to get by.
Something that I'm noticing is that as I grow older (I'm about 50 now), I tend to get more emotional and sentimental about things. I am quite certain that it relates to decrease in testosterone (about 1% per year after age 30 in males). This is frustrating at times, but it has also allowed me to build a greater experience base with my emotional side.
On to Feelings Are Facts>>>
