Because of your good work in the past, your boss has decided to give you a more challenging work. You feel important, joyful and proud of yourself. However, you are worried about the challenge ahead. Your inner-voice reassures you that you will be able to do the task successfully.

During the project you are always wondering if your boss is happy with your progress or is thinking that you would never make it and that you are not made for the job. “What if it all goes wrong?”, you ask yourself.

Eventually you reach the deadline, pleased with yourself that you did well after all. Your boss examines your work and tells you that some part of your work is not up to standard and you need to work on it. You don’t get any praise or even a simple “thank you” for your work.

Back to self-talk again! You are not happy at all. You think that all your hard work has gone to waste. You feel that you have been exploited and the situation is completely unfair.

You start to think if you are in the right job and perhaps you should start looking for another job and initiate a change in your life’s direction!

What happened here? Somehow you ended up feeling very emotional and lost control. Your self-talk seems to have accelerated the sequence of events to the point where you felt completely hopeless and you even carry on with the current job.

This is what Daniel Goleman calls Emotional Hijacking. Your logical brain is hijacked by another part of your brain responsible for processing emotions. This hijacking can have great consequences as it short-circuits your logical brain and lead you to decide emotionally. Why do we have such a section in our brains and what it is good for? Do we really need it? How does it work? To answer these questions let’s look at the brain more closely and understand what emotions are all about.