Displaying Emotions

The Emotion Coding game was quite interesting and challenging to me. I was doing quite well at the  decoding part, but my encoding part was poor. I drew the Irritated and Inspiring cards. Two team members understood that I was displaying the inspiring motion, but when I tried to express irritated, my team members thought the motion was bored. This game was quite interesting to me because from it I realized that expressing negative motions was something I needed to work on.

My poor performance at the game reflects my personality in real life. I often do not say "no" when somebody ask for help even when I don't like the person or I am too busy with my own stuff. Also, when my friends ask me if I am OK with something, I never say no even though I don't agree with them at times. Looking back, I found the cause of my difficulty in expressing negative emotions. As a child, I was quite straightforward and often offended other people as a result. My dad told me time after time that I needed to care about other people's feeling and not to express negative emotions easily. Because of what my dad said and the need to make more friends, I tried to change  the way I talked. I become quiet and often hide my negative emotions because I don't want to offend other people.

I realize that hiding negative emotions may help build friendship. But to be a good leader, I need to express feelings like anger and disappointment appropriately. It's hard for me to change the way I talk in a short time, but I believe that I can achieve the goal eventually.