On Emotional Speed

I’m a man of action. The hundreds of ideas and initiatives I want to put into motion right now tend to alarm the people around me. My decisions look like they’re built on logic, but behind every one of them there’s an emotional experience I’ve already lived through — especially when it comes to facing down fears or doubts.

For a long time I couldn’t understand why, the moment I tried to move a situation straight into concrete steps, I ran into a wall. Why do people push back even after I’ve laid it all out, point by point? The key turned out to be a difference in the speed of emotional perception.

When I offer a solution, to me it’s already obvious: I’ve lived through it inside, made my peace with it, and I’m ready to act. But for someone hearing it for the first time, the road to that same solution can take longer. They haven’t yet grasped or felt the situation. And at times that’s irritating. It’s all logical, isn’t it?

I move through emotions just as fast: a conflict or a joy is, an hour later, already part of the past. It surprises me when others keep turning something over, going back to it again and again. It stirs up this urge in me to speed up their emotional process, as if that were even possible. But no.

Recently I coined a term for myself — “emotional speed.” It’s the individual pace at which a person lives through their emotional states and returns to a point of balance. Until emotions are digested, they run us — fears, expectations and inner pressure get in the way of making conscious decisions, even ones that come from intuition.

Everyone’s pace is their own, and there’s no “good” or “bad” here. Some handle their feelings quickly, some need more time. I had to learn to accept this, stepping on the same rake countless times out of my habit of running ahead of the train. Here’s what I understood: every step in the process is an action with its own weight. And when there are too many steps, or they come too fast, you hit overload — and everyone has their own tolerance for it.

When we try to speed up someone else’s emotional process, it causes deep discomfort. The person may shut down, start defending themselves, or feel resentment. At the level of the nervous system it reads as pressure. Which means no constructive interaction is going to happen.

To keep reminding myself of this, I set my phone wallpaper to an image of a lightning bolt — the first association that came to mind on the subject. It became an “anchor” for me — a reminder that’s always with me, of how important it is to give people time to live their emotions at their own rhythm.

When we respect other people’s emotional boundaries and speeds, a space opens up for genuine conversation and deep connection.

Here’s to all of us staying attuned to our own pace and others’, and to giving emotions the “air” to be lived through! 😎