Many of us carry emotional baggage, perhaps from a previous relationship or maybe from a previous experience. The baggage is usually negative. Maybe when the baggage prevents us from making a fool of ourselves it could be positive.
Now what has emotional baggage (EB) got to do with accounting?
I think quite a lot. EB is what we carry from what happened in the past which we have not yet resolved. And something in the present triggers our EB to wake up and we react (usually) nastily. The new event would not have deserved our response but for our EB.
Our past experience that we have not resolved yet nor accounted for towards the appropriate person or thing is now channeled towards a new person or thing.
It's like robbing Peter to pay Paul which again is an example of wrong accounting.
If we had been able to categorize and deal with and account correctly for our previous (negative) experience we would not incorrectly channel our baggage towards someone / something now that didn't deserve it.
The wrong accounting is obviously disliked by the person who receives it from us and if we were at the receiving end we would find it objectionable.
And if we ourselves were to understand that it was our emotional baggage from the past that caused us to say or do something inappropriate in the present we would be horrified.
I guess people who are introverted by nature or those who, for some reason, couldn't find an outlet for their problem in the past are more likely to carry emotional baggage (and then unleash it on someone who certainly didn't deserve it).
An interesting twist is when we unleash our negative emotion on someone, for something rather trivial that they did, against whom we have some baggage from the past. The twist is that Rob and Peter are the same person in this case. When we unleash our rage at Rob, he is taken by surprise because our reaction is disproportionate to what they did. They do not realize that we have carried forward some old "balance" that we had with him. How is Rob to know about our old baggage? So he thinks we are being irrational.
Few days back an emotionally intelligent friend of mine told me that she had stopped talking with her aunt. She explained to me that her aunt had used my friend's time rather unnecessarily and that the aunt had seemed rather insouciant or unrepentant. The aunt had asked my friend to do something for her and when the thing was almost done the aunt had told her it wasn't important and she could abort the effort. When my friend asked her aunt why she, the aunt, had earlier had impressed upon my friend that the issue was urgent only up abort it later her aunt replied that she had never told my friend that it was urgent.
My friend told me she was furious with her aunt for lying to her and for having thus wasted her time. This was the incident that started me thinking about baggage.
Now my friend is hardly a person who would get upset because someone aborted an endeavor which caused my friend's effort to go waste. She herself does it to others. And as to "lying" she herself lies about trivial things as all emotionally intelligent people do. For my friend, disturbance of her inner peace is completely unacceptable while lying to her or use of her efforts is hardly an issue with her. Or so I think.
Why, I thought to myself, would my friend react so badly to her aunt's behavior which was somewhat like her own? And I realized, or felt, that there was some baggage between my friend and her aunt. The right account got debited but for the wrong reason and at the wrong time.
An interesting twist is when we unleash our negative emotion on someone, for something rather trivial that they did, against whom we have some baggage from the past. The twist is that Rob and Peter are the same person in this case. When we unleash our rage at Rob, he is taken by surprise because our reaction is disproportionate to what they did. They do not realize that we have carried forward some old "balance" that we had with him. How is Rob to know about our old baggage? So he thinks we are being irrational.
Few days back an emotionally intelligent friend of mine told me that she had stopped talking with her aunt. She explained to me that her aunt had used my friend's time rather unnecessarily and that the aunt had seemed rather insouciant or unrepentant. The aunt had asked my friend to do something for her and when the thing was almost done the aunt had told her it wasn't important and she could abort the effort. When my friend asked her aunt why she, the aunt, had earlier had impressed upon my friend that the issue was urgent only up abort it later her aunt replied that she had never told my friend that it was urgent.
My friend told me she was furious with her aunt for lying to her and for having thus wasted her time. This was the incident that started me thinking about baggage.
Now my friend is hardly a person who would get upset because someone aborted an endeavor which caused my friend's effort to go waste. She herself does it to others. And as to "lying" she herself lies about trivial things as all emotionally intelligent people do. For my friend, disturbance of her inner peace is completely unacceptable while lying to her or use of her efforts is hardly an issue with her. Or so I think.
Why, I thought to myself, would my friend react so badly to her aunt's behavior which was somewhat like her own? And I realized, or felt, that there was some baggage between my friend and her aunt. The right account got debited but for the wrong reason and at the wrong time.
How does one probe this baggage? How does one ensure that one doesn't rob Peter unnecessarily? Or that the debit happens at the right time for the right reason.
Does a good accounting brain help?
Does a good accounting brain help?
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