How To Use Emotions To Get What You Want
Our emotions, positive and negative, provide the tools necessary to focus on what truly matters.
Magic: The Gathering is one of the few indulgences in my life that I love to get into, though my opportunity to play it isn’t all that often. With my local game store no longer hosting any Magic events, I’m pretty much stuck playing with a few of my friends whenever we get time to do so.
What this does for me is between then and the next time we eventually play, I remember some of the outcomes of the games we’ve played. I rethink strategies and things I could’ve done differently. I think about the decks I can tweak or create that would be a lot of fun to play.
But I ultimately remember the emotions I experienced in the game and connect that to the plays I made and the cards in my own decks.
For the past few sessions, I lost every game with a few times being pretty close. But between those sessions and the session my group had yesterday, I won two of the three games we played.
Despite the way I make it sound, I’m not the incredibly competitive type. I won’t “flip the table” if I lose a game or get particularly frustrated if I end up losing.
But I will look at suboptimal plays or decisions that I made that weren’t the best decision and make adjustments to my behaviour, but also the deck itself. And how I do all of this is through emotions.
Because despite me not being overly competitive, I still would like to win some of the time and at worst make a deck that is fun and challenging to overcome for my opponents. And my emotions are what help me get to that point.
Your Emotions Get You To Focus
The rules surrounding Commander are very restrictive. Beyond basic land cards you need to play the game, you’re restricted to one copy of a card in the deck at all times. This is on top of a Commander deck being only 99 cards too.
Since you’re able to select any card in the history of Magic (minus banned cards) to put into the deck, players have thousands of options of combos, synergies, and strategies that they can choose from to put into the deck.
Depending on the colour identity of your commander and the cards and strategies you want to pull off, some strategies are easier to do while others are harder.
The overall strategy of the deck, in other words, is the “story” of the deck. It’s a term I picked up from a streamer I watch — Day9TV.
What this means is simply asking yourself what is the story that you want to tell with the deck? In other words, what is its intended purpose? And most importantly, what cards are going to be able to help you complete the story as quickly as possible.
A story is an emotional one of course, but each and every card has a feel to it and contributes to the overall story in its own way. If you don’t like a certain part of the story, you can cut the card out and replace it with something else. If it’s too unrealistic, you can remove certain pieces and put in something that feels better in theory.
At the end of the day, building a deck is entirely emotional and making adjustments is emotional too.
And when you leverage those emotions, you’re able to figure out steadily what the deck is supposed to do and do it consistently.
You win in either cases in that you literally win, or you get to do what the deck was intended to do.
Of course, with Magic, there is a chance you don’t get to do that. Sometimes you’re drawing nothing but land or sometimes not getting enough land to do what you wanted to do in the first place.
But that’s not always the case in other matters of life. We’re all living out our “story” right now. Every day. Every moment. This is our story. And what you are feeling right now and onward is something worth asking:
Am I doing what I want to be doing?
You see, our emotions give us a great deal of focus when we ask for it. And often that’s delivered through our emotions. Just like with building a Commander deck, I can ask myself how the deck feels and whether I’ve made the right decisions of putting these particular cards in the deck. Whether I should dismantle certain decks and what new decks I want to brew.
Life has many branching decisions in the same way and our emotions can steer us into the direction that we want to go in the first place by letting us focus on what matters. After all, what matters is finding a path that feels right for us, however that looks like.
Emotions Give Us The Motivation
Most self-help gurus focus on the power of positive motivation in order to direct people to where they want them to go. We see this time and again through hustle bro culture, large crowds filled with positive energy and inspirational music.
It’s everywhere.
And while we know that, there is a case to be said about negative emotions fuelling us as well.
Whenever I lose a game of Commander, I ask myself what could I have done better? Even in scenarios where I win, I also dwell a little bit on what things didn’t feel right or fit with what I wanted to do.
What sort of things didn’t work in the way that I thought they’d work out.
On the life stage, negative energy is just as important as the positive energy that’s pushed so often. We’ve seen union workers win big sweeping changes to their industry because they were frustrated with how they’ve been treated.
Sometimes you get angry with yourself to the point you force yourself to change or do something you’ve been putting off.
I use my negative emotions in my deck construction to ultimately build better decks within my own personal restrictions. This is on top of using it on occasion to push myself into doing something different.
Getting what you want in life demands work from you in many different ways. But it’s our emotions that are effectively the starter. They are the spark that sets everything in motion.
Wallowing in our emotions doesn’t get us anywhere and it’s about as effective as willing something into existence. It simply won’t go anywhere. It’s until you begin to take action where we see our emotions guiding us and giving us that focus that we want to pursue what we want in the first place.
It’s why self-help gurus provide something at least tangible to us to give us a sense of realism. That we’re pursuing something.
Leveraging our emotions ultimately give us that energy to move on past that emotion and experience more along the path. For once, it’s an actual good loop, provided that what you are focusing on is realistic and something you personally value.
While Keeping Our Expectations Realistic
All of my Commander decks have some similarities but I do try to mix them up drastically. Even so there are some decks that I will say are not optimized at all.
There is one deck that is a three-card combo and drawing those key cards is pretty tough for this deck in particular. I’m more likely to win in completely different circumstances other than that specific combo.
But I still have it in the deck because the entirety of the deck isn’t optimized at all.
It’s more of a meme deck rather than a dream deck. It’s one that I’ve purposely made it into something more fun rather than trying hard to win.
What this means is whenever I play that deck, my goal isn’t to be digging for that specific combo every time. If I happen to get it, great. If I don’t, I won’t be losing sleep over it.
This coincides with my values in self-help pertaining to manifesting things in your life in that it’s important to curb your expectations. To think realistically about what it is you’re doing and what you are currently capable of.
Of course, we can still grow and improve. We can change our mindsets and adapt to a changing environment. We’re flexible individuals in that regard. But we do also have to face some hard facts and recognize our own individual limitations in the process too.
Our emotions work as a sort of anchor in that regard. It keeps us hopeful without disconnecting us from reality entirely. We keep it real.
And when it comes to getting what you want out of life, our emotions effectively tells us what we can achieve and what we can’t at the time. Better yet it encourages us to focus and make some adjustments so we can get what we want in our next attempt.
One of the reasons entrepreneurs second business ideas work is because the first one failed and they gained a lot of experience in what to do and what not to do for next time. Our lives work in a similar fashion where we learn from our mistakes and our emotions provide reminders along the way.
We will always remember how we feel during those moments and those stay with us.
It ensures that what we are pursuing in our lives is something that we desire and that we can obtain ourselves with a little bit of life adjustments and mindset shifts.
Our emotions can do an incredible amount of things for us and self-help gurus know this. The only problem is that so many choose to focus on the positive ones and build their empire around it.
While it is helpful, a lot of the problems that the industry faces though is a result of us focusing so much on the positive. Beyond that, there are still so many people who become disillusioned by many who only focus on the positives rather than a more balanced approach.
The reality is those who focus on the positive vibes are somewhat right. We can get what we want out of life. But not through the methods and strategies that they constantly encourage.
When it comes to our emotions, if we stay true to them and use them appropriately, we can set ourselves up to figure out not only the path but to find the courage and motivation to pursue that path in the first place. All we have to do is see our emotions, process them, and move on to the next one.
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