Displays of Emotion (Eric Dodge)

I liked the Emotion Coding game and felt like it was applicable to situations in all parts of life. The game was quite difficult because the sentences were very awkward, and some of the emotions were a little hard to act out. This is what made the game challenging, as well as good practice for real-life situations.

When it comes to life situations, we will not have to portray an emotion while reading some silly Dr. Seuss rhyme. But there will be times when we need to portray emotions that are different from the ones that we are truly feeling. This game was good practice for that because we had to display different emotions based on the cards we drew. Each time we had to read a sentence, it was for a different emotion, that we probably were not actually feeling at the time. The fact that the sentences were so ridiculous added to the difficulty because most of the time the sentence had nothing to do with the emotion we were portraying. This made for better practice because the more difficult it was during this practice, the easier it will be when we have to do it for real.

I feel like the main goal of this game was to practice controlling which emotions we show. This can mean showing an emotion that we are not feeling, or hiding an emotion that we are feeling. Both of these are important skills in the business world because there will be times when something makes you angry, sad, disappointed, etc., but it will not be a good idea to show that you are feeling this way. On the flip side there will be times when you do not feel very strongly about an issue, but you will have to act to others as if you feel a specific way about it. It is a very valuable skill to be able to only show the emotions that you want others to see. I try to control my emotions in every part of my life, and only show the emotions that I would like others to see.

Although the game represented an extreme example of showing different emotions, I feel like it was good practice. If you can learn to show a variety of different emotions, while saying some nonsensical sentence, you should be able to portray whatever emotion you like when delivering real communication. The trick is to think about which emotion you would like to portray, and how you can achieve that.