Communicating with people brings out emotions, and our feelings affect our behavior, human relations, happiness, and performance in our personal and professional lives. Emotions overpower rational thought and others' behavior influences our emotions and how we handle emotions. Thus, understanding emotions and how to manage your and others' emotions is important to personal and career success.

Emotions are often just called feelings, and we express them when we communicate. There are six universal emotions: happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, and disgust. We should realize that feelings are subjective; they tell us people’s attitudes and needs. Feelings are usually disguised as factual statements. Most important, feelings are neither right nor wrong, but behavior is, so we should not make judgments and evaluate feelings, only behavior.

We cannot choose our feelings or control them. However, we can control how we express our feelings. Also, if someone says something that upsets you, you will feel the emotion and then choose your behavior, such as to say nothing, give the person a dirty look, or yell or throw something. People can’t see our feelings, only our behavior that expresses those feelings.

Emotions are more clearly revealed through nonverbal communications than verbally. If people are angry, they don’t usually tell us. But we can tell by the look on the person’s face, the tone of voice, and so on. So to truly understand feeling, pay attention to nonverbal emotional behavior as you interact with people.

At work, we are expected to control our behavior, not our feelings. Emotional labor requires the expression of feeling through desired behavior. You are expected to be cheerful with customers, to be pleasant with coworkers, and to avoid expressing feeling through negative behavior at work.