Go With Your Gut Posted on February 28, 2008 Respect your emotions toward your work, advises Peter Salovey (bio).

A major part of my research career has been looking at the role of emotions in thinking and in behavior, a kind of functional view of emotions and how they motivate us to behave in adaptive ways; that's the basic assumption of the Emotional Intelligence perspective. And that research perspective has a kind of piece of career advice that follows from it.

And that is that what you feel passionate about is important. It is very difficult to organize a career about something that leaves you emotionally dry. You are, as we've discussed, you need to be resilient. You need to stick to things. You need to have multiple things going on at the same time. You need to manage a team. And you are not going be able to do that if you don't feel something in your gut about the subject matter that you're investigating and teaching.

And my father really gave me the advice. As I mentioned I came out of high school a math-science student. My dad is a chemist. And so I thought I would follow in his footsteps and end up with a career in, strictly in the natural sciences. I took chemistry and math and courses of that nature at Stanford. I liked them. I did well in them. But I loved psychology. I found it, I wanted to read the next chapter in the book. I couldn't wait to go to lecture. I couldn't wait to talk to my professors.

And I remember calling my father in my freshman or sophomore year in college and describing this to him. And the piece of advice he gave me is, "Your gut is essentially telling you what you should do with your life. Go with what is making you most happy. Go with what is most exciting you." And if you don't feel those things about what you're doing, you may be in the wrong field. And I don't want to discourage anybody, but if you don't get up in the morning wanting to do this, that's telling you something. On the other hand, if you do get up in the morning wanting to do this, you will be able to sustain a career.

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