If you’re a woman, and if you’ve ever shown what society claims to be too much emotion, you’ve probably been called unstable at one point or another in your life. I know I have.

For the biggest part of my life, I felt that my emotional life was one of my biggest weaknesses. The burden of this belief has weight heavily on me, for a long time, until I understood what a strength it actually is.

Early on, I realized that crying or expressing feelings wasn’t going to cut it at home, where emotions were something that didn’t belong. Later, I was led to believe the same thing when I started my professional career. The corporate world I was venturing into hardly had room for women, let alone for their emotions. I learned to do without, to hide my emotions most of the time. Only to show them sporadically, mostly to my romantic partners – who weren’t equipped at all to deal with them – which further reinforced my belief that emotions were a problem. That I had a problem.

That’s how I came to believe that hiding my emotions was a good thing, and that the palette of colourful feelings I was gifted with (hello highly sensitive empath!) had no place in the left-brain macho world I was living in. Although, I didn’t understand the world like that at the time. The only thing I could make of it back then was that it felt as if I didn’t belong.

From feeling like I didn’t belong, I took the next logical step and convinced myself that my emotions were a weakness. One that I should hide, and do everything I could to try, and correct. From there, it was easy to include my womanhood and femininity into the mix. I started to see those qualities as weaknesses too, and secretly wished I was born differently. For that would have made my life much easier.

We live in a world that has been dominated for centuries by left-brained thinking, science and technology. There is no room for emotions, intuition, or anything other than measurable quantities in that world. In such a world – that is, in the one we actually live in – we’re all being conditioned to be like that as well. To see emotions as a weakness, something that is not quantifiable. That must be hidden.

Now, after many years of trying to live up to this programming, I know emotions are not a weakness but a strength. I got curious, and questioned my beliefs. In the process, I realized that those beliefs didn’t work for me – and that I had the ability to choose something different for myself. My inner life, in all its beautiful, bright colours, emotions, feelings was waiting for me, ready to be born again.

By embracing my emotions, magical things happened…

First, I’ve been able to make deeper and more personal connections with people from around the world. Once I stopped being ashamed of my emotions, I stepped into my power full-force and learned a new way to connect with others, especially women. Instead of competing, I learned to collaborate. Instead of comparing, I learned to help and be happy for others. Instead of thinking I was all alone and needed to be strong all the time, I learned the power of community by allowing myself to receive friendship, love, compassion, and care.

Then, letting my emotions flow allowed me to start living a more meaningful life. When you’re separated from your emotions, there are no exceptions to which emotions get silenced. Even happiness and joy don’t come easily. By opening myself up to what I was feeling, I was able to experience these emotions more profoundly, which in turn makes my life so much more worth living.

On top of that, I’ve been able to infuse my businesses with new and better values. Although I’ve always been conscious of the good that I wanted to do through my work, I once approached building and running my businesses from a very left-brain perspective. There was no real heart in my work, and not enough love for the people doing the work with me. Things are different now. I consider my businesses to be extensions of myself and, as such, they’re now flowing with emotion. My businesses have hearts now.

Finally, allowing myself to express my emotions has made me know myself so much better. I love all the feelings that I have now, even the not-so-good ones. Because they’re the proof of how infinite life is and how much potential lies in every moment.

Having all of the above in my life doesn’t make me unstable. On the contrary – it grounds me. Gives me perspective and makes me care. For others, and for myself, too. But most of all, it allows me to love and feel… which, in the end, is the most important of all.

I invite you to embrace your emotions for the strengths that they are. The world needs them. It needs you. Desperately.