Emotions are a powerful navigational tool that can help you make better decisions under challenging circumstances and emotions provide valuable guidance. While strong negative emotions like anger and grief may feel overwhelming, your inner life is a valuable source of information. If you can learn to analyze your emotions without feeling overwhelmed, you’ll cultivate an emotional agility that will make you more successful, flexible, and happy.

Negative emotions like fear serve a vital function. Strong emotions often contain messages about your life and the need for change. For example, chronic frustration with a romantic partner could signal that it’s time for the relationship to evolve. If you repress those negative emotions, you’ll miss the message. But if you can undertake a more dispassionate review, examining the emotion as a response to the outside world, you’re likely to learn something and Emotions provide valuable guidance.

Consider stress, a commonly misunderstood emotion. Many people view stress as an enemy that must be defeated. This attitude only worsens the emotional burden of stress. Instead, you should understand stress as an indicator. Sometimes stress signals that you need to slow down. Other times, stress can be a motivational tool that helps you push through to the end of a project. If you can decipher what your stress is trying to tell you, it will become easier to manage the emotion.

It’s better to jump than to be pushed.

At some point in life, everyone experiences a nagging feeling that something in their life needs to change. Maybe it’s a job. Maybe it’s a relationship. Steve Harvey, the comedian and television personality, says that if you aren’t proactive in making that change, the universe is likely to impose one. Emotions provide valuable guidance.

Harvey says that to realize your dreams, you can’t simply wait around for something to happen. You need to make a leap of faith, triggering a change with your own actions.

Making a jump might seem frightening or even impossible when you feel stuck in an unhappy situation. It may seem easier to simply stay in an unsatisfying job or relationship. The frightening prospect of losing your family or going broke looms large. But Harvey says that when you’re willing to take a chance on your own happiness, the universe will provide.

You may have to jump more than once. Successful people often make leaps of faith at different points in their lives, understanding that the exhilaration of the jump is part of what it means to feel fully alive. Emotions provide valuable guidance.