Master Your Emotions: Unleash the Power Within
You are emotions driven.
Most people think their rational mind is in charge, but in reality it is their emotions. People who don't have emotions - there are examples due to a cancer brain surgery - loose their complete drive in life, nothing matters anymore. We need to face it: emotions are in the driver seat of our life. The problem is that you cannot control them directly. You need to treat them more like a good friend who you want to give advise.
A key to a successful life is to learn how to master your emotions. Don't your emotions take the decisions in your life, don't run on auto-pilot.
To be calm is the highest achievement of self. - Zen proverb
Have you every experienced a clam person midst of a stressful situation. Where everyone else is nervous and shows emotions bursting out due to stress. Who is in command of that situation? Who will find a way out? Who do you look up to?
Right, the person who has mastered their emotions, who has mastered their mind.
Emotion help you survive
To take advantage of your emotions, you need to work with your emotions, not against them.
Your emotional side is in control, suppressing or fighting it will make things worse. There more you do this, the more the emotion will come up and stress you.
Emotions are an evolutionary success pattern to survive. They are information to keep you alive, to get you moving fast. To keep you alive in a hunter and gather setting and even before. Nowadays your life is not in danger anymore. But emotions are still very helpful to get you moving forward. You don't need them to survive, but to evolve, to develop your self further.
Emotions are part of human nature, a useful part of human nature. You need to become aware of them and accept them to make them work in you favor.
Emotions are not a negative thing, they are powerful. If not the most powerful instrument in our arsenal.
Emotion are information
Take emotion as information.
Your body creates emotion as a reaction to your environment. This is automatic, and you have no other choice than accepting that. Important is that you don't have to react to that information. Imagine your spouse shouts at you in an argument. Your body creates emotions in that situation to show potential danger. It is important that you become aware and acknowledge that emotion, accept it. That way it can already looses it grip.
You need to be aware of the upcoming emotions and accept them as what they are: information. That is how you get out of the auto-pilot mode, following your emotions like a victim.
With that awareness and acceptance you win the space to decide how you want to react to that information. That way you in control. It takes training to get there, but it is so worth it.
To say it with Viktor E. Frankl:
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space us our power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Create emotions
Humans have an advantage over all other living beings on this planet. We can create emotion out of nothing.
You can imagine any situation in the past or in the future in your mind. If you go deep and visualize and feel into that situation, your emotions will be same as when experience that situation in reality. This is of course happening all the time if your let your mind wander. Which is how you get stressed or feel anxiety. But when used with intend you can use it to your advantage.
Think of it this way: You can call up emotions to create movement into a desired direction.
Behavior change
Leveraging emotion is the most powerful way how we can change a deep rooted behavior, that we want to change.
The more humans do a certain thing, there more it becomes automatic. Because it is getting more and more engrained in our brains. That is why it is so hard to change an old behavior, it has become automatic, your second nature.
You know that eating those sweets is bad for you. But that will not change your behavior. Even with iron discipline you cannot break it. Now: Emotions have the power to do that. Emotions can create the force to break this deep pathways in the brain.
Emotions have the power to transform not only your behavior, it can transform your whole life - step by step. When a person is at a low low point in their life, they are full of negative emotion. That negative emotion creates the force to change and turn around their life to the positive.
Emotions are the driving force to create the big changes in your life. And you can steer it.
Let's have a look how your do that.
In the example before: you cannot stop eating those sweets. We want to leverage both, positive and negative emotions.
You already know that eating those sweets is bad for you: The long term effects on your health are dramatic. It will get you in a chronic disease state. What seems so pleasurable the one minute you eat that cookie will be the bane of your existence at some point. Do some research if your are not aware of the full extent of it.
You want to paint that picture in your head. How will it be living like that? You have become diabetic. You need be very careful what you eat, especially that cookies are not allowed! You need to track your blood sugar and need to inject Insuline. Your energy level has become low, you cannot play with your kids or grand kids in the garden, it is to exhausting. And so on. Go in all the dirty details. Feel into that picture. Feel how depressing that is.
Write all that down, the situation, the feelings. I know it is very dark. Understand: Negative emotions are so strong to create the motion, to force to change.
Now you do the same on the positive side. If you stop eating that cookies all day long. How would your life look like in 10 years? Imagine playing with your kids or grand kids in the garden. Feel into it. Write it down.
Overload both images the positive and the negative with emotions while imagining them. Not to an unrealistic point, but we want to feel into it: how would it be on both ends of the spectrum.
Every time you feel the need to eat that cookie, go back to those feelings. Start with the positive side. And if that is not enough, tap into the negative side.
You also want to make sure that you do that. That you don't eat the cookie on auto-pilot because it is so deep engrained in your brain. I put a sticky note on the shelf with the sweet stuff. It says "Remember". It means: Remember how it will be.
What you can do additionally is to remember this when you are shopping. Don't buy that sh*tty cookies. That way you make sure you cannot eat them in the first place. Shape your environment, so that you are less triggered into your old behavior. I will go deeper on that topic in an upcoming newsletter.
Holistic Picture
You can use the behavior change methods also on a more holistic level.
To live well you need to master the following areas:
- Purpose
- Mind
- Body
- Relationships
- Wealth (Professional life)
- Leisure activities.
I am convinced that you need a vision for each of those and how they shape a holistic picture together. Meaning how would this play out on an ideal day-to-day basis.
Create a vision of your ideal life-style and use emotions to move you in that direction.
Summary
Emotions are part of the human experience. Emotions are what gets us moving in any direction. They made us survive, like other species. In a modern world we need to me more deliberate to use emotions in our favor:
- Become aware of your emotions
- As you become aware: Accept that emotion.
- Take the emotion as one data point to inform your decision how your want to react in that situation.
- This takes training. Good thing: You can train this as you go by your usual day.
We humans can create emotions out of nothing to our advantage. For example to overcome an bad behavior:
- Extrapolate your behavior in to the future: Paint a picture how bad it will be. Feel into that.
- Do the same for the scenario that your replace the bad behavior with a positive one. Feel into that.
- Tap into those emotional states every-time you feel the urge to do the old behavior.
You can use that technique also to create momentum in direction of your life vision.
I hope this article did change how your think of emotions. Emotions are something very positive if your learn how to work with them.
