“It’s not about managing your emotions; it’s about managing your reaction to your emotions”
There has been tremendous attention drawn to emotions and how we manage them. An essential fact to understand is that emotions are not critical thinking; they are just emotions. One way to look at emotions is by comparing them to the experience of learning to drive. As a new driver, paying attention is central to providing critical feedback and helping to stay out of harm’s way and on the road. People will attempt to pull and push you off course, rarely where you want to go. To be successful, you must resist the temptations of emotions and not fall for the distractions they bring to mislead you.
Life is littered with conflicts and different perspectives. Negative stuff happens to us all the time. It is critical to distance oneself from a victim’s mentality. The goal is to not cause your own suffering and anxiety. Yes, there are external circumstances and suffering you cannot control. However, the internal component is entirely in our control. It allows us to resist worrying, fearing, and overacting to these emotional stimuli.
Our brain is an instrument that often has difficulty recognizing the difference between the stories we imagine for ourselves by being reactive or the reality that is situations. Our passions and internal biases can cloud and undermine our ability for even basic reasoning. The challenge is to not let the vast array of emotional responses such as anger, being judgmental, and negative talk be your default reactions.
Faith in yourself is a requirement. To be truly successful, we must look inwardly and reflect on our choices and the habits formed by those choices. Reactions driven by pride need to be overcome by humility. Life is a series of choices. While we think we can judge the motives of others, we are wrong to trust our judgment of others or to believe we can understand what drives another’s thoughts or reasoning.
Summary: Tougher conversations with ourselves are required. Challenge yourself to honestly know and understand the authentic you. A great option to remove the influence of others that create our self-doubt is to engage with a coach on a journey of self-discovery. Is it time for you?
Give me a call for a no-obligation, free consultation.
Dr. Lawrence