Emotional Mastery - Part 2
Recongnizing an Emotional Response
This is the second part of a three-part series on emotional mastery. If you haven’t read the first part, I strongly encourage you to do so, since that deals a foundation for ideas discussed in this and the subsequent article. This part deals with realizing when we feel an emotion, which is absolutely necessary in gaining mastery over it.
The very first stage of emotional mastery is of course, to realize you are feeling a negative emotion. Simple as this may sound, it is indeed quite hard to put into practice. We may often find ourselves regretting words spoken in a rush of anger, but while we are actually in that angry state of mind, we lose control over reason. Emotion takes over and we can hardly recognize it, let alone counter it. It is like we completely lose ourselves in a tide of emotion and cannot even realize it.
If we intend to gain emotional mastery, we have to learn to recognize an emotional reaction. We need to be able to pinpoint and say “Yes, I am feeling sad” or “This is angry me talking.” It requires a state of awareness. Next time you find yourself regretting a heated discussion, tell yourself that next time you are angry, you will realize it and stop it. If you continue this, you will soon learn how to realize an emotional response.
Predictable situations
Let me share a few ways to help you realize when you are having an emotional response. First of all, you know certain situations always make you feel sad/ angry/ fearful/ drained etc. If you know this, then you can prepare yourself for the situation. For example, if public speaking always makes you fearful, then the next time you have to do a presentation and you feel scared, you can realize this and tell yourself, “I am giving control to fear right now.” Or, if everyday chores make you feel drained, you can tell yourself “I am giving up control to a draining feeling right now. It is not a helpful emotion to me at the moment.” If you continue to do this for all the situations, you will soon be in a habit of realizing when you are giving an emotional response. It will help you use the ideas shared in the next section of the article to control these emotional responses.
Unpredictable Situations
There are unpredictable situations too that may catch us off-guard and cause us to fall into emotional behavior. How do you realize you are giving an emotional response in these cases? There are some techniques that can be used.
One way is to program yourself to always realize an emotional response. When you are reading a book or watching T.V and you catch yourself emoting, then immediately tell yourself, in your mind, that you are experiencing this emotion. Do this whenever you can, even in minor occurrences of the emotion. When you feel mildly irritated and tell yourself you are feeling mildly irate, then soon you will be able to tell when you feel stronger versions of the same emotion. Do this for whichever emotion you want to control, like anger or despair or fear.
If you ever do lose your cool and give in completely to an emotion, you can still make it better next time if you tell yourself “I felt so and so way. It was caused by such-and-such incident. Next time I have such-and-such incident, I will behave in a cooler way, that is to respond like this - <fill in your response.> I will know when I feel this emotion and it is under my control.” Repeating this exercise will signal to your subconscious that you want to be notified when an emotion takes over, and that you intend to control it.
Now let us go through various techniques that will help us achieve emotional mastery.
Go To Emotional Mastery - Part 3 >>
