Emotions are functional tools. They want to make you aware of something and move you. Every emotion has a reason and purpose for existing. Fear makes you aware of danger and wants to move you away from it. Joy makes you aware of pleasure and wants to move you toward it. Anger makes you aware of threat and wants to move you against it. Guilt makes you aware of inconsistency and wants to move you to hide it or fix it.
The simple skill of emotion is being aware of what you’re feeling, why you’re feeling it, what it wants you to do, and directing it in a way that benefits you and others rather than damage. The advanced skill of emotion is to create the feelings that move you how you want, where you want, when you want and to allow disruptive emotions within you to rise, fall, and wash away like a wave in the ocean without taking you over and negatively affecting you.
Self-awareness
Take complete and total responsibility for your emotions. No one else is ever going to be responsible for your emotions, mostly because they don’t want to, and also because they can’t. So it’s up to you and only you to take responsibility for every emotion in your life. Evaluate where the emotion is coming from. What story are you telling? What meaning are you assigning? What does the emotion want you to do?
Self-discipline
One of the truest and and most reliable behavior patterns that has remain unchanged over 5,000 years of documented history is this: people make emotion driven decisions and use logic to justify it after the fact. You will not, no matter how hard you work, overcome this completely. But you can improve.
Evaluate every intense emotion you feel. The more intense the emotion, the less you can trust yourself to act on it. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong or bad, it just means intense emotions tend to justify their own existence and demand action before you’ve had a chance to evaluate and decide with discipline.
Self-confidence
There is not enough time or space available in this email for me to go deep enough on emotions and believing in yourself, so I will add this now and return to this topic in 2019.
Deeply held opinions and strongly felt emotions are not an indicator of being right. They indicate you feel strongly based on how you see things. Where emotion is high, clarity is low. If you saw it differently you’d feel differently. Embrace strong emotions, don’t avoid them, just remember they tend to dominate your mind and block out other relevant information.
Do the work.
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