Mastering Emotions as Tools – Page 5

Emotional Empowerment. Your Emotions are always Valid. But, They May Not be Appropriate! Anger as an example.

This is the first of two posts designed to help you own your emotions so that you can use them to empower yourself in your interactions with others.

This post looks at the issue of owning your emotions by validating them and whether you should express or discard an emotion based on how appropriate it is.

The bottom line is that all emotions are always valid but might not be appropriate.

I will use anger as an example.

Let’s look at some definitions. (from dictionary.com)…

valid: having force, weight, or cogency; authoritative.

appropriate: suitable or fitting for a particular purpose, person, occasion, etc.:

In the Emotions as Tools Model, all emotions are adaptive and, therefore, valid.

The reason all emotions are valid is that your emotions reflect and are a direct result of how you (subconsciously, at first) perceive your situation. Because they are a reflection of you, your emotions have cogency and are authoritative in that they reflect your initial “analysis” of your situation.

Your brain constantly scans your surroundings for any possible threat and, when a threat is detected it subconsciously and quickly formulates a fast analysis of the threat. The function of your emotions is to alert you to the threat prepare your body to act quickly to help you survive.

The words threat and survive are italicized because they are highly subjective and are based on you, your current situation, your past, and so forth.

Your emotions inform you about a possible threat based on this initial, very quick, scan of your situation. This means that your emotions start out being highly idiosyncratic (or unique to you).

The emotion, per se, is the same for everyone.

My anger is the same as yours and conveys the same message that there is a perceived threat and that this threat can be eliminated or overpowered.

How the emotion reflects your perception of threat, however, is unique to you.

In other words, there are three “reasons” why there is a distinct possibility that your initial assessment could be inaccurate…

your emotions reflect your initial assessment
your initial assessment is based both your past and present experiences and
the actions of another person may be ambiguous,

Your perception may not be accurate to the extent that you have…

misunderstood your situation (the other person’s actions are ambiguous)

misinterpreted your situation (you have viewed their actions through a filter clouded by your idiosyncrasies).

Therefore, your emotion, which reflects that perception, may not fit the situation and may not be appropriate to what is going on.

The emotion of anger informs you that you perceive a threat that you can eliminate if you throw enough force at it. Anger prepares you for war. The threat can be physical and involve your personal safety or it can be psychological in that it reflects an “attack” on your ego, your values, your sense of right and wrong and so forth.

The perception of a psychological threat can be very subjective.

It is, however, important to note that just because your perception is subjective does not mean it is inaccurate, incorrect, or inappropriate.

You may be very subjective and you might be very accurate in that you are being “attacked”.

The task, then, is to acknowledge your emotion as real and valid and then to assess each emotion as soon as you become aware that you are experiencing it and determine the extent to which that emotion accurately reflects the situation in which you find yourself.

In other words, the appropriateness of the emotion.

A visit to the Index tab, above, will give you access to many posts which will help you learn to do this.

In my next post, I will address the issue of reclaiming your emotions.

Is it a good idea to hide negative emotions from your children? Part #2

This is post #2 addressing the issue of what, when and how a parent (or grandparent) should express an emotion in from of a child.

In my last post I discussed (regarding kids and expressing emotions)..

the topic of negative emotions (There are none!)
issue #1 (What emotions should a parent express in front of a child?and
issue #2 (When should a parent express their emotions in front of a child?

In this post, I discuss issue #3 and sum up the entire question.

Issue 3: How should a parent express their emotions in front of a child?

This is where matching and modeling come in.

As I noted above, unless you are very good at hiding your emotions (which most of us are not), you can deny, try to disguise, or attempt to cover up what you feel to your kids all you want. Chances are, however, that they will see right through your subterfuge.

This is potentially harmful for two reasons.

First of all, your credibility is at risk if they sense that you are not being truthful.

Secondly, you risk confusing and misleading the kid about emotions in that you may be saying that the expression of anger is actually sadness or the expression of anxiety is actually anger and so forth.

Imagine that your smoke detector beeps either because it is telling you it needs a battery or you burnt the toast. You are in a hurry to do something so your kid sees you take the detector down, remove the battery, and put it on the table. Instead of learning that the detector is a critical lifesaving tool which must be maintained, he learns that you eliminate the annoying messenger (the beep) and move on. Note: This is a real example you see in the news where the house burns down because the smoke detectors were not working.

So, that you need to express your emotions honestly is a given. Let’s look at how you do this.

Matching

The idea here is that we attempt to match what we express, how we express it, and the explanations we give as much as we can on what the kids can understand and absorb.

There is an old story about a child who goes up to her dad and says: “Daddy, how did I get here?”

The dad grimaces cause he doesn’t want to answer the question and sends her to her mom.

Mom doesn’t want to let dad avoid his responsibility and directs the child back to dad.

Dad takes a deep breath, swallows hard, and tells the whole reproduction story from soup to nuts.

The child listens politely and, when dad is done, innocently says, “Oh, now I remember, we flew on an airplane.”

The lesson here is that you have to match your explanations to the age and intellectual abilities of the child.

One of the respondents (Ali) in the Quora feed noted that she validates her emotions by expessing them. And, if she views her emotional expression as problematic for her kids, she apologizes for her outburst, explains the basis for her actions and provides a future focus on how to behave differently.

This is a good answer to the extent that you match your explanation to the age and intellectual abilities of the child.

The bottom line here is that you want to educate your children as to…

what emotions are,
the purpose they serve and
the importance of learning to master their emotions as tools.

Is it a good idea to hide negative emotions from your children? Part #1

Note:

In the next 2 posts, I will address the issue of what, where and how a parent (or grandparent) should express the emotions they feel in front of a child.

This is part #1 and part #2 will publish in 2 weeks.

The other day I was consoling a friend of mine whose wife had recently passed away. As we were discussing the grief he was feeling, he began to cry and his grandson questioned if he was “okay”. My friend responded that he was trying to be “strong”.

I suggested that he tell his grandson that he was “feeling sad and was missing your grandmother”.

The question about what emotions you want to share with your children has come up on the site Quora.com and I think it calls attention to an important topic.

In this post, I have elaborated upon my Quora response.

This question focuses on the emotional interactions between a parent and a child and there are two parts to the question:

The idea of negative emotions.
When and how (or if) you should express emotions to your kids.

Regarding your kids and your (and their) emotions, the 3 specific issues involved are the following:

What emotions should a parent express in front of a child?
When should a parent express their emotions in front of a child?
How should a parent express their emotions in front of a child?

There are three underlying principles here…

Your kids will know (or at least sense) that you are “emotional” regardless of whether you acknowledge, deny, or express those emotions.
You need to show your emotions to your kids so that they can learn what emotions are and how to appropriately express them. This is called modelling. It is also being open and honest.
When it comes to your kids, you need to tailor the message about emotions to your kid’s abilities to accept and understand the message so that you don’t give them more information than they can handle based on their age, intelligence, and experience. This is called matching. It is also being respectful and considerate.

But first, let me address the issue of negative emotions…

The original Quora question addressed the idea that a parent might want to hide “negative” emotions from their kids.

While it is true that you do want to monitor what and how you express emotions to your kids (as I will discuss below), the reason you want to do this is NOT (emphasis added) because some emotions are negative.

The basis for this myth is that some emotions do not feel good and, therefore, are labelled as negative. The danger of the myth is that it implies that some emotions should be eliminated (Think a negative eval at work or a negative balance in your checkbook.).

Indeed, there are no negative emotions. All emotions are just tools that, when you learn to master them, can be strategically deployed to improve your life and your relationships!

When you eliminate an emotion, you deprive yourself of the information and power that emotion provides.

Back to my friend and expressing emotions.

Interestingly, I was visiting my friend because his grieving was eliciting tears, he was feeling physical pains, he really missed his wife, and he did not know whether all of this was normal or appropriate.

I assured him that all of it was part of normal grieving.

Now, my friend is a caring person and a good grandpa. He isn’t all that great with emotions.

So, when his grandson saw him crying and wondered if he was hurt, he told his son he was trying to be “strong”.

Now, while the idea that crying in men is a sign of weakness is a version of the myth of negative emotions, I don’t know if this was the basis for my friend’s comment.

The problem that I had was that the implied message to his grandson might have been that grieving needs to be avoided because it does not demonstrate “being strong”.

The bottom line for me is that the significant adults in a child’s life need to both teach these kids about emotions so that they have access to and can strategically benefit from all their emotions and honestly demonstrate how to appropriately express a wide range of emotions.

Which takes us back to the 3 main issues noted above regarding the expression of emotions to kids.

Issue #1: What emotions should a parent express in front of a child?

A parent should attempt to express all emotion in front of their children with one major caveat:

The expression of every emotion should be within an “appropriate”range given the age and intellectual abilities of the child, the nature of the emotion, and the behavior elicited by the emotion.

I will address this in more detail below.

Issue #2: When should a parent express their emotions in front of a child?

There are two concerns here.

The first involves the setting in which you express an emotion and the key element here is whether the setting is such that the child will connect what he or she witnesses in you with the emotion and the message that emotion conveys. As an example, if the child has done something which appropriately elicits your anger, then get angry. If the child is playing and doing nothing wrong, showing anger (from a previous incident) or even sadness might not be advised as the child might not be receptive to “dealing with” your emotion.

The second issue involves your feelings. If you are “overcome” with an appropriate emotion (not connected to the kid), then you have a decision to make.

Can you express your feelings and include the kid if he or she questions it?

This is the situation in which my friend found himself.

If you can, then go with the feeling.

If not, then it is probably best if you excuse yourself and express your feelings privately.

As an example, if you are so angry (either at or independent of the child), that you are raging, you need to get out of rage before you interact with the kid. If you are so overcome with anxiety or grief or sadness that thinking straight is difficult for you, again, stay away from the kid.

Regret: An emotion I misunderstood. Until Now.

Regret is an emotion that, like anger, has gotten a lot of bad press.

The image we often see is of a tattoo on a buffed arm that reads “No Regrets”.

Or, if you are into humor…”No Regerts”.

In a new book, Daniel Pink writes about the emotion of regret and notes that when you ask people if they have regrets, they will answer that they do not. If, however, you ask them if there are things they did (or failed to do) that they wish they had done differently, they will say “yes”.

This is, in fact, the essence of regret.

The message of regret is, indeed, that you either did something, or failed to take some action, that led to an outcome that you strongly wish had progressed differently than it did.

This could involve an action you took such as

selling the stock just before it split and hit a new high
losing a bunch of money because you got scammed
“acting-out” and destroying an important relationship

It could be a missed opportunity to..

get an education
tell someone you loved them before they died
reestablish a relationship that ended badly
start a business
buy that house

You get the idea.

The emotion of regret is often labelled as a negative emotion because it hurts.

An example from my own life..

When I was in graduate school, I was home for vacation and my mom was taken to the hospital. I had visited her in the hospital and was going to visit her a second time. I was outside the hospital in my car and decided that I would run an errand and then go and visit her. She died while I was on my errand and I was both not there for her and unable to say my final good-byes.

It is important to note that the “errand” was not at all critical.

I, maladaptively, held on to my regret for many years.

I’ll explore my regret in this situation below.

My issue with regret stemmed from my belief that the emotion could only lead to a downward spiraling rabbit hole from which there was no escape.

My self-talk regarding my mom went like this…

I screwed up. I was not there for my mom in her moment of need.
My actions led to a bad situation which I can’t change. She died and I will never be able to comfort her and tell her how much I loved her.
I should have made a different decision. I knew that the errand was not significant but I “bought” my rationalization. I acted in a cowardly manner.
My actions will always haunt me because I can’t change what I did.
There must be something wrong with me that led me to screw up. I was in grad school and knew about rationalization. I did not acknowledge my own inability to cope with my mom dying. I should have acted differently.
I screwed up because I was unable to deal with my anxiety. I will always be haunted by my guilt because there is no way for me to make it right.

Experiencing an emotional maelstrom involving self-criticism (guilt), self-denigration (shame) and being stuck (regret) was horrible. But, it is exactly this negative emotional soup that is associated with the emotion of regret and that gives it its bad reputation.

As a Psychologist with the Youth Authority, I had 5 young incarcerated women all of whom had killed their children. I need to say upfront that while I always maintained that they were responsible for their actions, I needed to help them deal with their regret so that I could help them grow and develop into healthy adults once they left the institution.

In order to help them and deal with my own regret, I developed and embraced the idea of IWBNI which allowed me and my clients to “eliminate” the emotion of regret by approaching the event as an IWBNI (It Would Be Nice If).

Viewing what I did through the lens of an IWBNI solved two issues which, to me, embodied the worst aspects of regret..

We (My clients and I) screwed up.
There was nothing that could be done to make it right.

How IWBNI works.

Noting that “It would be nice if” the (screw-up) had never happened…

tacitly acknowledges and validates that it DID happen
detaches the “screw-up” from any attached self-recrimination
puts the undesired outcome both in perspective and in the past
allows us to acknowledge and move past whatever was done and the negative outcome it elicited and
allows us to learn from our actions.

While using IWBNI’s, per se, is still a viable and effective approach to events which elicit regret, I now believe that regret ought to be considered a valid emotion that can be mastered like any other emotion.

I’ll explain.

I paid too little attention to the learning potential of regret and it is this potential that is the key to using regret as a strategic emotional tool.

It is important to note here that there are two categories of regrettable actions.

Actions you have no opportunity to change.
Actions you can do something to reverse the past and create a new outcome.

Category 2 was easy. If I could change my future behavior, great, regret could be strategically deployed as motivating me to avoid future similar screw-ups.

I, however, had viewed the emotion of regret only in terms of the first category.

Indeed, if you could not do anything to change, or reverse, what happened, I reasoned that you were powerless regarding the focus of your regret and, therefore, your only choice was to validate the emotion, accept your actions, and move on.

To put it another way, the emotion of regret informed me that I screwed up. Okay. But, it also reminded me that there was nothing I could do to change what I’d done. Therefore, there was nothing to learn. Consequently, regret could not be strategically deployed.

I was mistaken.

My epiphany about regret was that you could, indeed, learn from both categories of situations.

And, to the extent that you could learn from your actions, regret could become an emotion you could master.

To utilize regret as a strategic tool, there are 4 steps…

Acknowledgment— IWBNI
Context —The BRR
Compassion and Understanding—Self-forgiveness
Consolidation and Moving on—List of what you learned

Step #1 Acknowledgment

As I discussed above, viewing what you regret through the IWBNI lens allows to acknowledge and validate the situation without judgement. You may still judge yourself and I will address that below. The IWBNI, per se, simply acknowledges what happened and the truth that you wish it had not happened without any inherent placement of blame.

Once you have acknowledged the situation and your actions, you are ready to progress to step #2 which involves understanding what you did.

Step #2 The Basic Relationship Rule (BRR)

As I have discussed in other posts, the BRR states that everyone in every situation does the best they can given their Model of the World and their skill sets.

While I don’t have room here to go into the BRR in depth, its relevance to the emotion of regret is that you now have a context to understand the actions you took that you now regret. What was your understanding about your situation, the perspective you took in the situation and the resources you had available to you to deal with that situation?

Now that you have acknowledged and gains some insight into what you did, you are ready for step #3 which involves compassion.

Step #3 Compassion

In step #3, you approach yourself as you would a good friend who did something you did not like. You express compassion toward yourself and you forgive yourself for what you did.

Self-forgiveness, like forgiving others, does not mean justifying what you did or letting yourself off the hook, per se, for the regrettable actions you took. Self-forgiveness simply communicates that it did happen and self-blame is no longer needed.

You can let go of your judgement.

Now that your actions have been acknowledged, understood and removed from self-blame, you are ready for step #4.

Step 4 Consolidation and Moving on

The final step involves listing what you have learned about your actions and making a plan to act differently should a similar situation arise (if this is possible) or if a situation that resembles (in any way) what originally took place happens again.

This is you consolidating what regret has painfully reminded you that you to do.

Once you have consolidated what you have learned, you are ready to move on.

What did I learn from my regret?

Whenever I am in a situation in which I know I need to act but I do not or I rationalize, I will step back, take a deep breath, reassess what is actually going on and what I am trying to avoid, and do what I know needs to be done.

I have mastered my regret.

Indeed, I still regret not going up to my mom’s room to be with her in her last moments on earth but I do not feel guilt and, in several situations, I have taken action I might otherwise have avoided because it didn’t feel absolutely right.

Mastering Grief as a Strategic Emotion

Grief is an emotion that is well known but little understood.

Today’s post is designed to give you both insight into this important emotion and, should you find yourself in its “grip”, hopefully give you some suggestions for mastering your grief as a strategic tool.

Grief is an important emotion because its purpose is…

to focus our attention on what we have lost,
prepare us to effectively deal with that loss, and
allow us to grow beyond the loss and get on with our lives.

Grief

Grief is the emotion we experience when we experience a significant loss.
The message of grief is that we have sustained a significant loss and that we need to withdraw from others so that we can heal.
Grief, as an emotion, hurts.

Grief and Pain

The experience of grief can involve..

tears that seem to come on their own
a sense of emptiness inside
an inability to function normally because we are consumed by a sense of unresolvable loss

Other feelings which can go along with grief

sadness
anxiety
guilt

Two significant Grief myths

It is important to be “strong” (whatever this means) in the face of grief
Moving on with your life means forgetting about your loss

So, let’s dive in..

If you never experience grief, I hope it is because you have never experienced a significant (however, you define this) loss. If so, I am thrilled for you.

It is, however, more likely that you will experience such a loss in your lifetime and you have at least two ways to approach the grief that accompanies the loss.

The unhealthy way… suppress the feelings, power through it, and keep going. This denial is equivalent to looking at the growing red spot on your skin, ignoring it because you don’t want to know more about it or don’t believe in skin cancer, and, down the road, having to deal with your cancer when it finally reaches a point where you can no longer avoid it.

The healthy way.. mastering the grief by validating it and working through it including experiencing the pain and the “symptoms” associated with the pain.

Pain explained.

A few years ago, a close family friend “lost” his wife after some 40 years of marriage. They were high school sweethearts, got married and spent their whole adult life together as a couple.

When his wife died, he felt as if an important part of him had been wrenched away leaving a void which could not be filled.

He was right (almost).

An important part of him had been wrenched away and there was a void. However, while he would never be able to replace his wife of 40 years (nor would he want to), he would learn to heal the void.

While he expected to miss (grieve for) his wife, he was blindsided and totally (but intermittently) immobilized by pain, tears and irreconcilable emotion.

There are at least two important elements to understanding the pain of grief.

I. The pain he experienced happened because of, and was a direct reflection of, his incredible 40 years of marriage.

In other words, the amount of pleasure he experienced in his marriage (however, he would define this term and what it included) was the “cause” of the pain he experienced when his wife died.

If the marriage had not been a source of pleasure, the ending, or loss, of that relationship would not have been that painful.

So, one important question he had to address (directly or indirectly) at some point was…

Do the benefits (love, companionship, etc) he gained from the marriage outweigh the cost (pain) he experienced when his wife died?

Or, to put it another way..

If he was given the choice to go back in time and not marry his future wife, would he do it in order to avoid the pain he felt when she died?

When he was ready, he acknowledged that the upside (benefits) of his marriage far outweighed the relatively minimal downside (his pain) and he wouldn’t change anything.

Note: Some people do choose not to get involved in a serious relationship in order to avoid having to experience this pain. While it has consequences, this is a valid choice.

II. His ability to relive, revisit and relish the memories of his wife and the 40 years he considers himself both blessed and very fortunate to have been able to spend with her could not happen until he experienced and worked through his pain.

This is an often overlooked component of the pain of grief and, by the way, is an argument for listening to, validating, and mastering grief.

Denying the pain of one’s grief does not eliminate the pain. It may mute the degree of discomfort you experience with your guilt.

What happens it this.

Every time he tried to revisit a fond memory, he would get a jolt of pain. Our friend would cry uncontrollably when these memories came up.

And, they seemed to come up almost spontaneously and unconnected to anything that was going on with him in the moment.

Mastering grief as a strategic emotion…

The message of grief is that you have experienced a significant loss. Grief prepares you to withdraw and begin healing.

You master your grief when you take all the time you need to validate the emotion and all the experiences that accompany the emotion. You withdraw as much as you can from your regular activities so you can experience the pain. You avoid judging yourself and your actions (like crying, feeling weak and vulnerable, etc) and treat yourself with the same compassion as you would a close friend going through his (or her) grief.

The process..

As I explained to our friend, when you allow yourself to experience both the pain and the memories, you validate the loss, the emotion, and your willingness to grow through it.

What happens, over time, is that the pain subsides and you are able to enjoy your memories. The pain may be experienced as sadness at the loss but the happiness which accompanies the memories far outweighs the sadness.

In addition, over time, the emptiness gives way to an acknowledgement that the relationship was deep, satisfying and real and that the memories which retrieve that relationship can never be lost. The person may be gone, the experiences are not.

As you master your grief and grow though it, you will find that you are increasingly ready to reengage with the world and maybe even consider new relationships.

I recall a story told to me by a deeply religious friend.

His wife contracted cancer. She didn’t want to do radiation or chemo so he and his wife changed their diets and lifestyle together until the cancer eventually took her.

He grieved for his wife for several years and didn’t date.

One night he had a dream in which his wife appeared to him and told him that she was safe with God and it was time for him to move on and begin dating.

He took her advice, started dating and eventually remarried.

Now, whether you believe that his wife actually spoke to him in his dreams or his dreams reflected his own growth and he was “talking” to himself is not critical. The focus of the dream was that he had reached a point in his growth where he was able to both enjoy fond memories of his deceased wife and begin to form new ones with his new wife.

He never forgot his first wife and is currently happily married.

Our friend followed a similar course of action and returned to a very fulfilling life.

This is mastering one’s grief.

A New Podcast-Different Topics

These are links to my recent podcast on PositiveTalkRadio. In this interview, I discuss topics which were not addressed in the podcast I noted in my last post.

I’ve included these podcasts because some of you may prefer to get your information in a video or audio format rather than reading it. If this is your preference, click on the Contact Me button above and leave me a message.

Video…

https://www.positivetalkradio.net/videos/ptr-ed-daube-phd-the-emotions-doctor/

Here are some specific issues which might interest you:

11:47 The problem with asking “why” questions and how “what” may be better. 19:10 The value of apologizing 20:28 Personal responsibility and the challenge of believing that emotions control us. 23:42 Jealousy
24:34 Hate
28:23 Fear and anxiety
32:10 Emotions gone astray and two issues… immigrants and the lady who called police on a black man walking his dog
37:34 Healthy disagreements with a spouse.

This is a link to a recent podcast I did on emotions with time stamps.

In this podcast, we discuss how I became interested in the topic of emotions, what emotions are and other informative issues.

Here is a summary (First number is minutes into the interview. Second number is seconds both of which are approximate):

3:47. Where did my passion for emotions come from.

6:08 How to understand the emotions cycle.

8:46 Understanding men, women and emotions. Men default to anger, women default to sadness.

14:26 Basic Relationship Rule

17:12. Emotions inform and motivate. The next step is mastery.

20:24 Develop new emotional habits.

24:38 My best success stories

28:23 Working with incarcerated young women

30:02 Anxiety

35:00 Sadness and IWBNI’s

31:00 Happiness

41:56. Primary and Secondary emotional progressions

52:25. Explore the blog

52:43. What would I tell a younger me?

54:47. Final Words.

Enjoy.

Jimbo Paris Podcast

Mastering Emotions for Entrepreneurs and others— My second interview.

This is the a link to my second interview directed at entrepreneurs but useful to anyone with emotions with Chris Gunkle.

Following up on my earlier interview, posted here on 2/23/22, I discussed….

the difference between fear and anxiety,
spent some time on the topics of “failure anxiety” and “success anxiety”,
reviewed a more adaptive definition of “failure” and
provided a strategy for getting around highly subjective and negative self-talk in order to access and maximize the value of what you already know and the experiences you have.

The podcast is audio only but, as before, it is worth the 20 minutes or so to listen.

Here is the link:

Surviving the Entrepeneurial Journey with Ed Daube

What You Can Do in the Next 48 hours to Begin Mastering Your Emotions as Strategic Tools.

This is a follow-up to my last post in which I dove into the topic of mastering your emotions.

Near the end of the podcast, the host asked me a question which caught my attention and peeked my interest…

What is one thing our audience can do in the next 48 hours to get on the path to success in mastering their emotions?

The answer I came up with was..

Begin the process of emotional mastery with three doable steps:

This, however, is not a satisfactory answer and needs further explanation.

So, I continued…

There are three steps, involving two strategic questions and an easy decision, which you can take, starting now, that will put you on the path to emotional mastery.
None of these steps are difficult.
All of these steps take a little bit of effort on your part.

The three steps are…

Ask yourself this question: “What will change for the better when I learn to master my emotions as tools?”
Take a “going to the doctor or your car mechanic” approach to your emotions and ask yourself this question: “What emotion is most problematic for me?”
Take action: Go to the Index tab on this blog, click on that emotion, read whatever post catches your attention and begin to follow the suggestions in the post.

The steps “explained”….

Steps 1 and 2 involve asking yourself a strategically focused question.

The heart of each of these questions is an assumption which will give you important information you want to have and which engages the brain as a solution seeking machine.

As I’ve noted in other posts which talk about the power of questions, when you focus your brain on a question, it will give you an answer.

Sometimes, you ask your brain a question the answer to which you really do not want. As an example, you never want to ask yourself the question: “How could I be so (stupid, blind, weak, etc)?” because your brain will give you multiple reasons why you are so stupid, blind, or weak .

Is this really what you want to know? Probably not!

You can, however, ask your brain for information you want. So, if you made a “dumb” mistake, you might ask: “How could I have approached this situation differently so as to produce (a better outcome)?”

You see the difference?

Note: Your brain will continue to seek an answer to your question until it finds it. I have used this “technique” to problem solve in many varied situations including writing papers in grad school, working on clinical questions in my practice, answering questions on Quora, and so forth.

The “technique” involves asking yourself the question before you fall asleep and then expect an answer sometime in the future. Keep asking the question each day until you get an answer.

Step #1

The assumption in Step #1 is that learning to master your emotions will bring about desired change. It is this “change” that will motivate you to pursue learning how to master your emotions as tools.

Note: It is not important at this point that you believe in this change. In fact, it is entirely possible that you do not. Phrasing the question this way, bi-passes your beliefs.

Once you ask yourself this question about the “positive changes” you can expect from mastering your emotions, you will begin to experience the answer.

A thought may occur to you along the lines of.. “I wonder if I will feel more in control of my life when I master my emotions?” or ” It really would be nice if my anger didn’t lead me to embarrass myself.”

The critical point here is that you take these thoughts seriously and not dismiss them.

Again, you are embarking on a process and, at this point, whether these outcomes will happen or not is less important than the real possibility that they might happen.

I suggest that, if it is possible, you write down these thoughts.

Two things happen when you write them down.

It makes these thoughts real.
You have the opportunity to review them later.

Viewing these possible outcomes as desirable, should they occur, will motivate you to continue learning how to master your emotions as strategic tools.

Step #2

You probably already know the answer to this question before you ask it.

Yes, but ask it anyway as the answer to which emotion is most problematic may surprise you.

Indeed, you may think that anger is your main issue but you may not be aware of an emotion that underlies anger such as anxiety, hurt, inadequacy or sadness.

Again, accept all the answers as potentially valid and write them down. You will come back to them in Step #3.

I mentioned going to the doctor or your car mechanic” approach for Step #2. What I mean here is this….

When you take your car to the mechanic (or your body to your doctor), you are asked about “Why are you here?” (or something similar). You then must focus on the main issue of concern. While other stuff may be going on, you focus on the issue that is most troubling.

I recently went to my doctor because it was uncomfortable for me to sleep on my right side. It was this issue that I focussed on with my doctor who recommended physical therapy. The other minor aches and pains I have experienced were not brought up.

When he asked if there were any other concerns, we did have a conversation.

Step #3

This critical step is the culmination of Steps #1 and #2.

This is where you educate yourself by learning about the emotion that is most problematic for you.

Once you are informed about emotions, in general, the emotional mastery cycle, and the specific emotion that is problematic for you, you have completed the beginning phases of mastering your emotions.

Now, you can move on to Step #4 which is to make a plan to master your specific emotion and follow your plan.

Keep in mind that you are learning a new habit of emotional mastery. And, like any new habit, it takes time and practice and you will make mistakes along the way.

A word about “success” and “failure”….

John Maxwell defined success as falling down Y times and getting up X times where X is a larger number that Y.

As long as you “get up” (take responsibility for your actions, forgive yourself for your mistakes, make any necessary corrections in your behavior) more times than you “fall down” (make a mistake, get “off course”, or fall short of your goals), your success in mastering your emotions is almost guaranteed.

If you continue to have difficulties with your emotions, you may have to get professional help.

Mastering Emotions for Entrepreneurs and others— A recent Podcast

Mastering Emotions – A recent Podcast

Below is a link to a Podcast I recently did with Chris Gunkle. Chris likes to address the needs of entrepreneurs and this Podcast does that.

But, the topics we cover apply to anyone who 1) finds their own emotions difficult to understand or 2) who has to deal with the difficult emotions of someone else.

I address the emotions cycle (what they are and why we have them), emotional mastery (as opposed to control or management) and specific emotions including anger, anxiety and sadness.

It is an info-packed 20 minutes, is audio only, and is worth listening to.

https://unrivaledexperts.com/ed-daube/

Note: There is a very interesting question near the end of the podcast. If you miss it, I will do a deep dive into it in my next post on March 9.