Taking Back Control Of Your Life

The Power Of Emotional Intelligence

          Are you tired of being controlled by your emotions? Do you want to regain its control and steer your life towards the happiness and success you deserve? Well, you’re about to discover how to break free from the impact that pessimistic feelings have on you, make a more brilliant, satisfied life for yourself and transform your life for the better. It’s time to break free from the grip that negative emotions have on you and create a brighter, more fulfilled life for yourself.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed and controlled by your emotions. However, it’s possible to master your emotions and put yourself on the path to permanent happiness, freedom and success.

By reading what follows, you’ll recognize and understand the destructive nature of negative emotions that make you feel gloomy and overwhelmed. You’ll also receive actionable steps to manage, overcome, and transform them.

          Whether you manage your emotions or allow your emotions to manage you, you have complete say in how that works out. This is because you possess the ability to control the internal battle of emotions within you. You’re in charge of your emotions. If you don’t take charge of them, they’ll take charge of you.

One of our biggest challenges around dealing with emotions is we are often oblivious and unclear about how we actually feel. Another challenge is that we don’t realize how easily we can be triggered.

We don’t realize that we have the power to think, ponder and examine how we feel, then choose to respond to our interpretation of how we feel. Knowing this is so important because whenever we get triggered, we don’t realize we’ve been triggered by the same things over and over for years, yet it always feels like it’s the first time it ever happened to us. Consider the reaction parents have when their child didn’t do their homework, asked them for money or failed to make their bed. Although they got triggered the same way over and over, they never recognized how predictable their reactions would be.

          When you are able to predict what can and will trigger you, you’ll be able to live a life of freedom and power.

          What follows is a list of ways we either unconsciously react or consciously choose to respond. They are:

Reactions:

·       Fear

·       Resignation

·       Anger

Responses:

·       Happiness

·       Fulfillment

·       Joy

We’ll start with the reactions list first: 

Fear:

Fear is an instinctive, unconscious reaction that has the power to immobilize us. It can and often blocks our thinking, intentions, and actions. More often than not, it takes over our mind without detection. No one intentionally chooses to feel or experience fear. Most of the time, fear shuts our brain down and we don’t know it. This is because fear is a DNA-wired, built-in protective measure. That’s all it’s designed to do – protect us.

In order to avoid being controlled by it, you need to notice what scares you, then put plans, strategies and effective mindsets in place to make sure you are protected. Doing this will have you feeling confident and optimistic that things will turn out for you and your life. If you don’t, people will control, manipulate and walk all over you. That doesn’t work and never will.

Optimism is the solution to fear because it’s difficult to be fearful if you also feel optimistic. Otherwise, you’ll end up sticking your head in the sand like an ostrich and get beat up by life. That doesn’t work either.

Resignation:

Resignation is the same as apathy. Apathy is giving up on something and not caring about it once you give up on it. For example, an entrepreneur crushed by continued business failures and gives up on their dream is most likely resigned.

Nothing good comes from being resigned. That’s because resignation blocks a person’s capacity for success more than any other emotion.

Resignation can be undone but feels impossible to undo unless you first recognize that you are there when it happens.

There are two ways to overcome resignation. The first is recognizing that you are resigned, then find something that motivates you to do something about it. The second is through having an Aha moment, revelation or epiphany. This causes you to see the world in new and different ways. When see what  made you resigned in a new way, the resignation you experienced will be gone forever.

Anger:

Anger is indignation, as in “how dare you!” It ignites aggressiveness, rage, revenge and other negative reactions within us.

          Anger is the most destructive emotion we experience because it points us in the direction of being destructive. However, it can also be used in positive ways. When that happens, anger can be the foundation of Passion. For example, if someone loves something so much that they get angry for not having it, they can combine love with anger, which transforms the two emotions into passion. Passion creates great things such as standing up for something you’re committed to or cheering on and motivating a family member who doesn’t believe in themselves.

It’s not necessary to ignore anger in order to be happy. However, it would be useful and productive to find ways to make anger either go away or work for you rather than against you and your life.

Happiness:

Happiness is an exalted feeling that can and often does take over our mind, body and soul. That is a good thing because it feels delightful and inspirational. However, it is a temporary rather than a long-term experience. It’s the experience of standing in the middle of success, achievement, love or whatever is important to us in any given moment. Unfortunately, because happiness is temporary, people can be happy one minute and unhappy the next.

You can enjoy being happy but don’t count on it because doing so will have you unintentionally create expectations. Unfortunately, broken expectations are a main source of unhappiness because expectations are really agreements with we make with ourselves but didn’t let anyone else know about it, including life itself.

Rather than focus on being happy, consistently produce successful results at whatever’s important to you because the source of your happiness is making things happen that you want to happen.

Fulfillment:

Fulfillment is the experience of being fully satisfied. It is an achievement-based experience. This is because when you get what you want, it will fulfill you. For example, a parent seeing their child graduate college provides a lifetime of fulfillment for them most of the time. It will never go away no matter how horrible the rest of their life is.

          If you confuse fulfillment with happiness, you could be setting yourself up for misery and you won’t know it. This is because fulfillment is a reaction to success. This is one of the few emotions we enjoy whether it came to us or we intentionally chose it. Give yourself permission to enjoy it either way.

Joy:

Joy is a combination of happiness and fulfillment. It is also a long-term and even permanent experience. This is based on the fulfillment of a person’s highest goal or desire. For example, permanently joyful experiences in life could be things such as winning a Nobel Peace Prize, earning the title of Employee Of The Year at your company, witnessing the success of one’s children, or fulfilling one’s life purpose.

One of the challenges around joy is almost no one knows the difference between the two because they feel the same in the moments we experience them. Happiness doesn’t fulfill you. Joy does. You could say that joy is permanent happiness. Because it is.

          Remember that you have the power to change your life and your relationship to your emotions. By taking charge of your emotions, you’ll be able to liberate yourself from the shackles of negativity, unhappiness and misery.

You hold the key to creating a life you’ll be happy, joyful and proud of. Embrace that power so you can rewrite your life story and create the life you deserve. You deserve nothing less.