Tag Archive for: gratitude

7 Ways to Develop Emotional Mastery

It is commonly understood that to exercise mastery on one's emotions is to master life itself. Developing emotional mastery goes a long way beyond just being less reactive to upsetting situations to being able to create a steady flow of positive healthy emotions on a regular basis, impacting every aspect of our lives. When we change the way we see things, the things we see change.

Emotional mastery or emotional intelligence is simply being aware and able to manage, control and understand one's own emotions and behavior and understand the emotions and behavior of others around us.

Here are seven ways to develop master your emotions:

1. Conscious Breathing: Just as your breath changes under emotional duress, conscious breathing can help you manage your emotions. Panicky breathing puts the body in a tense state, increasing heart rate, creating a state of anxiety. Deep relaxed breathing, reduces the heart rate, evens out blood pressure, gets more oxygen into your system and has an overall calming effect on the body.

2. Movement: Emotional mastery comes with having control over and being able to create emotional states in the body. The fact that emotions are "feelings" tells us that emotions live inside our bodies. Certain body postures are associated with people who, for example, are depressed, and other body postures are associated with people who are ecstatic.

The facial feedback hypothesis in psychology, proves the release of dopamine in the brain, when an individual is smiling, creating a wave of 'happy' even when sad.

Just moving around the body, exercising, running, dancing is enough to shift your mood tremendously.

3. Refocus: What we focus on becomes bigger, in essence we fuel the thoughts we choose to focus on, magnifying the feeling behind the thought. By simply shifting our focus to move past the event, or to a more pleasant thought associated with the experience, we expand that pleasant feeling thought, and thus shift our emotional state.

4. Reframing: looking at the situation from a different perspective. Before settling on one and only one story that 'THIS is how it is', find other ways of looking at the situation. It is not mere talk that every cloud has a silver lining. This is how optimism is cultivated. See things from a different angle, one that eases your mind than tenses you up more. It's worth spending time on changing the way we feel, cause one change doesn't go in vain, it effects our future reactions as well.




5. Gratitude: Cultivating an attitude of gratitude is life transformational. Being grateful is like putting on special glasses they bring to light all the blessings in life, which were otherwise overlooked and never appreciated, even during the most trying times. Habituating appreciation for not just the things in your life but even so much as attempting to see good in everyone and everything can be empowering in shifting the way you look at things.

6. Never Assume: The point of the matter is that an emotional reaction is simply a physical reaction to a given situation based on the beliefs you harbor in your subconscious that was a result of a previous encounter of a similar experience. An example of this could be 'There is something wrong with me, that at every job, my colleagues don't like me '. This is a belief that is made strong every time a colleague forgets to greet you, or reply to your email. There is a lesson behind every emotional reaction, and to master emotions, one should cultivate the curiosity to understanding the root or core belief that pushes you to react in a certain way. Emotional reactions can teach us something about ourselves that when understood and changed can avoid similar reactions in the future.

7. Meditation: Emotional mastery goes hand in hand with self-mastery. At the core of self mastery is self awareness. Meditation is a great tool to objectively view emotions, thoughts, events and behaviors. Meditation simply inculcates the ability to become the awareness behind a thought, than the thought itself. It distances the person from the emotion or thought, in essence the observed becomes the observer, distancing from the emotion and gaining an understanding of where it arises from. Meditation quietness and brings the mind to an altered state of awareness where things make sense and where one experiences overwhelming states of calm, tranquility, peace and relaxation. Meditation however isn't just limited to sitting crossed legged, eyes closed and focused on the breath. Meditation can refer to anything that quietness and focuses the mind, from constant traffic of thoughts to one thing. This can be brought about by creating a pattern by repeating mantras, jogging, listening to music, or simply listening to the breath.

In conclusion, we are in conscious control of how we feel. Developing the ability to deal with, change or create emotions leads to emotional mastery.

Beejal Parmar Founder & Senior Partner, True Aim Solutions

"The better you know yourself, the greater you will succeed, the happier you will be!" We help our clients discover what they need to know about themselves and others to achieve greater success and happiness in their career, business and life by providing various personality assessments and training needs analysis.

>>> We invite you to take our COMPLIMENTARY 3-minute test to discover the secrets of your personality and receive the FREE 'Personality Success Keys Guide'. Please take a moment to visit our website: http://PersonalitySuccessBlueprint.com

In Pursuit of Happiness. Easy steps to create happiness

pursuit of happiness

To go by the words of Abraham Lincoln, "most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."

These words find support in what the famous psychologist Richard Lazarus explained in his Cognitive Mediational Theory(1991). In this theory, Lazarus proposed that the most important aspect of any emotional experience is how the person interprets, or appraises the stimulus that causes the emotional reaction. in simple terms, the happy man is he, who thinks he is.

Nobody's life is hunky-dory all the time. Every person has to face trials and tribulations, go through difficult times. He indeed, is wise, who chooses to put on the glasses of optimism and faith and interprets the events of his life as positively as humanely possible.

Life, if you look at it this way, is not a race. It is a hurdle race. You can't question the presence of hurdles. They will be there, for that's the nature of the sport. If you bang your head on the hurdles and try to remove them out of your path, you going against the flow, attempting the illogical and the fruitless.

Not just that,you are not putting your heart and soul to win the race, for your focus has actually slipped into some other territory. There is no way you are going to win in this manner. If you lose your strength at the sight of a hurdle, and ask "why such things happen to me all the time, WHY ME?", you yourself are delaying your victory.

Again, if you just sit there, waiting for the hurdle to disappear, you are only deceiving yourself.

Not just the best, but the only option you have is to jump over the hurdles, as and when they come, without creating any fuss.

It often helps if you are a person deeply connected to nature. Feeling low? Well then go smell the flowers, let the breeze kiss your hair, leave your slippers on the porch and let your feet feel the moist grass, savour the delightful courtship dance of the butterflies, go out in the sun and let the blameless blue of the winter sky be your confidante, let the zephyr carry your message to that distant companion. Go, fall in love with nature.

Learn to appreciate the beauty that the mundane things of everyday life have to offer. Just imagine life without the things you take the most for granted. You will know their value then.




Maintain a gratitude journal. list all those things, people and moments in it that had made you smile someday and that make your everyday life worth living. It can be your coffee mug, or a compliment your teacher paid you that fine day, anything. When you are low in spirits, just flip through its pages, and you will have a hundred and one things to be happy about.

It is often seen that people find it easy to forgive, but not to forget. What we don't understand is, forgiveness is incomplete in such a scenario. By repeating emotional episodes over and over in our mind, we inadvertently etch them in our memory. So, the key is to let go, to not think at all about anything unpleasant that we have been through.

Equally important is to first know ourselves. It is always desirable to keep the doors of improvement open, but we also need to learn to distinguish between comments that are credible and that are not. If you have put on a white dress and a friend of yours with black sunglasses comes and tell you that the black dress you have worn does not look good on you, and on top of that, you get upset on hearing that... well, to say the least, nothing can be more ridiculous.

Not to forget, nothing succeeds like success and the high one gets out of achievement is just unmatched.

Have a clearly defined goal, make sure it is challenging enough but realistic and put in every possible effort to achieve it. If you are able to achieve it, well and fine. If not, you did not lose either, in the actual sense of the term, for in the process, you actually grew as a person and learnt things you not have, had you not been in pursuit of the goal. At least you will not be amongst those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Last, but not the least, cultivate a taste for literature, for poetry. It will be with you when nobody else is. Go, live your days of happiness!!!!

Sudha Shashwati is a psychology major in University of Delhi and considers positive psychology to be her niche. She is an out and out humanistic psychologist, a hopeless romantic and a shouting optimist. When not drowned in literature, she loves spreading sunshine around through her writings at http://thelidislifted.blogspot.in

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What you focus on is what you feel

 

Has it been a really busy few weeks for you too?

It has been hectic for me.

It has been a fortnight of back to back meetings, delivering several presentations, conducting telephone coaching, making time with my wife (who is pregnant with child number 3) and playing with my other two boys, exercising, returning emails...and that's just in the mornings!

By midweek, I'm looking for the 'emergency stop' button!

It is easy to get yourself overloaded and overwhelmed when there is a lot happening in your life.
I'm sure you know this feeling - like there is a never ending list of things to get done in your life.

It can wear you down...if you let it.

...it all depends on what you focus on.

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A few end-of-the-day questions for YOU

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A Piece of Me: Reaching for the Sky

I was sitting on the curb with Goober who was crying from the excruciating pain in her leg. She leaned against my shoulder as I tried to console her. As we sat, she cried for her mom. She ached; she wanted her mom, but her mom was with my mom, and they had been drinking all night. So we sat together on the curb watching our siblings ride their bicycles against the gentle summer wind. We watched as they freed their hands from the handlebars and reached toward the sky. They were carefree. Their smiles were infectious. Goober tried to smile. I smiled. Their energy was contagious. It was powerful. For one moment, Goober had forgotten the pain from the tumor in her leg and smiled. This unspoken energy moved all of us to forget the negative pains we were feeling shortly before the bicyclers reached toward the sky with joy.
We pass unspoken thoughts and feelings to others. Let this simple act of child play lead you toward that positive energy. Stand under the big blue sky or the big gray sky, and reach toward it and smile. I just bet you will make someone else smile too. If that doesn't happen, realize the joy simply reaching up gave you. If you are daring, ride your bike and raise your hands from the handlebars, looking up and reaching toward the sky as the wind blows in your smiling face. If you feel less adventurous, just keep your hands on the handlebars, look up for a second, and smile.
Exercise: Really Look at the World
Today, I want you to go outside. First, go out for an early morning walk. Notice the dew on the grass, and feel the coolness from the night. Notice the quiet, free from traffic and noise. Hear the birds singing and the sprinklers going as they water the lawns. When you arrive home, get yourself a warm cup of coffee or tea. Sit outside; enjoy the quiet, the solitude. Close your eyes for just a few minutes; then open them. Notice how much greener the grass is, how much more vibrant the flowers are. Notice how much clearer you hear the sounds of nature. Look around you. Feel the warmth of the sun on your face. Embrace the moment. In the evening, venture outside. Look up and see the vast universe and the stars in the sky. Smell nature and all its fragrances. Smile, lift your arms up high, and say a quiet prayer of thanks.
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In Lose the Baggage, Lose the Weight, Lorna Stremcha teaches women how to use the P.I.E.S. way of life to positively affect the physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual aspects of their lives. Using life experiences and sound research she provides the tools that will help you understand the underlying problems and make necessary changes in your outlook and your life. ISBN#9781618627612