Emotional Development
Not Choosing is making a Choice
Your emotions are not given to you, you choose them! When you look around whether at work or at home you see many people often experiencing angst, anger, fear, regret, unhappiness, or one or more of many not so good feeling emotions. Often as an observer we look at their situation and say to ourselves, “Well, what they are going through is really not that big of a problem.” From our more unbiased perspective the source of their emotional discomfort looks insignificant or easy to solve. We think they should just do “……” Their solution looks easy to us.
To someone who is not in the middle of their emotional experience, the solution is often obvious or so it seems to us. However, when you are living the experience, the problem often feels very different and not so easy to dismiss. A lot of people spend a lot of time feeling negative about situations sapping the joy and ease from their life.
Exercising Your Power of Choice
The beautiful thing about being a Human being is having the ability to observe something you do not like and if you choose to observe it, to choose how you feel about it. This is the point where many say, “I observe and I feel, I don’t choose how to feel what I observe is dictating the feeling.”
Sadly, they are right. They didn’t choose how to feel or not to observe the condition that feels bad. By not making the choice, they made the choice to feel bad and become upset! We are taught by others as we grow to see and react…not see and choose. Learning to react doesn’t mean we can’t choose differently. Choosing just isn’t normal practice but it is yours to do. “If you choose to!”
In order to choose something that feels better and restore ease and enjoyment to your life experience, you must first choose emotional development. That is to develop your emotions, so you choose them they do not choose you. Just because you were taught to react to what you observe, doesn’t mean you have to. It’s a learned behavior.
Through emotional development you can learn to emotionally prepare yourself, becoming selective in your observation, and only give your focus to things you want to experience not everything happening in your environment. You learn how not to judge every person and event and feel negative reactions. You learn that when you do mistakenly give your focus to something that doesn’t feel good, you can emotionally shift your attention to something that does feel good. You learn to stabilize your emotions, so you remove your buttons to be pushed, chains to be pulled or goats to be gotten. You develop a firm emotional foundation that holds your positive focus and feels fantastic. You feel happy, free, empowered, stable, calm, and easy and you inspire others through your example.
Leading Yourself and Others
As a leader of people, having learned to choose what, where, when and how you focus, whether a corporate CEO, a school teacher, a politician or just a parent you open lines of communication, you make interactions easy and you inspire those around you through positive behaviors and actions. At TLI we call that emotionally stable, positive, and powerful person an “Aligned Positive Influencer” or API.
Bottom line, through emotional development and skills acquisition your emotions can become a source of power and ease instead of a source of chaos and negative feelings. Whether at home or at work you have the power to change your life experience through retraining yourself from a reactionary observer of conditions, to a calm, stable, and happy person choosing where, when, and to what they give their focus to. You smooth your experience and make it yours to enjoy not yours to survive!
