Mastering Life’s Changes

Mastering life’s changes

The only constant is change and the only thing that changes is
you.

The world has been the same since the beginning. It is always a
competition for resources and living. It is always a hustle and bustle.
Yet – somehow we think that our changes are extraordinary. We all have
problems, we all have issues and we all have to cope with life’s daily
churn.

The changes that happen in life are invariably accompanied by
emotions. Emotions are the subconscious expression of that which happens
around us and that affects us. Our emotions are formed by what we are
exposed to when we are young and shape us for the rest of our lives. As
such it is almost like “software”. But sometimes it is necessary for us
to upgrade our emotion-ware to the next version, especially as we grow
older and wiser and need to achieve more.

Just because emotions come up, it does not mean that there is no art
or science to mastering life’s changes – but merely that it is a journey
that does not have to be overly daunting.

The key to this adventure is to realise that you are fully in control
your state of mind and that with this knowledge you can direct your own
destiny.

Sheer will and hope can overcome adversity. Enthusiasm, spirit and
passion can open opportunities. Anger and frustration can and does close
doors (sometimes they need to be closed). Patience can overcome many
complex situations while knowledge can open more doors than most would
expect.

Once you start realising that activities and emotions can direct the
course of events around you, you can start being more spiritually and
emotionally intelligent about your actions, words and emotional
state.

With a greater understanding of what drives the actions that you have
from a subconscious level you will stop running away from situations
will change into engaging with them and although the emotions may still
be hard – in time you can learn that they do not need to be and that you
can keep on going forward. You may find yourself running to situations
to seek the best out of your interactions with people and
situations.

A basic observation that acting differently in different situations
leads to outcomes that are different. If you rush into a complex
situation and come out crying – then you were not in control and the
situation controlled you. If you rush into a complex situation, keep an
open mind and assert your thoughts at the right time – the power of the
situation is reversed because you observe, orient yourself and direct
the outcome.

There may be powerful personalities in life that have better control
of emotions and that can direct the outcomes of situations more
directly. You must study how you interact with these people and how they
respond to your words, actions and emotions. You may be surprised to
find that it is often “pre-programmed” and that they have habitual
responses to similar situations. This arises from years of working with
people and is often referred to as your “social intelligence”.

So the first thing to understand is what are the emotions that arise.
Basic research shows that there the primitive emotions include being
surprised, sadness, happiness, joy, contempt, disgust, fear and anger.
Some also add attraction, repulsion and pride as emotions.

Most people react to situations giving rise to emotions in a negative
way by shaming, blaming, embarrassing, judging, discrediting or
dividing.

On a positive level we respond to emotions through love, pleasure,
happiness, success, pride.

There are many schools of thought and models in emotional
intelligence and two that is of particular interest

The first model is the branch model of emotional intelligence which
portraits four key areas or branches as critical to becoming more
effective at controlling and directing emotions. In a sense the model
gives a progression and asks its user to assess “how competent am I at
this level”. If you apply this to different emotions it may assist in
moving to the next level.

1. PERCEIVING EMOTION

The initial, most basic, area has to do with the nonverbal reception
and expression of emotion. The capacity to accurately perceive emotions
in the face, voice, movement or expression of others provides a crucial
starting point for more advanced understanding of emotions. Do you know
when you are happy and when you are sad and do others recognise that
this is the case?

To get better at expressing your emotions you need to make sure that
you are expressing them. Do you gage if others are re-acting how they
are because of their emotions and can you start looking beyond the
emotions to the underlying issues? Perceiving your own emotion and the
emotion of others is a practical skill that you can practice at any
time.

This opens the gate to the second branch.

2. USING EMOTIONS TO FACILITATE THOUGHT

Does your emotions guide your thinking. The idea is that if you are
feeling emotions you need to understand why you are feeling them. Mood
swings may help for creativity but one must also understand that it may
have a deeper cause that could be emotional, spiritual or physical. To
understand where an emotion comes from it to be able to make it stronger
or weaker and to invoke it at will. By going deeper into the emotion it
unlocks new thinking and new possibilities. By focusing on the emotion
and separating it from the underlying cause you may be able to direct it
more effectively and start directing your response.

By using emotions to think you open the gate to the third branch.

3. UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS

Emotions convey information: Happiness usually indicates a desire to
join with other people; anger indicates a desire to attack or harm
others, or a fear of being alone; fear indicates a desire to escape,
hope is frustration that has become inevitable and hate is usually love
gone bad. Each emotion conveys its own pattern of possible messages, and
actions associated with those messages. A message of anger, for example,
may mean that the individual feels treated unfairly. The anger, in turn,
might be associated with specific sets of possible actions: making
peace, attacking, retribution and revenge seeking, or withdrawal to seek
calmness. Being angry may not be good or bad – it is just being. By
being in a situation and being able to distance yourself from your anger
you can control the situation and not be under the power of your
emotion.

Understanding emotional messages and the actions associated with them
is one important aspect of this area of skill. It is then also possible
to start shaping how you re-act. Lets say that when you feel threatened
you usually seek empathy from the other person and expose your
weaknesses. What if you start re-acting differently by asserting
yourself, challenging the other person or bringing facts to bear on the
situation? Each of these responses is different from the original
response and will have a different outcome.

Once a person can identify such messages and potential actions, the
capacity to reason with and about those emotional messages and actions
becomes of importance as well. Fully understanding emotions involves the
comprehension of the meaning of emotions, coupled with the capacity to
reason about those meanings and to choose the actions that would bring a
desirable outcome from that point.

That opens the fourth gate.

4. MANAGING EMOTIONS

Finally, emotions can be managed and directed. If you understand that
emotions convey information then you can use them to convey information.
To the extent that it is under voluntary control, a person may want to
remain open to emotional signals so long as they are not too painful,
and block out those that are overwhelming. In between, within the
person’s emotional comfort zone, it becomes possible to regulate and
manage one’s own and others’ emotions so as to promote one’s own and
others’ personal and social goals. The means and methods for emotional
self-regulation has become a topic of increasing research in this
decade. Sometimes this may mean accepting the emotion and sometimes this
may mean fully embracing the emotion and amplifying it.

People respond to how you respond. Research shows that within 3-7
minutes of a conversation starting people have fully absorbed the
emotional states of people around the table subconsciously and have
started acting on an emotional level. This means that if you remain calm
– others will become calmer by you just being there.

Conclusion

Life changes lead to emotional changes. Being more aware of how
emotions work allows one to start channelling and directing them to the
point that they can start working for you.

When you start changing your emotions – your life starts changing by
the way that others react to you.