Mastering our emotions is one of the most important skills that we can learn.
There are MANY things that are outside of our control that we'll face in our lifetime.
“Negative” or “bad” experiences will happen. It's inevitable.
However, choosing how to respond and the MEANING that you associate with your experience is what emotional mastery is all about.
Many people are victims to their emotions and believe that they have no control over how they feel. This is simply not true, as YOU are in charge of your brain and can change the meaning to any event in your life.
You can choose to perceive things in a positive way or a negative way.
You can choose to be happy or sad – it's all on you. But in order to be successful at mastering your emotions, you need to know exactly how our emotions work and re-condition yourself to be in control.
In this video blog, I go into 3 easy steps on how to master your emotions. Watch the video below.
(Click here to watch on YouTube)
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Video Transcript
All right. How to master your emotions, three easy steps. One of the most important things to really understand and integrate into yourself in order to have emotional mastery, is to really understand that you are in control of your emotions. You are in control of how you feel in any given moment. Whatever emotion you experience, you are creating that within yourself, and you are doing certain things to create that emotion.
A lot of people want to believe that emotions happen to you, they happen to us, that it's because of the rain, the weather, it's because this person yelled at me, therefore, I feel a certain way. It's because of my boss, or it's because I got, ripped off and XYZ happened, so therefore, I feel a certain way.
The first lie
That's the first illusion that you have to dispel. It's not true, and if you believe that and buy into that, then you're coming at this from a victim mentality, and you're never going to be able to fully master the emotions of yourself. You're always going to be a victim, and all these external things that are outside yourself, are always going to influence how you feel.
In order to be a master of your emotions, to have emotional mastery, you have to become a master of meaning. The meaning that you associate to an event, is what's going to determine how you feel in any given moment. Right now it's raining, and I can either associate a meaning of, “This sucks. I want to be sad.
I'm going to be depressed,” and focus on all the things that suck about that, or I could associate a different meaning to that, and actually see that as a positive thing, and be happy and grateful, because the rain is feeding the plants, and it's going to give me an ability to stay in, to create videos for you guys. Looking at it in a different way, a positive way.
Nothing in life has any meaning…
In any given moment, you can find a good meaning, a positive meaning, or a disempowering or negative meaning. It's whatever meaning that you give it. Nothing in life has any meaning, except for the meaning that you give it.
One of my favorite books is one called Man's Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankel. He was a psychiatrist, and he was living in Auschwitz. He got taken away, living in Auschwitz concentration camp. He is one of the first people that discovered that it's not the events, but it's the meaning that we associate with it, that really determines how we feel.
We can be in a negative environment. You can be in an environment where there is suffering all around you, and still find meaning, still find happiness, and not be controlled by external events in our lives.
Understanding that that meaning is what creates emotion is really the first and most important thing, and that you can change the meaning associated with anything, just by asking yourself a new question. If something bad happened to you, what determines whether or not it's bad, or how you're going to feel about it, is the meaning that you associate to that experience.
Find the good in every situation
Just by asking yourself, “What's great about this? What else could this mean? What's good about this?” And forcing yourself to find the good in every situation is going to radically change how you feel about it.
Two different people could have the exact same experience. I'll give you an example. Two people go to Afghanistan. They're serving the U.S. marines. Two people lose their leg. One person, the meaning they associate with it is that their life is over. “I've lost my leg.
I'm never going to be the same. No one is ever going to love me. I'm depressed.” He's suicidal, and he kills himself. That's something that has happened. The other person who has lost his leg, same event, but he finds a positive meaning, an empowering meaning behind it.
He thinks first of all, “Oh, my god, I'm so grateful, I'm so thankful that I'm still alive. I'm so thankful that I still have my other leg. I'm so thankful that I still have my arms, my hands, my head, and other parts of my body.” That person ends up being appreciative, and has a gratitude, and believes that he was given a second chance.
Therefore, he cherishes his life. He's going to take advantage of all the opportunities. He's going to stop and smell the roses. He's going to just live his life more fully, and be more alive, because of that event. As you can see, it's not the event. It's the meaning that you associate with it.
You can change how you feel in an instant
Let's go into some practical steps here. One thing I learned from Tony Robins and just general psychology, there's three primary things that affect how we feel at any given moment. Again, your emotions are something that you have control over.
You can change how you feel in an instant. Have you ever felt a certain way, maybe you're tired, maybe you're depressed or sad, and all of a sudden, the phone rings or something happens, and the words come across the phone? Someone is sharing something with you, and you're in a totally different state, and you feel totally different.
How is that possible? One minute, you're depressed and sad. The next minute, you feel excited and energized, and you feel happy again. It was just the meaning that you associated, based on what that person said, or what happened.
3 strategies to change how you feel
You control that meaning, and you can change how you feel, based on these three strategies right here:
1. What you focus on, which is related to your meaning. Whatever you focus on is what you feel. In any given situation, there're good things to focus on, and there're bad things to focus on. You focus on the good, you're going to feel good.
You focus on the bad, you're going to feel bad. Asking yourself certain questions, or looking at things in a different way, is going to help you change how you feel. If you focus on why things won't work out, what could happen, all the negative things associated with that, you're going to be in a lousy state.
If you train and condition yourself to focus on the good, what you're grateful for, what you're happy about, what's great about this, what you can appreciate, how can you love more, how can you learn from this and utilize this in your life, then you're going to be in a totally different state.
Controlling your focus, asking yourself new questions, looking for the good, that's a very important piece.
2. The next thing that affects how you feel, that will help you master your emotions, is mastering your physiology, how you use your body, how you use your body language in everything and engaging your body. Every emotion is associated with a certain body or posture that you might have.
If you're going to be sad and depressed, then you're probably going to have your shoulders down, slouched, your head down, your voice quiet. You're low energy, low breathing in your body, and by using your body that way, it's going to make you feel depressed and sad.
On the other hand, if you want to be happy and confident and feel good, then you put your shoulders back, your head up. You put a big smile on your face. You change the tempo of your voice, how you're speaking, the volume of your voice. You start using your hands, your gestures. You start breathing in full, using your body in different ways that will biochemically change how you feel.
A lot of people have the habit of just always walking around like this. They just feel down all the time. That's something that you condition. You're doing that. You're in control of how you use your body. Training yourself to always have good posture, always smiling, always speaking with a loud, clear voice, using your hands, using your body.
One great way to change how you feel is through exercise, going for a run. That's why part of my morning ritual, I go for a walk and a run. It radically changes my state. I feel much differently for the rest of the day, and certain things might happen, they're not going to affect me as much, because I've built a good foundation first thing in the morning, by exercising and engaging my body.
Not only that, but science shows that exercise, smiling, using your body, helps to release endorphins, dopamine, and certain chemicals that make you feel good.
3. Your language, what you say to yourself, your belief systems. If you' always use negative phrases or words, and you talk about how “I can't do this, I can't do that, this sucks,” and you use negative language, you're going to feel bad. You're not going to feel good.
Speaking in positive ways to yourself and to other people will also change how you feel. One of my favorite ways of changing that is, whenever you catch yourself saying something negative or disempowering or limiting, say the opposite of that. Just correct yourself. If you said, “I can't do this,” say, “I can do this. I can do this.”
If you say, “It's raining. It sucks,” be like, “It's raining. It's great. I'm so happy that it's raining.” Just speak the opposite of that, because often times, that will be positive.
Those three main things, your focus, your physiology, and your language, and changing the meaning, those are the most important things you have to master, in order to master your emotions. Mastering your emotions takes time, because we have built all these habits, this automatic way of being.
Recondition yourself
The more that you condition certain emotional states, certain emotions, certain ways of focusing or using your body, the more automatic and natural that feels for you. The only way to change that is to recondition yourself.
One of my favorite ways of doing that is by using a morning ritual. Every single morning, spend 15 minutes to an hour, conditioning yourself, conditioning your focus.
Taking time each morning to focus on what you're grateful for in your life, what you're happy about, what you're proud of, what you're excited for, what's great about that day, focusing on your vision, your goals.
Just by forcing yourself to do that every single morning, is going to help recondition you, and you're going to find yourself naturally feeling happier, all throughout the day, naturally looking for the good, where you once looked for the negative.
Conditioning your body, going for a run or lifting weights first thing in the morning, to engage your body. Spending time in the morning, just dancing, or standing up tall, and just forcing yourself to have good body language all throughout the day.
The same thing with language, repeating to yourself over and over again in the morning, certain affirmations or incantations, certain phrases or certain belief systems that you want to say again and again out loud, that will help condition your mind and change how you feel also.
Just reminding myself of that constantly. By having a morning ritual, what happens is, you're basically reconditioning, reprogramming yourself over a period of time, and you get to a point in your life where you don't really need to do a morning ritual, and you just naturally feel that “Wow, this is who I am now.
Build new habits
I don't have to really think about it, but I just always feel happy. I always feel excited, because you're building new habits that are supporting you in your life.
Mastering emotions, it does take time, it does take practice, but over time, you get better and better at it, and you get to a point where things could be happening, negative things, and you just don't respond and react in a negative way. It doesn't really affect you as much.
It's a pretty powerful place to be because having more control over your emotions will allow you to have better relationships. You're not going to react. You're not going to get hurt as much, and associate negative meanings. You're going to amplify your relationship, because typically, the state of a relationship is based on the state of the individual.
You take two different people that are in happy, positive states all the time. You put them together, you're going to have a happy, positive relationship. You take two people that are always depressed and sad, put them together in a relationship, you're going to have a sad and depressive relationship.
It affects your relationships, your friendships. It affects your productivity, your happiness. It affects your business, your success, your health. Everything is affected by your emotions and your morning ritual.
I want to encourage you to start a morning ritual, whether that's 15 minutes every day, to an hour or more, if you choose. I put together a great program that can help you with this, called Morning Ritual Mastery.
Just go to MorningRitualMastery.com, or click the link below in the description. Great program. It's helped a lot of people. Great Morning Rituals, and more important, stick with the ritual over the long term, also. That's it for this video, guys. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next video.
=> CLICK HERE TO JOIN MORNING RITUAL MASTERY <=
One of the best ways to practice and develop your emotional mastery is through a morning ritual.
Through a morning ritual every day, you can re-condition yourself and strengthen your emotional well-being. This can help make you unstoppable throughout your days and be unaffected by things, because of the emotional state that you're in.
To learn more about creating a lasting morning ritual, check out my Morning Ritual Mastery program.