Control and Re-Direct Emotions

Emotional conflicts derail almost all goals. The most important emotional skill is to face what is in front of you without letting your emotions get the better of you.

How do you learn to do this?

Here are some tips

• Meditate

• Role play

• Journal

• Play games in which you imagine yourself in difficult situations and how you would handle them

• Keep a log so you can learn your triggers, your weak spots

• Go for a walk and notice things around you

• Really focus in on the details of your environment

• Use techniques that diffuse your emotional reactions such as Emofree

• Draw out a situation that would be rough for you and think of many different ways to handle it - goofy, silly, mean, super nice, mean guy, etc. The idea is to have several options for difficult situations

• Expect that life will present you with challenges

• Become aware of your breathing, your feet, your hands

This is one of those paradoxes because emotions are your gauge.

If you had none, you would be a machine.

Emotions tell you things.

They tell you what you're afraid of, when somebody is violating a boundary, what makes you happy, what you are about.

Fear, anger, grief and hopelessness have their place. It's getting stuck in them that cause a problem.

Negative emotions (I.e., conflicts with others) can get in the way of completing your milestones on schedule. In fact it is one of the most common ways you get sidetracked.

Unfortunately conflicts occur when you least expect it. You are going in one direction and to you, the person you are having an argument is opposing your goal.

Getting locked into the conflict, wastes valuable energy. Learn to conserve your energy. Just as you are learning to not waste resources, don't waste your own. Emotional conflicts not only waste resources but create roadblocks to your priorities.

Most of the time, you get into a conflict when you are only looking at things from your own perspective and you grant insufficient value to the other person's perspective.

Get pissed off at yourself for wasting precious time! Be engulfed in your milestones. Standing there going toe-to-toe and arguing back and forth rarely accomplishes anything except wasted cycles. Wait till things calm down before addressing the problem.

Exercise - think of a conflict you had in the last week. How did you deal with it? Is there a way you could have improved your handling? How could you have avoided the conflict?

In what way was it not your fault? What part of it did you contribute to?

Think of another conflict

How would your mother have handled it?

How would your father have handled it?

Think of another conflict

How could you have made it worse?

What would have been the consequences?

Think of another conflict.

What were you trying to achieve?

What was the other person trying to achieve?

This article comes from the forthcoming book "Take Control of Your Life, The Ten Commandments for Mastering Discipline" by Harris Kern and Adriana (Ace) Lewis.