Learning how to manage your emotions even if things don’t go as expected

How many times did you sink or get blocked because things didn’t go as you expected?

To me, a few.

Learning to manage your emotions isn’t easy, so in this article I’ll try to give you some tips to make it easier for you.

I always say that training in Emotional Intelligence should be a subject at school, but so far, it hasn’t been made mandatory.

What happens when you DON’T know how to manage your emotions?

Well, you suffer from everything that happens to you because you DON’T have a choice.

Here’s an example:

Something happens to you or you’re told something that makes you FEEL bad, if you don’t manage it, because you DIDN’T learn how to, you’ll REACT  in any of the following ways:

1. Fear overcomes you and you flee
2. You explode in a fit of rage
3. You cry and sink
4. You get anxious and blocked
5. Your own learned response arises automatically (even if it isn’t the most appropriate one)

Imagine that you’re at work and have given a presentation to your colleagues about a subject they don’t really know. When you’re done, your boss says:

“You did a great job, next time, try to lengthen your presentation because it was too short”.

Depending on how you INTERPRET this comment, you’ll have a positive or negative emotion.

Positive Interpretation: you think “they’re happy with my work, I only need to extend my presentation a bit, but the rest was very good” –> Emotion that triggers the thought: Joy, Satisfaction.

Negative Interpretation: you think “they didn’t like my presentation, they must think that I’m not good for my job, they don’t value me even after everything I’ve done” –> Triggering emotion: Rage, Sadness, Frustration…

This interpretation happens within lengths of a second, so, often, you aren’t even aware of what you thought. But suddenly you feel horrible and don’t really know why.

In this case, you’re SUFFERING because of an interpretation that YOU made and that has led to negative emotions.

Learn to manage your emotions

What alternative do you have?

Being aware of the internal process that’s happening within you to be able to change it.

Let’s continue with the previous example, but this time, we’ll start from the feeling.

Imagine that you “suddenly” feel bad and don’t really know why.

The first thing you need to do is Identify your Emotion.

You can ask yourself the following question:

• What am I feeling right now… rage, sadness, frustration…?

Let’s imagine that your answer is: Frustration

The next questions you can ask yourself are:

• When did I start feeling frustrated?
• What happened today or the previous days?
• Who have I talked to?
• What have they told me?

These questions aim to Identify a Concrete Situation from which you began to feel bad.

Let’s assume that reach the moment of your presentation and detect that it was just after that, that your boss made a specific comment.

You retrieve your boss’s comment:

“You did a great job, next time, try to lengthen your presentation because it was too short”.

Then, you also retrieve YOUR interpretation:

“They didn’t like my presentation, they must think that I’m not good for my job, they don’t value me even after everything I’ve done”

Right then, AT THIS MOMENT, you can learn how to manage your emotions because when you become AWARE of the AUTOMATIC AND NEGATIVE interpretation that you’ve made, then, you can continue to question yourself beyond it.

You don’t keep what your mind tells you, instead you CHOOSE to continue investigating why you made that interpretation.

So you can ask yourself:

• Why does this comment affect me so much?
• Why do I interpret it negatively?
• Why don’t I see it constructively?
• In what other moments of my life did I feel “undervalued”?

And let’s assume that during this investigation, a childhood or any other memory from your PREVIOUS life comes to mind in which you felt UNDERVALUED.

That’s how you establish the connection:

• Ah! Throughout my childhood I felt that neither my mother nor father valued me.

Done!

Now you know why you feel bad.

When the past intrudes onto your present

I always tell my clients that when a past situation HASN’T been managed or accepted, a repressed emotional pain is left behind that needs to be released.

Continuing with the example that I used previously, now that you’ve realized that throughout your childhood you felt undervalued, it hurts, doesn’t it?

Well, when a situation emerges in which you, even if due to a wrong interpretation, feel underappreciated again, the pain activates automatically.

But, this is exactly where the question emerges:

10% of your pain belongs to YOUR PRESENT: feeling undervalued by your boss.

And 90% of your pain belongs to YOUR PAST: all the time you felt undervalued by your parents.

If learning how to manage your emotions hasn’t been a priority in your life, then, you’ll experience many situations like this one, in which a past pain intrudes onto your present, but as you can’t differentiate it, you simply sink or block.

It seems absurd if you look at it from the outside. How can your boss’s comment, or that from any other person, destabilize you emotionally?

Actually, it wasn’t your boss’s comment, it was YOUR negative INTERPRETATION of a CURRENT situation, based on a PAST EXPERIENCE.

So, if you want to RESPOND instead of REACTING, you’ll need to learn how to manage your emotions so that, even if things don’t happen as you’d like them to, you can give a different answer and won’t sink or get blocked in the process.

And remember that managing doesn’t mean NOT feeling. You’ll continue to feel all your emotions, but if you’re aware of your internal process you’ll know what to do about it.

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