You and Emotions

What can you do to improve your emotional quality of life?

Set goals to become more aware of your own states. Set goals to be less reactive emotionally, and more proactive, so that your emotional states depend less on what happens to you, and more on your own choices.

If you do not know how to use anchors, just think of an emotion you want, like calmness if you are anxious, and remember one of your best memories of feeling really calm. In your imagination put yourself fully back into this memory for at least a minute, noticing what you are seeing and hearing around you in the memory until you feel calmer. You can use this process for any emotional state and the more often you use it the easier and quicker it becomes. Pretty much the only thing that will stop you, is believing that you can’t. Practice believing you can.

Your emotions can teach you a lot about your values and what is really important to you. For example, if something makes you feel really angry, a core value may have been violated. What is it? Anger isn’t necessarily bad, but lack of anger management skills usually is. Learn how to express anger appropriately in the specific context. There are a wide range of emotional skills you can improve.

You will find that daily reflective journalling is one of the most useful practices to enable you to continue to develop your emotional intelligence skills, and improve life genrally. Which particular applications of emotional intelligence would make the most difference to your quality of life, and to those around you? Enjoy exploring this further.

Go well, be well.