There are easily millions of important Life Skills that are not taught in school or by your parents. One of these is Emotional Self Control. You can run over to your favorite book store and and find hundred's of self help books on not letting others control your emotions (Co-Dependency) but my experience has been that this particular life skill can be reduced to three basic abilities in the form of questions;
1. Asking yourself at various times throughout the day, "How am I doing?" What this refers to is having some type of emotional gauge or reading as to your current emotional state; happy, sad, neutral, etc. Also known as one element of self awareness. People high in this ability are known as being skilled in self observation.
2. Asking yourself "Why is it this way?" In other words why am I feeling what I'm feeling at this particular moment in time? Or, how did I get here? This question becomes especially important if you're feeling good, strong or some other positive emotion. Knowing how you ended up feeling good can be very helpful in reproducing it later when you're not feeling so good. Feeling good is no accident! It results from both your actions and the responses of others.
3. If I'm not feeling so good emotionally, "what can I do to get back to at least neutral if not positive?" Seems basic to me that none of us has to remain in a negative emotional state unless we want to for some reason. How we feel is our choice. Sure, there are events or circumstances in life that are going to do a real number on us as far as emotional upset goes. No need to list here the multitude of things that are bad in life or that we will all face from time to time. The important thing though is that we can alter our emotional state of our own choice, making us free to act as opposed to simply react.
If you see that many of your actions in life are impulsive or simply reactions maybe you want to make a change? We can help. Email me and I can explain how.
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