It’s one of the most frequent questions in emotional intelligence workshops worldwide.
How can I get better at controlling my feelings?
The language of this question reveals a bias that there are bad emotions requiring control – which means exerting power to subdue. Here’s a simply radical shift in perspective: How can I get better at harnessing my feelings? We call it Navigating Emotions.
In under 5 minutes, Dr. Barbara Fatum offers practical tips for all of us do a better job with feelings, including ideas on how to teach this invaluable skill to children — here’s the video. Below are several more resources.
Easy Tips for Controlling Emotions
1. Change your perspective.
Emotions, even challenging ones like anger, fear and jealousy, are there for a reason! They’re messages from you to you — there’s wisdom. Instead of “controlling” the emotions, control your behavior (hitting, shouting, hurting, running are all behaviors).
Here’s a bit of neuroscience about emotions and how to handle feelings better.
2. Create emotions strategies.
Consider: What do you want to happen next? Based on that: What feelings will help make that happen? Do you have any of those feelings? Chances are, in any situation you have multiple feelings — call on the ones that will help you move forward.
Here’s advice on strategic use of emotions in business.
And an article to discuss the meaning of emotions with children.
3. Charge your compassion batteries.
It’s tough to make emotionally wise choices when you’re feeling of compassion is hiding. Interestingly: Actively practicing to care about others increases your compassion — which increases your own inner peace.
What’s your favorite tip for handling emotions? Add it in the comments below!
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have not get clearly the roles played by diferent emotions
When I feel emotions that are bubbling up and I am unable to identify them, I take a deep breath and I think about softening and slowing my body and breath. I think and feel spaciousness. And then wait and listen…..
Breathe, Soften, Slow, Spaciousness, Wait, Listen…..
The information always surfaces for me.
Dr. Barbara Fatum’s article on navigating emotions explains that capturing the energy and insight of emotions will help us to use them and make the best decisions we can. The key questions for me is “how can I get better at harnessing my emotions and making them work for me?” I guess the more aware I become of my emotions, the better I am at naming them and the more I can appreciate the valuable data and insight they offer me the more automatic the ability to respond rather than react will become.
Dr. Fatum explains a task for helping us to reflect upon situations where we might not have done so well and reacted rather than responded
– Naming an experience with a strong emotional content
– Drawing the experience
– Drawing the outcome
– Reflecting on what might have been done to achieve a different
outcome (thoughts, feelings and actions).
Practise and reflection must surely help us get better at this skill of navigating emotions?
Joshua’s tips on handling emotions are also valuable and helped me reflect on recent experiences.
1). Changing Perspective (even challenging emotions are for a reason). To reflect – even harness the enormous feelings that can accompany big experiences such as those experienced in grief. They can speak of the relationship with the lost person or thing. With big experiences comes big feelings.
2). Create Emotional Strategies. To reflect – this is paramount when life’s experiences are huge and throw up a medley of feelings that can knock us on our head! What else do we have in our emotional repertoire that can help us?
3). Exercising Compassion (promoting inner peace). To reflect – this might be self compassion – being kind to ourself or as it was explained to me -“what empathy and compassion can you give yourself right now?” or “what would a truly empathic person offer you right now?” That truly empathic person might be yourself giving to yourself.
I likes the concept that emotions are there to tell you something about you. Is is not there to confuse you, nor to scare you, it is there to guide you to better outcome. It is there from a part of you to another part of you.
Emotional are chemicals and are there for a reason to tell us something. First step to handling them is understanding them and understanding why are we feeling the way we are at the time. Recognising our patterns of how we deal with emotions also helps.
Navigate emotions is the key to act EQ in our daily bases
I love the example of the hands to understand the connection between the different brain elements.
Learnt the following.
Creating a positive or atleast a neutral thought. It brings in a whole bunch of positive emotions…and possibilities!
Changing a negative emotion before it steps on the escalator. Giving yourself and others a chance to survive!
Understanding how to use emotional data in decisionmaking is where I still struggle. Does one go ahead with a decision where one ‘feels good’ but is hard to execute?
Hi Mahnaz – your question is tough! Our feelings are guides… but often they don’t give us clear messages. They give us a little push to say: Think About This. So, if the decision feels good, maybe it’s a message to say: “Look further into this. Get support. See if you can enroll others. See if you’re really committed.” As you lean into the idea, maybe the feelings change — if you get more intense feelings of YES!!! then probably it’s the right direction. 🙂
I’m at the beginning stages of navigating my emotions so these three tips are extremely helpful for me. It provides some structure for me to practice. Shabbir, thanks for sharing your idea as well – I like the idea of keeping a list of emotions with me so that I can reference them in those particular moments (or any moment for that matter). For me, it’s about me being more aware of those feelings and then deciding what to do with them. Thank you for sharing.
Great material, putting it to practice is as hard as fascinating!
Some people believe EQ is about killing emotions and becoming a robot, but it is actually the opposite. A robot is programmed to act in one way after certain stimulus, while a human being has the power of choice. It is when people react and let themselves go without making a decision, when they actually behave more like robots….
Always enjoy your writing, Josh!
I carry a little card in my pocket with list of emotions. When I feel uncomfortable and feel like my emotions may get best of me, I take it out and try to label which emotions am I feeling and what is the intensity of each one.
Another technique I use–I try to count backwards by 7. Really engages my pre-frontal-cortext:-)