What can I do to feel more fulfilled every day? Emotional mastery to control how you experience life
My past belief and approach:
I believed that mental strength and resilience is something people are born with. I always knew it was the difference between good and great, but I didn´t know that you could become better through practice. Also to me it just meant having the ability to deliver in pressure situations. I had no idea that the way you feel determines how you experience life and that we can actually be in full control of how we want to feel. So I just lived every day according to the way I felt and surrendered to that feeling. That meant every time I felt emotions that rarely serve us anymore like frustration, anger, stress or fatigue, I would look for the next best thing that would lift me up, which was usually junk food, tv, sweets or alcohol.
My reason to change
I used to feel happy, driven and motivated until my 20s, but the more responsibility I got, the more drained I felt. Instead of feeling primarily good, I started feeling primarily stressed, tired, easily frustrated and annoyed. Your mom and I started fighting a lot and when I found myself starting to yell at you, I wanted to find a way to step out of my self-pity and get back to feeling great again to become a better dad, husband and friend. Here are the three things I found to have the greatest impact.
My top 3 learnings
I learned that mastering mental strength means mastering the ability to change how you feel. Most people are controlled by their emotions. And the quality of your life is directly linked to the quality of your emotions. If you have a billion dollars but you spend most of the time being angry and frustrated, thats how you will experience life. Everyone of us has an emotional home, its the emotions that we experience most often and no matter what happens we get back to them. We use the world, we use triggers to get to our emotional home. If your emotional home is happy, you look for things to make you happy, if its being angry, you look for things to make you angry, if its being sad, you look for things that make you sad. Instead of becoming a slave of your emotions you can learn to control them to serve you, so that a bad moment does not turn into a bad day and a bad day doesnt turn into a bad week etc. Its not about not feeling or pushing emotions away, its about noticing them, deciding if they are serving you or not and being able to change them if they are not. So if you notice that you are annoyed and find that this is not serving you, you could try to change the meaning of what annoyed you to something that will serve you e.g. feeling grateful for the lesson you are being taught. With practice, you will be able to do that faster and faster until you barely have to spend time in emotional states that don´t serve you.
Trade your expectations for appreciation Happiness Formula: Current Situation is equal to your Expectation
So if you are earning 200.000 USD/Year but you expect of yourself to earn 1 million usd/year you will be pretty frustrated. Don´t get me wrong, nothing wrong with setting the goal of earning 1 million usd/year. But if you don´t appreciate what you already have and what you are learning on your journey to achieving that goal, you will feel pretty miserable. Gratitude is the anti-dote for emotions like anger or frustration that rarely serve you anymore. Expectations equals focus, Focus equals feelings, feelings equals life. What makes people go to suffering states? EXPECTATIONS. When other people don´t do, say,act what we expect them to do, say or act! But you cant control people, so will always be in suffering states. You need a strategy when the brain wants you to go into suffering state how to combat it. Trade your Expectations for Appreciation (about people, machines, technology, food, vacation etc.) How to appreciate? Look at what you have, not what you are missing! What is gratitude: it’s not being thankful, to be thankful is when you expected sth to happen eg holding door open. Genuine gratitude is:
Its specific
it needs to have a reason (why does that touch you emotionally?)
The feeling lingers
It’s personal (look at the reason)
Everything in our life is controlled by 2 forces:
Our beliefs. What we are willing to do. What we are certain about. How we interact with people has nothing to do with them, but with what we belief about them e.g If we believe all women are manipulative, it will influence how I will interact with all women. Beliefs can create or destroy. There are two types
Global beliefs (affects everything in your life): Life is…I am ..People are..
Rules: If then..eg. if you love me, then you won't scream at me. When you have a conflict with someone, its about different rules even with yourself (you broke your rules), but especially with kids. If you have many kids, dont have too many rules, because someone will always be breaking them and you will always be stressed out. The more rules you have, the more stress you have, so don´t have too many rules. Seek and you will find - confirmation bias. Look around at look for brown - you won´t see any red. If you think someone is evil, you will find the evil in them. If you think you are a loser, you will find the loser in you.
Our values The true north of your life. determines the direction of your life. when you change your values you will change your destiny. they are the emotional states that I believe are most important for me to either achieve or avoid e.g. Towards values (I want more of those): Energy, Courage, Determination, Appreciation, Adventure, Joy, Love. And Away values (I want less of those): Fearful, Overwhelmed, Frustrated, Humiliated, Overwhelm, Rejection, Suffering, Conflict, Anger. Towards and Away values can be in conflict and then you will not achieve towards values because the pain of away values is higher. So you take two steps forwards towards energy and courage, but then you take three steps back because you might get overwhelmed, fearful and frustrated
My three most impactful actions for execution:
Triad: What controls the quality of your life?
MEANING (is a rainy day good or bad, what meaning do you give it?). Meaning produces emotion and emotion equals quality of life. How do you control meaning? 3 forces:
Phyisology (Posture, Breathing, facial expression): the way you feel is the result of how you move (Emotion is created from motion). The way you move your body impacts the way you think. Start day with cold plunge, go running, work-out, shoulders back, head high, smile, stand strong
Focus: do you focus on what you have or what you are missing? What keeps us from being in peak performance states like clarity, determination, courage, passion and love and brings us into disempowering states like overwhelm, stress, fatigue, anger or fear are our emotions. And what controls our emotions is what we focus on. When we focus on what we are missing instead of on what we have, when we focus on what we can´t control instead of on what we can control or when we are just focusing on us instead of focusing on what we could give to others it becomes incredibly tough to feel good and really easy to feel like shit. What is your primary question? Do you ask yourself many times per week am I enough? do people like me? or how did I get so lucky in life?
Focus on what you have not what is missing
Focus on what you can control, not what you can´t
Focus on present, not past or future
What am I going to focus on? - Where focus goes energy flows - Focus equals feeling - Will you focus on the bad stuff in your life or the good stuff? What does this mean - is this a gift? Is this a disaster? Meaning equals emotion and emotion equals life . What am I going to do? Nothing? Massive Action? All suffering starts with the illusion of loss. Uncertainty, stress, fear are all the same things - but these are just in our heads. If you can find appreciation in every moment than fear will leave you. If you can focus on what you love and not what you fear - you will have a fulfilled life
Language: the words we attach to our experience become our experience - “I hate this” vs “I had hoped for sth. else” . The words we use, create our experience. Ask yourself better questions (will also help with focus). Questions that help you redirect your language and focus:
What can I be grateful for, proud of?
What are the things that I have that Im happy about?
What could I be happy about?
what could I be excited about?
How could this be useful for me? or Whats great about this?
Whats not perfect yet?
What do I want to change?
What inner conflicts do you have e.g. you want to be slim and healthy but also want to eat junk food?
What limiting beliefs do you have?
What are you most afraid of?
Create an empowering Identity: We are limiting ourselves to the identity that was formed by others instead of creating our own identity, the real you, without fear. Identity shapes our choices. We don´t do what we can, we do what we believe. Distroy limiting beliefs, get a powerful identity..I AM..a leader, determined, loving etc.
Shift in belief: Life is happening for you and not to you