Leaders need this tool to up their game!

By Peter Jansen

You can change your emotional state in less than a minute.

If you are a leader or you are developing your leadership abilities, this is the most useful tool you can have.

Manage your states and you’ll be able to influence yourself and others.

As a leader, what would you give to have this power?

Emotions are simply put, non-filtered reactive thought processes. Keep this in mind throughout this article and beyond, this is important so you understand you have power over them.

The story begins as early as humanity does, and they begin developing as soon as there is neurological activity. A baby comes out of the birth canal, her name is Trinity, who is first exposed to light and to air. Sounds and smells begin to saturate her senses. It is absolute confusion and sensory overload, she is scared and unaware of what is happening and what to do. So she begins to cry. As soon as she feels the warmth of her mother’s embrace and hears the beating of her heart, she calms down. This will happen many times in the beginning, the baby girl is learning about pleasure and pain. If she feels the pain of thirst, loneliness, hunger, etc. she begins her cry which she has now learned will call her mother or father to come and soothe her pain away. Little by little this terrifying emotions begin to subside as she begins to adapt to her new surroundings.

Fast forward a few years, our little Trinity is now a toddler and her world is all about curiosity and she starts to develop complex imagination processes and playing strategies. Her curiosity drives her to explore and experiment as she pulls the table cloth from the already set table. She pulls relentlessly until, in a split second, everything begins to fall from the table, breaking on the floor, making loud crashing and breaking sounds and sending debris all over her surrounding area and onto her as well. She cuts her hand with some glass and burns herself with hot tea. Once again there is a strange saturation of stimuli which she can’t deal with yet and in her overwhelming, she becomes scared and begins to cry frantically. She’s in pain and doesn’t understand this.

This is a crucial point in Trinity’s development. She’s going to start to learn about consequences and this lesson is going to hit her from multiple sides.

Pain is teaching her a lesson through the construction of reactions to specific situations. But her parents and their reaction will also teach her a lesson. This parental lesson is an important one, and the formation of Trinity’s emotions, reactions and personality are highly dependent on these two. They will begin to form her view of the world and her perceptions. As time goes by every event in her life will begin to form her thoughts and the stories she tells herself and the games she plays in order to simulate situations which may arise.

Trinity’s thoughts will soon become her words and her beliefs, her words will become her actions as her beliefs turn into her attitude. Her actions will determine her habits and her attitude will determine her performance traits. As her habits develop her character does too.

When life puts all these things together she will fully develop her character and her personality.

Remember, her first experience of life was a physiological one, and everything else branched out of it.

This is one of the reasons why interrupting emotions through physiology is so effective and quick.

The storytelling abilities Trinity has developed give her a fantastic virtual reality simulator of life which she activates every time she plays. As she develops these, she develops the ability to travel through time in her imagination. In doing so she’s able to remember the past and replay stories, events and situations giving them her imagination’s magic touch, and she’s able to travel to the future and create a vivid world file with situations she may face, thus giving her an opportunity to prepare and plan.

Pay close attention to children at play. Their imagination is filled with danger, lava threatens to burn them if they miss the jump from one couch to the next, hearts and livers are cut out of an unsuspecting patient as they operate to try to save their life due to some unknown unfortunate event. Cops are chasing after robbers as they shoot at each other across the park, and so on. Their imagination seems to lack any subtlety.

Time traveling, virtual reality simulations of tragic events and reaction formation bombard Trinity’s world and will continue to do so for the rest of her life.

Through the creation of internal time travel strategies, she will begin to associate emotions to her focus on the past, present, and future.

Just as it happened to Trinity, it happened to you and to everyone you know. 

Dr. Paul Ekman has dedicated most of his career to the understanding of human emotion. In his work, he identifies 6 universal human emotions from which all others stem. These are:

1. Sadness 
2. Rage
3. Contempt
4. Disgust
5. Joy
6. Fear

I have found through my work and my studies that the stories we tell ourselves and their focus in time determine the specific emotion we have at any given moment.

The physiological interrupts I have designed, specifically target the emotion felt at the time and disrupt its temporal focus dissolving it.

If you would like to have this powerful tool to begin using it to develop as a leader, and develop other leaders now, and you want it for free go to my website www.coachjansen.com and sign up to my newsletter.

Share it and use it!

Peter Jansen