Mastering Your Emotions

Hi, I’m David Timis and my mission in life is to prepare people for the future of work.?

In this week’s edition of the newsletter the theme revolves around managing our emotions, which especially in times like the ones we’re experiencing today, when there is a great deal of uncertainty and confusion in the world, is a skill we should all develop. Providing stability and hope for our colleagues and our families in times of crisis starts with nurturing those same emotions in ourselves. However, before we can nurture those positive emotions and support others, we first have to overcome our fears, doubts, and insecurities, and learn how to manage our emotions. As Nelson Mandela famously said, “courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” And when it comes to managing our emotions that triumph is rooted in self-discipline, in falling in love with the process not the outcome. Below are some insights and thoughts that will help you master your emotions.

Timeless Insight

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.” – Marcus Aurelius

Finding faith in the knowledge that our job, as Marcus Aurelius argued in Meditations , is to focus on what we can control - our minds and our reactions to external events. Therefore, what matters most is not what other people are doing or what’s happening in the world around us, but how we differentiate between what we can change and what we cannot, what we have influence over and what we do not, and how we then decide to respond. When the COVID-19 pandemic brought our entire existence to a halt, stoics such as Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, and others provided me with the tools I needed to cope with the things that were happening around me that I had no control over. In a sense, they have been the best mentors one can have in times of crisis. And, by following their timeless wisdom, I’ve managed to stay sane during the lockdowns and come out even stronger from the pandemic. If you'd like to read more about Stoicism, a great book to start with is the Daily Stoic , which is a collection of daily meditations drawn from the wisdom of the Stoic philosophers.

Food for Thought?

We all have emotions, both positive and negative, and we move up and down the spectrum, from one type of emotion to the other throughout the day, depending on what’s going on around us. And although our emotions can be overbearing at times and we might feel that they are out of control, we actually have more influence over them than we think.?

Managing emotions is different for everyone. Over the past two years, given the outbreak of COVID-19, and the subsequent lockdowns, job-losses, and personal tragedies that followed, each of us was able to see how we cope with a crisis and how we manage our emotions in the process. Some people were able to control how they feel better than others, but in general most people realised during the pandemic that they still have work to do when it comes to better regulating their emotions and improving their mental health. Luckily, emotion regulation is one of the fastest-growing areas of psychology, and so there is a lot of literature around the topic for those looking to better understand themselves. However, no technique or tool that promises to help us manage our emotions is useful if we are not able to become more present at first. It is only by taking a step back at different times during the day, noticing our emotions and naming them, that we can hope to take back control and make better choices when it comes to how we react to our minds and to external events.

The journey of a thousand miles, which will eventually lead us to mastering our emotions, begins with a single step, asking ourselves ‘how are we feeling in that very moment’? Depending on what our answer will be we will at least know what to expect from ourselves. Let’s say we are feeling stressed and/or anxious, and we find it hard to focus on the task at hand, which are all indicators of an emotional imbalance that we need to address. What do we normally do in such a situation? Do we raise our voice or say something inappropriate? Or do we detach from the situation for a few minutes, and manage to regulate our emotions? After we figure out how well we regulate our emotions we can adopt a growth mindset and start improving the way we deal with them in our daily life by following these steps:

1. Noticing our emotions - gives us a chance to take a step back and observe what we are feeling at any given time during our day. By noticing we will be able to manage whatever we are going through more gracefully and make better choices on how to react.??

2. Naming our emotions - tends to lessen the burden of being at our worst and puts us back in control over what we’re feeling. By naming our emotions we will be able to accept them, monitor them, and when we feel ready, let them go, since we are not our emotions.?

3. Taming our emotions - frees us from the state we are in and puts us on a path to mastering ourselves, one emotion at a time. By taming our emotions we will improve our ability to focus, our mental resilience, and how we respond to anything that life brings us.??

Emotional regulation is an important predictor of mental health, academic achievement, and work performance. Therefore, by managing our emotions better we can improve virtually every aspect of our lives. We can connect on a deeper level with our loved ones, perform better at school, and build more meaningful relations with our colleagues at work.?

Article of the Week?

How History’s Great Leaders Managed Anxiety

Caricature of the Week

Source: Condé Nast

Thank you for reading and keep on growing!

David

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