Our emotions impact our connection with others.

We are faced with different situations every single day, the cognitive theory of emotion suggests it is not the situations themselves that cause us pain but the meaning we attach to them.

Two people may experience the same comment from a manager both attaching completely different meanings to the event (there is more likelihood for a negative meaning to be attached if someone is experiencing chronic stress in their life). One person may believe the manager was being supportive and one may believe the manager was having a go at them, the event has not caused the upset, the interpretation of it has.

What do we do about this?

We start to become aware of the meaning we attach to certain circumstances and people. If you dislike a person you may find their comments are far more hurtful than someone you get on well with, again proving that it is the meaning around a person, comment or event that dictates how we feel and view it. By being more mindful of emotional responses we can connect better with others and more importantly ourselves.

Connecting to ourselves reduces inner conflict.

The meanings attached to events can be conscious and unconscious. If you are growing your own business and you have had a particularly difficult week you may see everything in your day in a negative way even though there may be an abundance of opportunities. You are switched off to opportunities as you are experiencing stress and tension. It is time to wake up to the opportunities that are around you, stress and tension disconnects us and creates gaps in our triangle (read on)!

I had a client recently who was focusing so much on what other people were doing in their line of work rather than on their own performance. They spent their day comparing themselves to others, feeling completely hopeless in the process. My client had been giving away their own power to other people and worst of all the other people had no idea they were so important in my clients life, they were pain free but my client was filled with pain.  

We worked hard at stripping this back to find the root cause of this comparison, it was the fact that they had worked under forceful people who had told them their way was right and they had to follow it. They had been conditioned to believe this was how to be successful. My client was set free when we removed this limitation and started to look at how they wanted to take action completely removing any link to the forceful bosses’ opinion.

The meanings attached to events are complex as you have many different vibrations going on at any one moment. Your vibration is the energy that is going on within you, this energy is projected out into the world and draws back similar people and events that match that energy. For example if you are feeling negative you will see negative people, you will focus on upset and torment.

Your life is a triangle with many points of connection, see illustration below.

To truly connect with ourselves and others we must have made peace with our past, self-regulate our emotional state and be aware of what is going on around us.

If either of these are out of balance meaningful connection may be difficult to achieve. If one is off balance it is very difficult to function at a high level. Taking for example someone who is holding on to a broken heart from the past, reliving the pain daily, their senses of what is going on around them may be dulled meaning their emotional state is low and less energetic. Balance on all sides is what makes us whole.

People struggle to achieve excellence when life is out of balance.

A number of events in your life can trigger anxious responses but you can start to learn to control it by understanding your own life story, to bring past pain to the surface to let it go for good.  This is what makes your triangle solid and stable. We must identify what is keeping you trapped, what it is that is stopping you from connecting to others. Yes, this can be painful but if working with a professional they can help lighten the load for you.

It often means we have to break the cycle of negative habits.

In the experiment of Pavlov’s dogs we see clearly how an association to a particular outcome is quickly formed.

Let’s take the example of the colleague who is going through a marriage break up, they come in every day for a period of time upset and snapping at others, they may snap at one person more than others. Over time the person on the receiving end associates having to jump into protection mode when they see this person. So, the person going through the marriage breakdown is better, they feel more able to focus, but the association still exists within the person who was snapped at more times than they would have liked. You now have tension in your team and your productivity levels are down, you cannot just ignore this as this has formed and it’s pretty solid. An emotional intervention is needed to bring peace to the situation and to help people digest the experience to let it go naturally.

By investing time in your staff you could be saving yourself time, money and talent.

Any relationship between client and therapist is a collaborative one, it is about working together not being told what to do with one person leading and another following, that would be a recipe for disaster. My programmes are private (1:1), group work programmes and leadership packages, a range of programmes often work well when experienced by the same person.

What I find most interesting about this is the change that can take place in one session. I have witnessed clients feeling like their whole life is falling apart and in an hours session feeling like it has been put back together. The reason this can happen so suddenly is professional questions that get to the root of the issue and fast, reducing pain and emotional reactions.

Everyone wants connection, if you have ever read any of Brene Browns work you will see she talks about us being “hard wired” for connection which is very true! We want to be accepted, we want to feel loved and we want people to be proud of us, its human nature. For all of this to happen we must invest in our own self-love, our own self-motivation and our own self-regulation to complete our triangle. No one else will complete our triangle for us, it is our job to be the best we can be then connection will start to happen naturally.

If you want to find out more about the work we can do together to ensure your life triangle is ready for the next level in business, in your relationships and most importantly in self-love get in touch. Email [email protected].

Brooke x