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KEY 2

RECOGNIZE WHAT’S IN YOUR CONTROL

CONTROL YOUR EMOTIONAL WORLD

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can change;and the wisdom to know the difference.

– Serenity Prayer

It is critical for you to recognize that you can’t control everything. However, you do have control over what you need in order to create the life of your dreams.

When you focus on the part of life that is out of your control and try to change it and fail, then you feel like your life is out of your control. The emotions that stem from the feeling of being unable to control your experience and help yourself are anxiety, frustration, and depression.

On the other hand, when you focus on what you can control, you feel strong and empowered to move forward and attain your life’s goals, aspirations, and dreams.

Here’s an analogy to help you understand this better. Why do most people feel in control when they drive a car? Because they’re focusing on the steering wheel, which is the part of the driving experience they fully control. Because, in essence they’re mostly out of control when it comes to protecting themselves from getting killed in a car crash. Most accidents don’t happen because a driver drives off the road but because another car crashes into their car.

When you focus on what’s out of your control, you get anxious, frustrated, and depressed. But when you focus on the part of life that you have the ability to control, you feel empowered and calm. When you focus on what’s in your control, you feel empowered and have the internal drive to make things happen, because it’s in your power to succeed.

One part of your experience that you can control is your emotions; you can make the rules as to when you experience a specific emotion. You also have the ability to turn emotions on or off. When you develop the skills to activate and deactivate your emotions, then you have the power to choose to supercharge your emotions so you win.

How Your Emotional Anchors Are Developed

You have millions of experiences in your lifetime. However, experiences do not in themselves have any emotions associated with them. Death is death. House is house. Car is car. Accident is accident. Child is child. Wedding is wedding. These are all neutral events and situations.

On the other hand, you have a vast range of feelings. We’ll look at this in more detail later, but for now suffice it to say that there are many different feelings that you can apply to any experience.

According to developmental psychologists, by about age eight we’ve pretty much compiled in our subconscious mind all the different emotions we’re going to experience in our life. These emotions become anchored to various events. There isn’t any hardwired automatic connection between a specific event and specific emotion; it has to be developed.

Your life experiences play a major role in forming these connections; these experiences forge a connection between two unrelated entities. For example, there is no natural connection between being slapped and running onto a street. However, if a toddler runs into the street, he gets a smack from his parent for putting himself in grave danger. The toddler will connect street with smack and most likely not run onto the street again. If a child associates a lollipop with good behavior, she’ll feel good when acting that way, even though, in essence, the behavior and the lollipop are two completely separate entities.

It is your mind that makes the connection between those two separate things. It’s important to know that you have the ability to connect any feeling to any event.

This concept is going to prove very useful to you in freeing yourself from limitations and supercharging yourself to win. You have the ability to attach good emotions to desired actions and propel yourself towards your desired direction.

Your emotional world is like a compass – its needle always points north, which correlates to feeling good. You learn how to forge the connections between feeling good and your desired outcome. You learn to change and control your internal world so that the things that you choose to move towards are in line with your emotions. They can begin to move you in the proper direction and it feels good.

When you wind up in a problem situation, where for some reason something is causing you pain, fear, and stress, you can connect a different feeling or a different meaning to that situation. You have the choice to create a different feeling in response to any event that has caused you discomfort up to right now.

In essence you’re not really changing a situation around you – and yet you are. You’re changing your whole world. Because you’re changing how you feel in a situation that in the past has been troublesome, you’re freeing yourself from its clutches.

For example, suppose you have fear connected to heights. Remember that heights stay heights; this fact will never change. But you can change your feelings associated with heights. “Heights” doesn’t specifically have to be connected with “fear.” You can enable yourself to feel calm next to “heights,” despite the fact that currently heights and fear are connected.

Why? Because experiences and emotions are not hard wired.

If a certain feeling – fear – has become connected with heights, you can change that association. You can control your internal world so “calm” equals “heights” or “exciting” equals heights. You have the ability to do that with any event!

Here’s another example. If “public speaking” equals “fear,” you can change that to “public speaking” equals “excitement,” or “fun, “or “confidence,” or any other good feeling.

Because your feelings – which make up your internal world – are totally under your control.

Taking Control of Your Internal World

To get yourself moving in a different direction, you’re going to have to make changes to your mind and in your body. If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’re going to get what you have always got. Or to put it another way, here’s that well-known definition of “insanity”: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

To take control of your internal world, all you need to do is change the way you feel in association with any experience.

THREE STEPS TO LEADERSHIP IN YOUR LIFE

There are three things you need to know to take the lead in your life.

1. You need to know where you are.

2. You need to know where you want to go.

3. You need to just do it.

Step 1: You Need to Know Where You Are

If you don’t know where you are, it’s not possible for you to make any progress.

Here’s an example I often give in sessions with clients.

A woman once called me and told me her daughter was getting married in a wedding hall and she wanted to know how to get there. Someone had dropped her off at the wrong wedding hall, and she was frantic.

I asked her, “Where are you? Tell me and I’ll tell you how to get to the correct wedding hall.”

She answered, “But I can’t open my eyes. There’s no way I could tolerate the pain of knowing I’m not at my daughter’s wedding!”

“But you have to tell me. If you don’t tell me, I can’t help you.”

“But I can’t open my eyes. If I open my eyes, there is no way I can tolerate the discomfort.”

We were at a stalemate. To get moving again, she needed to tell me where she was at that moment, as painful as that would be for her.

So, it’s important to see and know where you are – to see it the way it is, but also not worse than it is.

Step 2: You Need to Know Where You Want to Go

The second step is to see the situation better than it is – to see where you want to go. It’s important to have a clear image in your mind, because life is controlled by invisible forces, one of which is visualization.

What are some other invisible forces, you may ask? Do I mean gravity? Radio waves? No, what I mean are emotions such as will, rage, optimism, creativity, calmness, and serenity.

You have to take control of these invisible forces in order to shape your life. That’s why it’s extremely important for you to know where you want to go. Imagery is where you start in accessing the right set of emotions to get into the process of attaining your desired outcome.

Suppose I’m a taxi driver. You get in to my taxi, and I switch on the meter and ask, “Where do you want to go?” If your response is, “Not here – I’m unhappy here,” how long is it going to take me to get you to your destination? We could be driving forever because you never gave me an address!

Supercharge Your Emotions to Win

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