Break Free Tip of the Month
From the desk of Terry Taylor, Your Recipe For Living Coach
November, 2010
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Terry Taylor

NOVEMBER'S BREAK FREE TIP focuses on five steps for freeing yourself from confusion about your emotions so you can stay in touch with yourself and get positive results for your life.  I'd love to hear how these steps work for you - feel free to email me at Terry@YourRecipeForLivingCoach.com or post a comment on my Break Free Blog at
www.yourrecipeforlivingcoach.com. And, please feel free to share this BREAK FREE TIP by forwarding this message to a friend or colleague. Enjoy!
Honor Your Emotions To Get Positive Results

When it comes to your emotions, here are some rules of engagement:

A. Don't treat your emotions as strangers. Your emotions don't come from thin air. They come from your assessment of your situation in the world:
  1. Your positive emotions come from (1) discovering your values and setting goals to achieve them, (2) making progress toward your goals, and (3) enjoying the values you have achieved.
  1. When you discover your values and set your goals, you feel motivated, focused, and raring to go.

  2. When you make progress toward your goals, you increase your confidence, enthusiasm, and self-respect.

  3. When you achieve your goals you feel like you love the whole world.  You feel proud of yourself for bettering your life, you enjoy the new improvement, and you feel like you are able to live as a full-fledged human being and achieve a healthy, happy, fulfilling life.
  • Your negative emotions come from (1) not having values and goals, (2) not acting on your values and goals, (3) having conflicting values and goals, or (4) having values and goals that are impossible to achieve. Negative emotions can also come from (5) trying to pursue too many goals at once and (6) the loss of a value you hold dear.
    1. When you don't have values or goals you feel unmotivated, lost and afraid.
    1. When you don't act on your goals you feel disappointed, ashamed, and "down."
    1. When you have conflicting goals you feel anxious, frustrated, and torn.
    1. When you have impossible goals, you feel incapable, unworthy and defeated.
    1. When you try to pursue too many goals, you feel rushed, stressed, and overwhelmed.
    1. When you lose a value you hold dear, you feel empty, numb, and listless.
When you have negative feelings, figure out which of the above situations might apply to you. Then do something to remedy your situation.

B. Don't lock your emotions up inside you. Are you a torrent of emotions on the inside, but a "walking dead person" on the outside? Allow yourself to have and experience your emotions - that's part of feeling alive.

C. Don't ignore your emotions. Whether your emotions are negative or positive, never pretend they don't exist. They do, and they can have a tremendous effect on you. You want to know what that effect is so that you can be in charge of you - instead of letting your emotions be in charge of you.

D. Don't criticize yourself for having negative emotions. Emotions themselves are neither good nor bad. You can't help how you feel. Your emotions come directly from your assessment of your situation. The only way to change how you feel about a situation is to change your assessment of that situation. Positive or negative, your emotions keep you constantly in touch with how you feel about your situation. A negative emotion can be a friendly warning to investigate its cause and rectify it before there are more serious consequences.

E. Don't be afraid of your emotions. Although they can be powerful, your emotions do not automatically control you. You can always choose to act on your best thinking and judgment rather than on your emotions.

F. Express your emotions. Part of being alive is giving expression "out there" to what is inside you. There are many constructive ways to express both your positive and negative emotions without interfering with your work or harming others. Smiling, laughing, writing in a journal, sharing with a friend, drawing a picture, writing a poem, singing a song, dancing, or playing a musical instrument are just some of your many options. Try different ways to see which ones satisfy you the most.

G. Take ownership of your emotions. Your emotions come from the way you assess a situation, not from the situation itself. So when you share how you are feeling, don't blame others for your emotions.

H. Learn when to express your emotions. There are many times when it is important to focus on doing a task and put emotional expression on "hold." You refrain from emotional expression so you can concentrate on your actions toward your goal. This is especially important for doing creative or highly skilled work, handling an emergency, or listening to a friend. It's good to be aware of how you feel, but you will want to focus fully on the task at hand and postpone emotional expression until the task is done.

HERE'S HOW TO GET STARTED:

 

1.     Monitor your emotions. Monitor the emotions you feel each day during the month of November. In just a few words, write down what you feel. For example: "frustrated over kids' schedules," "mad I missed my workout today," "guilt over being a working mom," "hurt because husband came home late without calling."


2.     Accept your emotions. Accept the emotions you feel all month, no matter what they are. By accepting your emotions, you can face them - and then you can trace their source to certain beliefs you hold. This enables you to see if any of your beliefs contradict each other and to revise them. You will feel so much better about all your emotions and you will be so much more in control of your life.


3.     Investigate your emotions. Investigate at least one of your troublesome emotions to uncover the beliefs behind it.


For example, if your mother was a stay-at-home mom who was always there for you, you may have concluded at a young age that mothers who work outside the home make poorer mothers than mothers who stay home. You have this belief stored in your memory.

 

Let's say many years later when you're married with children, you decide to work outside the home, and you suddenly feel guilty. You're surprised; you don't know where that emotion came from.

 

Do some detective work and try to trace where it came from. You will discover that it came straight from your early childhood belief that stay-at-home-moms make the best moms.

 

Once you discover that you have over-generalized that "stay-at-home moms are better moms than working moms," you can free yourself of that guilt by saying, "I don't believe that any more."

 

You can remind yourself that with careful planning and time management, working moms can be just as good or even better parents than stay-at-home moms, especially if they love their work and are happier, more fulfilled human beings because of it. As a working mom you can teach your children that work is not only vital to your survival but to your happiness as well. Your children will start to see you as a person in your own right, not just as their "mommy-servant." And because you and your children get a "break" from each other, you appreciate the time you do have together all the more.

 

Even if you still believe it's better to be a stay-at-home mom, you have to stand back to see your total picture. A good parent supports her child financially, as well as physically and emotionally. If you can "make do" without having to work outside the home, then you have that option. Otherwise a good parent needs to earn the money to feed and clothe her children and to put a roof over their heads. The most important qualifications for a good parent are that you care enough to discover how to become a good parent, you provide good protection and good guidance as well as a good role model, and you spend high-quality time with your children. Working moms as well as stay-at-home moms can qualify, as long as they care enough to do what it takes.

 

By revising your childhood beliefs to be compatible with your best adult understanding, you can resolve the contradictory beliefs that cause your emotional conflict and set yourself free from that conflict!


  1. Express your emotions. Try a different, constructive, fun way to express at least one of your emotions. Possible ways are to email a friend, write a short poem, or dance around the house!

 

  1. Express a difficult emotion to someone you are in a relationship with. Practice expressing how you feel in at least one of your relationships. Be sure to convey that this is how a certain situation made you feel and be very careful not to make the other person feel accused of causing your emotion. Ask the other person if you are interpreting the situation the way it was intended or if the other person sees the situation as being something entirely different.

For example, you can say, "When this happens I feel anger. How does it make you feel? Can you help me figure this out?" Then explore together the beliefs you have about this situation that make you each feel the way you do.

 

This kind of approach treats your relationship with respect and gets you working as a team to solve a mystery. And it gets much better results than accusing the other person with, "You make me feel so angry!" Blaming makes you both feel alienated - sharing makes you feel close to one another.

By the end of the month you will enjoy how much richer your relationships are and how much more alive you feel when you don't squelch your emotions!
Always here to make your days more delicious,

Terry

Terry Jean Taylor
Your Recipe For Living Coach, LLC
Your Recipfe For Living Coach, LLC logo 
A passionate motivational speaker and life coach with a new reality-based, no-nonsense approach, Terry Taylor is the designer of a unique strategy for reaching your goals and loving your life. Her CD program - 8 Steps For Reclaiming Your Life From Conflict, Confusion And The Control Of Others - is available at her website www.yourrecipeforlivingcoach.com, where you can also learn about her upcoming book, This Is Your Life: No Apology Needed.
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