What wrecks your mornings getting your kids off to school? What causes most of the fights between you and your significant other? What always gets in the way between you and your boss? What keeps you from eating right or exercising? What causes your friendships to drift?
What do these seemingly different scenarios have in common?
Each one is highly charged with emotions. Particularly your emotions.
While you can’t necessarily control which emotions you feel, you can control your response to those emotions.
The degree to which you control your emotions, in my opinion, is one of the most significant things that separates average people from extraordinary people. It’s what separates high performing people from those who feel like life is against them.
The choice you make immediately after you feel an emotion will propel you towards the life you want or it will keep you stuck in vicious cycles. Getting off the hamster wheel always starts by you choosing how you will respond to what you feel.
When you control your responses, you are in control of your life. When you allow your emotions to dictate your choices, someone else is in charge of your life.
We even use that type of language when we talk about our emotions…I lost control…I lost it…I don’t know where that came from…I couldn’t walk away…I felt like I was having an out of body experience watching someone else make those choices.
Emotions are brutal masters. You can go from happy and cheerful to anxious or angry in a second.
When was the last time you felt controlled by your emotions? When was the last time you felt paralyzed and like you could only choose the response you least wanted? Was it getting your kids off to school? Was it at work? Was it with your spouse? Was it with a social media post you just had to chime in on?
It’s easy to let our emotions take control. But when they are in the driver’s seat, we always regret it. We will almost certainly have to apologize (but we usually don’t because our emotions are still in the driver’s seat).
Even worse than not being in the driver’s seat is we end up going in circles. We never make real progress. We keep gaining and losing the same 10 yards.
Imagine what your marriage would be like if you were able to actually gain ground instead of trying to regain it. Imagine what else you could focus on besides losing the same 20 lbs. Imagine how you could use your tax refund or bonus if you didn’t have to keep paying off the same credit card.
Our emotions have more potential to keep us going in circles with our careers, marriage, friendships, health, and finances than anything else.
IT’S JUST MY PERSONALITY
When you have been controlled by your emotions for a long time it’s easy to believe you don’t have a choice. I know some of you are pushing back about whether you really have a choice. You think it’s just your personality or you think it’s other people making you feel that way. I used to believe the same thing.
I remember spending time with a professor I admired. We were talking about different personality types and what it can look like in the church. The professor shared his personality type with me, but I was reluctant to believe him. How could he have the same type as me? He certainly didn’t seem to have some of the flaws I knew all to well about my personality. I pushed back, he couldn’t have that type because he didn’t demonstrate any of those negative characteristics. (Obviously, I knew more about him than he did.) He thanked me for my observation and proceeded to share how he had spent a lifetime working on those areas. My professor didn’t want to be controlled by his emotions, he wanted to control them. He never used his personality as an excuse.
Other people you admire have found a way to control the same things you think you can’t control. It’s one of the reasons you respect them.
I don’t have the space in this post to give you specific strategies to help you deal with each emotion, but what I think would be huge progress for you is to just recognize you have a choice.
You don’t have to be controlled by your emotions. You can control them. You can choose whether to feed the emotion or starve it. Your brain will do whichever you tell it to do (Phil 4:8).
MAN’S BEST FRIEND
Do you have a dog? The best way to ruin your dog (and your house) is to let it do whatever it wants whenever it wants. Having a dog you and others enjoy requires training. It requires you being the one in charge and not your dog. The longer you wait, the harder it will be no matter what the breed.
Some of us have let our emotions do whatever they want for so long without any training we don’t believe it’s possible to actually be in charge. We’ve used our “breed” or personality as an excuse. Sure, maybe no one helped you control or channel your emotions in a healthy way when you were a pup, but it’s never too late. You can tame the wild beast. You can enjoy your personality and so can others.
LEADING YOURSELF WELL
I think the hardest part of leading yourself well is controlling your response to your emotions. Some emotions will be easier for you to tame and others will be your life long work. Maybe one day someone will be surprised by how effortless your self-control seems, but you’ll know the truth. It was a lot of hard work.
One of the best ways you can set your child up for success is by helping them know what to do with how they feel. Before you can pass it on you have to have emotional control yourself. They will mirror whichever you model.
The next time you feel your heart beating faster with fear, the next time you feel your anger flash, the next time you reach for the Oreos or want some retail therapy ask yourself…Do I really want my emotions controlling my life or do I want to be in control of my life?
The life you want starts with how you manage your emotions.
