I most recently reviewed a section in Tony's book entitled ' Six Steps to Emotional Mastery.' Several weeks ago I posted an emotions chart and I have found that chart to be such a useful tool in my own emotional growth. As I paired the chart together with Tony's section on emotional mastery, I felt an awesome quality of connection!
Here are six tools you can use to master your emotions: (Excerpted from Awaken the Giant Within)
- Identify what you're really feeling- "Instead of feeling overloaded, step back for a moment and ask yourself, ' What am I really feeling right now?' As you identify what you're really feeling, you can lower the intensity even more, which makes it much easier to learn from the emotion."
- Acknowledge and Appreciate Your Emotions, Knowing they support you- "You never want to make your emotions wrong. The idea that anything you feel is 'wrong' is a great way to destroy honest communication with yourself as well as others....whatever you resist, tends to persist. Cultivate the feeling of appreciation for ALL emotions."
- Get Curious about the Message This Emotion is offering you- "If you put yourself in a state of mind where you truly are feeling curious about learning something, this is an immediate pattern interrupt to any emotion and enables you to learn a great deal about yourself."
- Get Confident- "The quickest, simplest and most powerful way I know to handle any emotion is to remember a time when you felt a similar emotion and realize that you've successfully handled this emotion before."
- Get Certain You Can Handle This Not Only Today, but in the Future as Well- "You want to feel certain that you can handle this emotion easily in the future by having a great plan to do so. One way to do this is to simply remember the ways you've handled it in the past.
- Get Excited, and Take Action- "Now that you've finished the first five steps- identified what you were really feeling, appreciated the emotion instead of fighting it, gotten curious about what it really meant and the lesson it was offering you, learned from it, figured out how to turn things around by modeling your successful past strategies for handling the emotion, and rehearsed dealing with it in future situations and installed a sense of certainty- the final step is obvious: Get excited and take action!"
This Emotional Mastery list is for sure going to be taped to a mirror in my house until it becomes an automatic process for me. Tony Robbins is truly an inspirational gift to this Earth. As I sit with these steps I can't help but chuckle at his philosophy surrounding the best time to handle an emotion, "Kill the monster while it's little."
As you move forward with your day and curiously connect to the emotions in your life, may you be inspired to harness the energy of transformation. You have handled this emotion before and you will handle it again! Stand in your power my friends. We are all born to fiercely shine and support one another!
May You Sweetly Seek:)
In Gratitude,
Sarah