There is a lot of information that we are exposed to daily and that tells us about emotions, about how our brain plays with them and how they play tricks on us when it comes to achieving or not achieving our goals.
The ability to feel an emotion comes from the factory; Emotions are the result of chemical reactions that arise when faced with an external or internal stimulus in our brain, specifically in our limbic system, and they serve many purposes. In fact, They were created to help us survive since each emotion predisposes us to a different action.
The main situations that make emotions emerge in us are the following:
An example: the case of fear
I’ll give you an example when we talk about fear. Many centuries ago, when a lion came towards us, our brains would trigger fear in us and we would run away. “Give your legs hard,” our brain said, and therefore the body obeyed…
Something like this also happens to us today. It is not common to find lions on the street when leaving home, but when someone or something “bigger” or “more powerful” makes us fear, we adopt that predisposition to run away Or something not so good can also happen to us: we block ourselves and remain static without reacting…
As we see, Emotion generates an automatic reaction in the body and leads us to do something in a certain way in some cases in a very productive way, running away, and others not so much, such as when we remain static in the face of a threat.
What happens when we set an objective or goal and find it difficult to achieve it?
It may be, due to many reasons, that the objective is poorly defined, that it is not realistic or acceptable to us at this moment… But also We must listen to ourselves and become aware of the emotion, taking it into account when we want to set objectives and goals We must align the emotion with the goal to be achieved, because we may not advance in our objective as we would like.
There are goals against which we do not move forward, and in situations like this we must explore what emotion triggers us and ask ourselves if the conversation we have with ourselves predisposes us to experience that emotion. At this moment we have to ask ourselves if the situation is limiting us, or if it can be modified… We must even ask ourselves why we are telling ourselves this.
There is a world of possibilities that allow us address an infinite number of different internal conversations that trigger much more productive emotions at that moment to achieve our objectives, and that is a job that we must address before making or planning any action plan or setting objectives. That way we will feel more aligned with what we want and how we want it, and above all we will be more productive, since it takes a lot of effort to fight giants over and over again.
In coaching, we call this linguistically reconstructing the emotion; It is a process that allows us to change the conversations we have with ourselves, so that we modify our judgments and, above all, We analyze those beliefs that immobilize us and limit us and therefore we generate a different emotion much more aligned with the objective.
On one occasion I had a coachee who, every time she saw or felt an injustice in herself or in someone else, I noticed her anger flare up. With that emotion, she could not manage conversations with others or with herself in a positive or productive way, which distanced her from her objective or goal. Thanks to the coaching process she changed her emotion, she tried what was best for her and above all she achieved her goal.
How reassuring it is to be able to play and change the emotion and not die trying, right?
