EMOTIONS AS RESOURCES

6) Use Your Emotions as Resources. The final step in emotional intelligence is discovering how to use your positive emotions to get into resourceful states and to use the emotional energy productively. With negative emotions, set your aim to use them to alert you to dangers, to “stop, look, and listen” to find out what’s not right. Something may not be right in your map about things (understandings, beliefs, expectations, etc.) and/or something may not be right in your skills and experience in the territory. Either way, the warning signal of negative emotions is designed to protect your well- being and prevent harm. With positive emotions, aim your aim for accessing them so you can then use them as your base-of-operation for living your life with joy, love, trust, compassion, etc.

If you think of your emotions as a set of resources that you can use to either access directly and/or to meta-state yourself in creating higher quality experiences, then you frame emotions as your repertoire for health, vitality, energy, competence, skill-development, confidence, developing as a person, becoming all you can become, etc. In NLP this takes the form of thinking about emotions as states—as mind-body states. And because you are always in a state, the questions are: What state are you in? Is it limiting or empowering? How are you creating that state via your thinking and emoting? What do you need to do to make the state optimal for you? Turn it up, turn it down? What qualities do you want to give that state? How will you meta-state it? How well can you interrupt the state and shift to another? How quickly?

This are but a few of the state management skills that we focus on in NLP and Neuro-Semantics and explains the attractiveness of the basic NLP model about emotions. It was for this reason that some years ago Denis Bridoux and Patrick Merlevede, along with Rudy Vandamme, took the basic NLP model and wrote 7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence (1997). It’s a well-written book that is a good example of applied NLP.

Feel your emotions. It’s emotions that give us a feel of life. With emotions, we feel more alive, in fact, we are more alive. It’s when a person fears emotions, taboos certain emotions, doesn’t track emotions to monitor them, that a dullness results. It leaves you with less energy, less vitality. Given that an emotion is just that, an emotion—the motion you feel to move out from your current state to another.

Access emotions to energize whatever you are doing. What emotions do you need for learning?

What emotions for skill development? For doing your job? For being with your loved ones? For going to the gym? As a form of energy, your emotions enable you to access the right state for the right activity.

Learn to access your emotions as you communicate. Imagine attempting to communicate without engaging your emotions! You would sound like a robot or an A.I. program. The words would be said, but without any energy, without any life. What makes coaching, training, consulting, leading, managing, leading, etc. effective and powerful are the energizing emotions within those conversations and/or presentations. When you can do that, you can induce state— which is one of the skills that we teach in Meta-Coaching and in Trainers’ Training.

When was the last time you thought about and/or talked about your emotions as resources? If it has been awhile, or never, then today is the day to change that. With nearly every training that we do in Neuro-Semantics, we ask about emotions in terms of resources: What state or states do you need to access to be able to do X? What states do you need to especially avoid triggering when you want to do X? What are the quality of your emotions states currently? What would you want as the quality of your emotional states?

Emotions are designed to be your friends, not your enemies. In terms of managing your emotions, we have now covered six steps. Do these and your emotional intelligence will skyrocket.

1) Accept the emotion as an emotion.

2) Explore to understand the emotion in your experience.

3) Let the emotion do its emotional work inside you.

4) Meta-State the Emotion.

5) Interrupting Emotions as Necessary.

6) Use Your Emotions as Resources.