EMOTIONS AS SKILLS

While we have looked at emotions in many different ways in the past articles, there is yet another perspective by which to view emotions—you can think of emotions as skills. Because as you think, so you feel, and because you can set an anchor on an emotional state thereby putting it under your control for ready access— emotions offer you a wide reportoire of ways to respond. And if a wide range of responses, then a set of resources as things you can do.

If we think of each emotion as a skill—then you have the skill to love and to hate, to get angry and to get calm, to appreciate, to stand in awe, to accept, to play, to enjoy, to be curious, and on and on. The emotion itself is not the external action, it is your internal, somatic response, but it can certainly infuse an action and give any action a certain feel. You can, and you do, texture your behaviors and activities with certain emotional qualities.

Because you can anchor an emotion and attach it to new triggers, you can access an emotion and then re-access it as you wish. This gives you the ability to create an emotional environment for yourself in a multitude of contexts and experiences. For example, what emotional environment would you like to set up for yourself when studying? When you engage others in conversation? When you work out at the gym? Does your current emotional environment bring out your best when you are negotiating, selling, doing your taxes, handling the kids, etc.?

Beyond first level emotional anchors, you can also set up meta-level emotional anchors. This is what you do when you meta-state an emotional state. If you ask, “What would I like to feel when I feel X?” you can begin the process. Let’s say you want to feel respectful when you feel angry. If you access respect and apply it to your state of anger, thereby creating respectful anger. Repeat that several times, future pace it, and set up something to remind you of it— and lo and behold, you create a strategy for respectful anger as a meta-emotion.

The next step might be to turn the anchor it into a ritual. Doing that usually consolidates the process even further, giving you even more access to the new emotional strategy. It is in this way that you can choose your emotions and your emotional response. In doing this you are making a decision or several decisions about an emotion—which emotion to feel in a given situation, how to feel it, how to express it, etc. In this sense, rituals are originally designed to induce emotional states. If a ritual no longer does that, then it’s probably time to refresh the ritual and/or invent a new one.

As you think of emotions as skills, how skilled are you at loving? Being compassionate, enjoying everyday life, learning from every experience, counting and validating even small improvements,

hold firm to your values, being curious, being playful, etc.? And if emotions are skills, how often do you practice one or more of your emotional skills? You could, for example, practice empathy. You could practice wonder. Emotions as skills allows you to think about them in terms of degrees.

Emotions—love them or hate them. Of course, that’s thinking about them in an either/or, polarized way, one that implies that you don’t know much about emotional mastery. Yet there is a much better choice now that you know a lot about emotional mastery, learn to develop them and apply them so that they make you more alive, more effective, and more able to do the things you want to do. You can manage your emotions! That’s what we train in the Neuro-Semantic training, Emotional Mastery. And if it is a possibility, then it is a choice that you could step up to.

Emotions no longer have to be mysterious or unfathomable. “As you think, so you feel.” Any complexity in emotions implies complexity in your thinking.