How to play with emotion and not die trying

This is how emotions are linked to certain actions.

There is a lot of information we are exposed to on a daily basis that tells us about emotions, how our brain plays with them and how they play tricks on us when it comes to achieving our goals or not. 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 before an external or internal stimulus in our brain, specifically in our limbic system, and serve for many things. In fact, they were created to help us survive, they were created to help us surviveSince each emotion predisposes us to a different action.

What actions are associated with an emotion?

The main situations that cause emotions to emerge in us. are the following:

• Anger or rage: leads to unfiltered actions, impulsivity.
• Fear: favors flight or paralysis.
• Happiness: in it we smile much more, our actions are more serene and any challenge seems more manageable.
• Love: it allows us to be in a state of harmony and optimism.
• Surprise: it opens us to a world of new possibilities, it is necessary in the face of new challenges.
• Displeasure or disgust: our body contracts, especially the mouth, we feel that something is unpleasant, even virtually.
• Sadness: it is inevitable in order to be able to mourn well in case of loss, it lowers our activity and metabolic rate.

An example: the case of fear

I give you an example when we talk about fear. Many centuries ago, when a lion came towards us, our brain triggered fear in us and we ran away. "Hit the legs hard," our brain would say, and the body would obey....

Today something like that also happens to us. It is not usual to meet lions in the street when leaving home, but when someone or something "bigger" or "more powerful" makes us feel fear, we adopt that predisposition to run away.. Or something not so good can also happen to us: we block ourselves and we remain static without reacting...

As we see, the 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.In some cases in a very productive way, like running away, and in others not so much, like when we remain static in front of a threat.

• You may be interested in, "What is fear for?"

What happens when we set an objective or goal and we find it difficult to achieve it?

It may be, due to many reasons, that the goal is poorly defined, that it is not realistic or assumable by us at this time.... But also we must listen to ourselves and become aware of our emotions, take them into account when we want to set goals and objectives.. We must align the emotion with the goal to achieve, because we may not advance in our objective as we would like.

There are goals before which we do not advance, and in situations like this we must explore what emotion triggers us and ask ourselves if that conversation we have with ourselves predisposes us to live 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 to to address an infinite number of different internal conversations that trigger much more productive emotions at that moment to achieve our at that moment to achieve our goals, and that is a job that we must address before making or planning any action plan or goal setting. That way we will feel more aligned with what we want and how we want it, and above all we will be more productive, because it is very tiring to fight against giants time after time.

In coaching, we call this a linguistic reconstruction of 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, we analyze those beliefs that immobilize us and limit us, and therefore we generate a newand therefore we generate a different emotion that is much more aligned with the objective.

I once had a coachee who, every time she saw or felt an injustice in herself or in the other person, she noticed how her rage was triggered. With that emotion she could not manage conversations with the other person or herself in a positive or productive way, which distanced her from her objective or goal. Thanks to the coaching process he changed his emotion, tried what worked best for him and above all achieved his goal.

How reassuring it is to be able to play and change the emotion and not die trying, isn't it?