#MondayMotivation – Own your Emotions this Week
It’s a new week; novelty and new challenges abound; Lagos traffic will piss you off, your co-workers might get on your nerves, and your personal life will have its share of experiences. But whether or not, this will get to you depends on your state of mind. Learning to interpret events in ways that enable you learn from them is one of the most valuable skills you can learn, however you have to know some things.
Our feelings aren’t objective, the events that happen to us can be interpreted in several ways; a rejection can be seen as an opportunity to try something new, failure can be seen as a learning experience, traffic can be interpreted as time to either read a book, listen to music or a podcast. You don’t have to be enslaved by your feelings; you can decide to rewrite the stories they tell; it’s difficult but here are some ways to go about it
1. Meditation
Take 5 minutes a day, to do nothing but breathe in and out. Focus on your breathing and ignore your thoughts as they pop up. Ignoring your thoughts doesn’t mean you can’t hear them; it just means you refuse to follow them down the trail they move on.
2. Finding new outlets for your emotions
A good example of this is writing a journal. Writing down your thoughts allows you to distance yourself from your thoughts, and gives you a wider perspective. Though can be hard to practice in the moment, there are ways to go about this; you can download a notepad app on your phone, and practice a form of journaling called interstitial journaling where you write down how you feel in real time. The ease of accessibility a phone provides will allow you write down a thing or two. For starters just write down your state of mind e.g. “I feel anger,” after that write down your reason for the emotion: “miss x annoyed me,” and finally ask: “is my anger justified? ” This process will force you to think about your feelings and help you see them from a different perspective.
