Rich Bello teaches a practical Emotional Mastery process focused on emotional mindfulness: when you notice a strong emotion, pause and deliberately investigate it (use your prefrontal cortex, name/welcome the emotion) rather than immediately acting. He emphasizes early intervention—"kill the monster while it's tiny"—and recommends breathing to down-regulate the sympathetic (fight/flight) response and re-engage the parasympathetic system and prefrontal reasoning. Bello cites Viktor Frankl to frame the pause between stimulus and response as the space for choice, growth, and freedom.
Chapters
You also don't want to blindly accept your emotions. They should be investigated. The Great Architect added the prefrontal cortex to your brain just for this reason. Use it. Analyze the emotion. During this step, you also want to identify the category of emotion and welcome it into your pfc. Welcome anger. How can I help you? This next step may be the most important step of all. Because if you're able to do this one, you can focus on the rest of the steps. When you feel and are aware of a strong emotion, hit the pause button. Your inclination is to act quickly, to release the tension from the emotion, but instead train yourself when you feel strong emotion. For non action instead of action. Pausing when you feel an emotion is the most important thing that you can do. When you feel and are aware of a strong emotion, hit the pause button. Your inclination is to act quickly, to release the tension from the emotion. But instead train yourself when you feel a strong emotion. For non action instead of action, develop an attitude of curiosity. If you can figure out how to master your emotions, you have a superpower that will last you the rest of your lifetime. I love the Viktor Frankl quote on this topic. Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. That's Viktor Frankl. That pretty much sums it up. Keep in mind that we can keep pausing all along the process, not just here. By the way, the best time to focus on implementing your plan is when you're first aware of the emotion. Once it grows because you haven't taken care of it, the harder it becomes to implement the Emotional Mastery process. For example, you may start up being little annoyed about something, but if you don't pause, that may become frustration, which then if you don't pause there, that can become anger. And if you don't pause there, that can become rage. Once it's at the rage stage, good luck hitting the pause button. The idea here is to kill the monster while it's tiny. A nice tactic to employ once you've been able to become aware of your emotion and and implement the pause button is to breathe. Just breathe for a few seconds. Why? Why would you do that? Strong emotions tend to activate our sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight response. This is a very power, powerful response and very stressful. It's a stressful activation. It increases your heart rate, causes muscle tightness, releases cortisol into your system, and a whole host of other physiological reactions that can be damaging over long periods of time. It also closes down your prefrontal cortex and thus your ability to reason. Now, breathing activates the opposite and balancing system, the parasympathetic nervous system. This turns down the sympathetic nervous system. When one goes up, the other automatically goes down. This relieves the stress and engages your prefrontal cortex and allows you to focus more clearly on your ability to reason, which is necessary to master your emotions.
