A short spoken piece (YouTube talk/transcript) by Jon Butcher describing two related but distinct skills: emotional insight (recognizing, accepting, and learning from emotions) and emotional control (intentionally creating desirable emotions via 'emotional recipes'). He contrasts observing unpleasant feelings to learn their message with proactively scheduling activities that reliably produce positive emotions like happiness or peace.
Chapters
How can one gain more emotional insight and more emotional control? And we're going to take these two issues separately because they're very interesting. So emotional insight really comes from learning to understand your emotions. When you start to feel an emotion, what you want to do is you want to acknowledge it, you want to pay attention to it, let it come up. Sometimes the emotions we experience are not pleasant, and we don't like to experience them, so we try to push them down. Emotions like jealousy doesn't feel good, or anger or resentment, but those emotions are really there to tell us something, and usually something important. Anger, for instance, comes up as a violation to one of your boundaries somewhere. So it's really good to pay attention when you get angry and ask yourself, you know, what am I angry about right now? Has one of my boundaries been violated? Now, you don't want to sit there and wallow in that emotion for three or four hours, but it's good to really try to learn what it's trying to tell you. So when your emotions come up, you want to pay attention, you want to listen to them, you want to acknowledge and accept them and not try to push them away. That's how to develop a little more emotional insight. Now, emotional control is a different animal altogether. With emotional control, what you're trying to do is create the emotions that you would most like to feel on an ongoing basis. So you're going to pick the good ones. Obviously, emotions like happiness, joy, peacefulness, tranquility, all the emotions that you really like to feel that make you feel good. And we've got a great trick at Lifebook for generating more of these emotions. What we call them are emotional recipes. So you can take an emotion like happiness, for instance. I know that when I go on my date with Missy every week on Thursdays, I'm going to be happy. That's just a strategy that makes me happy every single week. So I do more of that and I feel more happiness. You can do the same thing with peacefulness or tranquility, that whole set of emotions, inner peace. You can take a walk in nature. You can listen to the sound of water. Running water always makes you feel peaceful. You can read a book. You can make a list of 10 or 12 things that make you peaceful, and there you'll have your emotional recipe for peacefulness. If you do more of those things, you will feel more peacefulness in your life. Just about every emotion works this way. You can create a recipe set. Do more of those things, and you'll get more of that emotion. So the bottom line on this issue is that to develop more emotional insight, what you want to do is pay attention to, acknowledge and accept your emotions. Really spend some time with them and try to understand what they're telling you. For emotional control, what you want to do is choose the emotions you want to feel more in your life, make a recipe for the things that make you feel that way, and then do more of that stuff and you'll feel that emotion more often.
