Focusing in The Face of Emotions

Why You Must Focus Your Emotions

We all have an idea of the negative consequences distraction has on us. We get less done in more time; rather than getting more done in less time. Yet, most people overlook the most dangerous component of distractions: the weakening of cognitive pathways within the pre-frontal lobe of our brains. People don’t realize that as one grows more distracted, their minds deteriorate.

The good news is that this can be countered. In fact, you can grow your mind to a point where it’s never been before.

By facing emotions in a focused manner, you create synapses between your limbic system and your prefrontal lobe. Your limbic system is an older part of your brain that specializes in feeling. When leveraged correctly, the prefrontal lobe results in mindfulness and focus. As you create synapses, your mind grows and matures–allowing you to become a more reasonable and focused person.

In ancient Buddhism, there sits a principle known as abhidhamma, which teaches that emotions are impermanent. By reflecting on emotion, and experiencing their rise and fall, one can strengthen their cognitive abilities. This is not detaching yourself from emotion, it’s taking in emotion, and reflecting on emotion to the point where you become more mindful of your emotion. This results in a more alert, and focused state.

How To Counter The 10 Emotions of Life Through Focus:

One summer, I sat and read through dozens, if not hundreds of success books. After a while, they all grew stale; yet, I found one section within Anthony Robbins’ Awaken the Giant Within that really hit home. He showed how one should react to emotions. I’ve decided to create my own version and guide for facing emotions below. My version centers on countering these emotions in a more focused manner, which will allow you to expand your cognitive pathways, and become more focused.

Discomfort:

When something just doesn’t feel right, it’s an odd feeling. Sometimes you can’t put your finger on what it is, but you feel uncomfortable. And you know it. It nags you throughout the day and the discomfort can really drag on.

How to reflect on discomfort

Discomfort sends a message that something isn’t quite right. This can be due to your perspective or lens in which you view life. You may be thinking simply about yourself. You may be using a lot of “Shoulds.” For instance, “I should be getting this, and I’m not.” You may be frequently focusing on yourself, and using “I’s” and comparisons.

Focused action steps:

1. Using a notepad (completely free and open space–like Seth Godin), write down your goals and your objectives that you feel will appease this discomfort.
2. List out your daily actions that enable you to reach this goal.
3. Audit these actions and make sure that they will lead to the end result; consider honing and changing some of your actions.

If not countered right away, discomfort can really stress you out. Little-by-little, discomfort can drain you. Just as Phil says in the profoundly classic film, The Hangover, as he references marriage, “You’ll die just a little bit every day.” That’s what discomfort will do to you.

This is further increased by our ability to visualize things in our minds. It’s critical to logically outline your objectives and your actions that lead to this discomfort. It’s important to map out in hand-writing exactly what actions are leading to this level of discomfort. If not handled correctly, discomfort can lead to the next emotion: fear.

Fear

Everyone experiences different levels of fear throughout their life. This can be characterized as either apprehension or slight uneasiness to intense fright and even terror. The key with fear centers on facing it in a logical, focused fashion.

How to reflect on fear:

Fear sends a message that you’re anticipating something that is about to happen, or at least should be prepared for. In order to counter this fear, one must look at fear from a logical perspective, or simply out-prepare their fear. What do I mean by out-prepare your fear? I mean, prepare so much for the action at hand, that you no longer fear it.

Focused Action Steps:

1. Define precisely what you fear.
2. Outline the steps you need to take in order to extinguish that fear.
3. Act. Through action, fear is killed. “Action cures fear, inaction creates terror. -Doug Horton”
4. Have faith that you’ll be able to accomplish those activities.
5. Look at the big picture; realize that if you continue to visualize the situation, and experience failure; you’re really just experiencing failure before you experience failure.

Hurt

This emotion stems from human relationships–both personally and professionally. This usually is driven by a sense of loss. After being hurt, one often lashes out at those around them. The key with hurt is to understand the emotion, and put it into perspective.

How to reflect on hurt

Hurts  serves as a signal that some expectation has not been met. An expectation that you visualized in your mind suddenly finds itself stamped on, and results in loss. This is painful to experience. Put simply, it hurts.

This can come in the form of expecting someone to keep their word, and they didn’t; or they just did something that feels as if you’ve lost trust in them. Something in which you expected them to do, but they didn’t.

Focused Action Steps

1. Make sure you’re not being irrational. Immediately after experiencing a feeling of loss, or feelings misconstrued from your expectations, it’s easy to act harshly, or immediately. Take a step back and calm down. Go to a coffee shop with a pad and a pencil, or a book, and get your mind off of it.
2. Understand the situation by asking yourself if you really lost anything. Likely, what happens is that your expectations are the only things that are misconstrued. In order to prevent this from happening again, adjust your expectations.
3. Communicate this to the person involved. Make sure you don’t use the word “you,” and instead use the terms, “I feel as if I’ve been let down because I expected x to occur. Am I wrong to expect this?”
4. Hedge your emotional risk. The feeling of hurt can really be detrimental to one’s life. Just as your financial assets shouldn’t be tied to one investment vehicle; all of your emotions shouldn’t be tied to your expectations of one person. Now I’m not talking about becoming a polygamist. This isnt’ sexual at all. I’m speaking about the work-place. About the ventures you pursue. About the clients you count on for revenue. Every great football team has one thing that other teams don’t have: depth. If their star quarterback goes down, their season isn’t over if they have depth. Aim to have this type of depth and diversification in your life–whether it be a business, a client or whatever. Hedge your emotional risk by diversifying your emotions. If your emotional expectations are contingent upon yourself, instead of others, you’ll feel empowered–and less likely to feel hurt if things don’t pan out.
5. Hurt usually re-awakens a sense of vulnerability, too. It almost feels as if a carpet’s been pulled out from right underneath where you’re standing. If you don’t have a solid foundation by the time you experience hurt, you can fall really hard. The vulnerability and lack of experience one feels from hurt can actually be shifted to an empowering emotion. Instead of dragging your head after a feeling of hurt, you can instead re-convene with your core values, and what you’re actually in charge of.

Anger

When anger takes hold, your adrenaline kicks in; you can become resentful, furious, or simply downright pissed. This stems from a chaemical in the primitive, survival part of your brain–norephinephrine. This chemical is a type of adrenaline that drives a fight-or-flight response in your mind. The key is to harness this emotion.

How to reflect on anger:

Anger sends a trigger that an action has taken place in your environment which violates a rule or belief that you hold dear. It can be a rule someone else violated; or you yourself violated.

Focused Action Steps:

1. Before reacting in anger, ask yourself a simple question, “What other possibilities could have driven this rule to be broken?” Make sure you explore reasons and rationale for how a person could have misinterpreted a pre-set rule you hold dear.
2. Realize that just because you hold certain beliefs and rules dear, that doesn’t mean the world holds them dear, as well. Everyone has their own beliefs in which they interpret the world. The key is to constantly communicate these beliefs and rules that you hold true to others.
3. Instead of letting the anger drive you into an irrational, reactive state, ask yourself two questions: First, “Going forward, what can I learn from this experience?” And second, “In the long-run, does this person have my best interest in mind–they just merely slipped up through lack of understanding?“

It’s critical to reflect in the time of anger. Adrenaline and dopamine fuel anger. When reflecting, serotonin is released into the mind, which calms the senses, promotes rationale thought–and helps the mind grow.

Frustration

Frustration is an emotion that stems from a feeling of being overwhelmed. If you’re exhausting yourself through a certain practice, or certain set of actions, and yet they fail to translate into success, you may get frustrated.

How to reflect on frustration:

Frustration sends a very positive signal. It tells you that your expectations aren’t being met for yourself. It’s a signal that you expect more of yourself than you currently are producing. Frustration tells you that you’re not meeting a certain goal you have for yourself.

Focused Action Steps:

1. First, you must explore your thoughts and explicitly define what goal isn’t being achieved.
2. Understand that you must leverage frustration to map out new actions and strategies to meet your goals.
3. In order to meet these goals, get some input from someone that’s experienced the goal you’re pursuing. Find a mentor and leverage their knowledge and insight to achieve that goal.
4. Pursue the goal. Remeasure your results. If you have yet to gain progress in reaching the goal, redraft the strategy, and pursue the goal gain.

Disappointment

This emotion is dangerous if not dealt with quickly. Disappointment sends a signal that you’ve been let down. Unlike hurt, disappointment usually stems from letting yourself down.

How to reflect on disappointment:

Disappointment sends you a message that your anticipated goal probably isn’t going to happen. And, even though it’s painful to admit, you know it. Thus, you must re-calibrate your goals, and look at them in a new perspective. Perhaps even scratching out the goal completely and shifting focus towards a different goal.

Focused Action Steps:

1. It’s critical that you map out what you’ve learned from this experience. What critical lessons did you learn? What skills did you develop? What can you take with you to your next venture or goal?
2. Understand that disappointment is sometimes very temporary in nature. It’s a critical skill to know when to pull the plug on a goal. Yet, sometimes goals take longer to develop than anticipated. Make sure that you know for certain whether to kick-it or stick-it. Ultimately, this is on you to decide. Yet by mapping out your rationale behind your decision, you can make a more focused decision. Benjamin Franklin had a process where he listed out the pro’s and con’s of each decision he made. I recommend mapping out your decision to stick with a goal much like this. Weight not only the costs of sticking with a goal, but the opportunity costs of sticking with a goal.
3. Now that you’ve reflected on what you’ve learned, it’s time to create a new goal. Make this goal agile, lean and something you can accomplish within three months. Let this goal drive you.

Guilt

We all try to avoid guilt, remorse and regret. The pain we expect to feel from these emotions drive us to make sound decisions. If guilt did not exist, many of our actions would cause pain to others, as well as ourselves.

How to reflect on guilt:

Guilt tells you that you have standards set for yourself. It tells you that some or all of these standards have been violated. And because of this, you feel guilt.

Focused Action Steps:

1. If guilt is a constant feeling–something that stems up on a monthly basis–then consider re-drafting your standards. Perhaps they’re too high. The slogan for another profound movie, Tommy Boy, is, “If at first you don’t succeed, lower your standards.” This is humorous; yet its true in many aspects of life. If you don’t meet your standards every once in a while, that’s one thing. But if it’s a weekly, or even daily feeling of guilt, consider lowering your standards.
2. Come to the realization that you have, in fact, not met a standard set for yourself. Write out that standard and define it clearly so that you can better understand it.
3. Outline what action you took that violated this standard.
4. Write out what you would do in the future now that you understand your standard more clearly.
5. Commit that you will not violate this standard.

Inadequacy

Inadequacy sends the signal that you’re feeling unworthy. This is usually driven by an irrational standard–a standard that makes you feel as if you’re inadequate.

How to reflect on inadequacy:

Inadequacy sends you a signal that you may not have the skill or talent to accomplish a goal. It sends a message that you need more information, experience, help from others, talent or strategies to accomplish your goal. Sometimes this feeling may be appropriate; sometimes, it’s irrational and driven by lack of confidence.

Focused Action Steps

1. First, you must determine if your feeling of inadequacy has merit, or if you’re being pessimistic about your abilities. Write down exactly what skills, experience, knowledge, talent or strategies that you’re missing, which prevent you from reaching your goal. If there’s nothing there, get tough on yourself, realize that you do have what it takes to achieve the goal, and press forth. If there’s sound reason behind your feeling of inadequacy, map out what you’re missing, and structure how you plan to fill the gap. If there’s certain skills you need, consider outsourcing the skills via a service like ODesk.
2. Inadequacy sends you an awesome signal that you have room to improve. If you never feel inadequate, that sends a signal that you’re not challenging yourself. We all need to start somewhere and end up somewhere. It’s better to feel inadequate at the beginning of your journey, rather than at the end.
3. If you’re feeling inadequate, find a person that feels adequate. Find a mentor, industry leader or person that’s been in your shoes before. Leverage their knowledge and skills in order to get to the next level.

Overwhelmed

I once went through a stage of profound motivation. I was passionate and driven. Overtime, though, the passion grew a bit stale, and I began living down to sociecty’s expectations–that is, being normal, climbing the latter and going the route society deems normal. There were so many dsitractions and set-backs that hit me. Eventually, I gained a feeling of helplessness, being overloaded and feeling overwhelmed. This gave me an indifferent approach to a lot of things. I was still positive at the core, but I was sarcastic and cynical. I felt as if I was in quick sand. The harder I tried, the more I was hit by setbacks. I feel this is a trap a lot of people fall into at some point in their life. They go through a very driven period, and then fall into one that feels as if you’re indifferent.

How to reflect on this feeling

Being so overwhelmed that you’re driven to indifference tells you that you need to reevaluate what’s critical at this point in time. Get in touch with your purpose, and with what drives you. Too often the distractions of life throws us away from our true purpose. When feeling overwhelmed, it’s critical to sift through the noise and identify what’s truly important.

Focused Action Steps

1. Identify one thing that you want to focus on in your life. Outline a critical goal in the field of your career, your personal life and an overall goal.
2. Now identify which one is critical for you to not feel overwhelmed; set it up so that it can be accomplished in three months or less.
3. Outline the action steps that are needed to achieve this goal, and list them in priority.
4. Immediately tackle the first item sometime today, or if it’s at night, then tomorrow.
5. Focus on the elements that you can actually control in life; if you can’t control  the elements that lead to feeling overwhelmed, don’t focus on them. Just as with any economic market, there’s two types of risk: systematic risk, and firm specific risk. Systematic risk is driven by the environment of business (legal, economics, society, politics). You can’t control systematic risk, you just have to bear it and not focus on it. With firm-specific risk, however, you can diversify and control this risk. With the feeling of overwhelming, you usually are side-swiped and stressed out about systematic risk. Don’t fall into this trap. Only focus on elements that you can control.

Loneliness

Life is about people. When we are disconnected from people, we are disconnected from life. Everyone’s felt alone. How you act determines how alone you feel.

How to reflect on loneliness

Loneliness sends you a message that you need to connect with people. It’s an excellent signal because it tells you that you really value people, and you feel the need to connect. Many fall into the belief that this means sexual intimacy; however, the feeling of loneliness doesn’t center on that. It centers on connecting with people–whether with a group of friends, with leaders in your field, with colleagues, or whatever.

Focused Action Steps:

1. First, outline what type of connection you need–business connection, friend connection or intimate relationship.
2. Realize that life is about people; life is about connecting with people. Instead of sitting couped up in your office or home, make a commitment to get out and meet people. This can be done through the following actions or activities:

• Networking events within your industry
• Classes or groups at a church
• Search Meetup groups
• Get a dog (warning–they’re a lot of work–or at least mine is). A dog is an excellent excuse to get out and meet people. Like kids, they demand attention. They’re selfish. This will allow you stop focusing on yourself, and instead get in the habit of focusing on others.
• Go to some wine-tastings in your community
• Reach out to industry experts and meet up with them for lunch

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