Who taught us to manage emotions? Has anyone ever taken a resilience exam? How do we make decisions in the most difficult situations? In this article we give the answers to these and other interesting questions.
Last update: June 15, 2021
You too will have experienced emotions that you did not know how to manage, intense and sometimes painful. You may have experienced bewildering situations that you only wanted to escape. In these moments, the only way to regain control in the face of temptations and impulses, it is an intelligent management of emotions.
Emotional management is, very often, the key to success towards triumphs, as it helps us make right decisions. Becoming aware of your emotions and learning to manage them is a huge adaptive advantage in today's society.
"We live in a society that doesn't educate us to be emotionally intelligent people."
-Daniel Goleman-
Learning to live with our emotions
Understanding the emotional universe that resides in us is a journey that never ends. In life we face a multitude of different experiences to which we react accordingly. Getting to know each other and knowing what we are feeling in a given moment can help us find the most appropriate answer.
Managing negative emotional states is not an easy task; to make management more difficult, physical symptoms such as headache, sweat, heat stroke, gastrointestinal pain may also occur. In these circumstances, the thoughts that torment us stand out, those associated with feelings such as guilt, fear or frustration.
“As human beings we all want to be happy and free from any misfortune, we have learned that the key to happiness is inner peace. This is most hindered by disturbing emotions such as hatred, attachment, fear and distrust. Love and compassion, on the other hand, are a source of peace and happiness ”.
-Dalai Lama-
Managing emotions to be resilient
Managing our emotions is essential for our development and it directly affects our self-esteem and the way we relate to the world and to others. Emotion management programs are now implemented in educational centers, with the intention of teaching from an early age to become aware of the inner world of their emotions, so as to acquire effective behavior and relational models.
More and more efforts are dedicated to finding the best methods of managing daily emotions. This is the case with training programs aimed at enhancing awareness and understanding and identifying our emotions in an appropriate way. Only in this way will we be able to deal with it in a targeted and not automatic way.
Along this line are positioned programs focused on the teaching of mindfulness, such as the MBSR (Mindfulness-based stress reduction) by Jon Kabat Zinn and the MBMB (Mindfulness-Based Mental Balance) by Santiago Segovia, designed to acquire full awareness and be able to self-manage. Normally they are based on strategies for increasing the skills of managing daily problems, paying particular attention to the issue of resilience.
Habits to strengthen resilience
Some useful strategies in the management of emotions are:
- Become aware of who you are, what do you want, where you are heading to. This will help you know your strengths and weaknesses. Do not underestimate the latter, which are essential for finding your balance.
- Learn from experiences. Whenever you stumble along the way, analyze the reason for the failure.
- Dedicate yourself to what you are passionate about. Find out what your purpose is to find the energy needed to achieve it. Moving in the direction of our dreams helps us never stop.
- Work on resilience. Resilience is learned by facing the different circumstances of life. It consists of a series of skills that can be learned, and which will help us recover faster and faster in case of falls.
Emotional intelligence, the secret to managing emotions
Emotional intelligence influences our personal future and our successes, marking footholds as important as social relationships. Emotional intelligence is a skill of people who have good self-management.
Those who boast of good emotional intelligence are able to adapt better to the ecosystem in which they live, being more prepared to face unexpected changes and challenges. It is a question of acquiring greater self-control, but also, for example, a better management of the fear that can derive from uncertainty.
