How to play with emotion and not die trying

There is a lot of information to which we expose ourselves daily and that tells us about emotions, how our brain plays with them and how they trick us when it comes to achieving our goals or not.

The ability to feel an emotion comes from the factory; Emotions are the result of chemical reactions that arise from an external or internal stimulus in our brain, specifically in our brain. limbic system, and they serve many things. In fact, were created to help us survive, since each emotion predisposes us to a different action.

• Related article: "Emotional psychology: main theories of emotion"

What actions are associated with an emotion?

The main situations that make emotions emerge in us are as follows:

• Anger or anger: leads us to actions without filter, to impulsiveness.
• Fear: favors flight or paralysis.
• Happiness: in it we smile much more, our actions are more serene and any challenge seems more acceptable.
• Love: allows us to be in a state of harmony and optimism.
• Surprise: it opens us to a world of new possibilities, it is necessary in the face of new challenges.
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• Disgust or disgust: our body contracts, especially the mouth, we feel that something is unpleasant, even virtually.
• Sadness: it is inevitable to be able to have a good duel in case of loss, it lowers our activity and metabolic speed.

An example: the case of fear

I give you an example when we talk about fear. Many centuries ago, when a lion came towards us, the brain triggered fear in us and we left by legs. "Hit your legs hard," our brain said, and therefore the body obeyed ...

Something like this also happens to us today. It is not common to find lions on the street when leaving the house, but when someone or something "bigger" or "more powerful" causes our fear to shoot up, we adopt that predisposition to run away. Or something not so good can happen to us: we block ourselves and there we remain static without reacting ...

As we see, emotion generates an automatic reaction in the body and leads us to do something in a certain way, in some cases in a very productive way, running away, and others not so much, as when we remain static in the face of a threat.

• You may be interested in: "What is fear for?"

What happens when we set a goal or goal and we have a hard time achieving it?

It may be, due to many reasons, that the objective is poorly defined, that it is not realistic or acceptable for us at this time... But also we must listen to each other and become aware of the emotion, take it into account when we want to set objectives and goals. We must align the emotion with the goal to be achieved, because we can not advance in our objective as we would like.

There are goals towards which we do not advance, and in situations like this we must explore what emotion we are shoot and wonder if that conversation we have with ourselves predisposes us to live that emotion. At this moment we have to ask ourselves if the situation is limiting us, or if it can be modified... We must even ask ourselves why we are telling ourselves this.

There is a world of possibilities that allow us address a myriad of different internal conversations that trigger much more productive emotions at that time to achieve our goals, and that is a job that we must tackle before making or planning any action plan or goal setting. In this way we will feel more aligned with what we want and how we want it, and above all we will be more productive, since fighting against giants one after another is very exhausting.

In coaching, we call this linguistically rebuilding emotion; It is a process that allows us to change the conversations we have with ourselves, in such a way that we modify our judgments and, above all, we analyze those beliefs that immobilize and limit us, and therefore we generate a different emotion much more aligned with the objective.

I once had a coachee who, every time she saw or felt an injustice in her or in the other, she felt her anger shoot up. With that emotion, she could not manage conversations with the other or with herself in a positive or productive way, which took her away from her goal or goal. Thanks to the coaching process, she changed her emotion, she tried what was best for her and above all she achieved her goal.

How reassuring it is to be able to play and change the emotion and not die trying, right?