Tag Archives: Emotional Intelligence

A Simple, Easy, Powerful Way to Release Your Unpleasant Emotions

Yesterday, I shared a powerful yet simple method to let go of your unpleasant feelings. This method is based on focusing your attention on the physical sensations that feeling creates in your body.

You don’t pay attention to the thoughts that are triggered by that feeling. You don’t label the feeling. You focus on the sensations in your body, stay with them, and release them if you can.

For example, if you feel anger, scan your body for how it manifests itself in your body. You might feel some tightness in some muscles. You can release those muscles and see your anger being released with that tightness.

You might start to use this method and realize that you have countless unpleasant feelings, a wide range of anxieties, anger, shame, guilt, desire, and so on.

You might feel hopeless because as you release a feeling, another one might come up. If you’re in that state, don’t give up your hope because your feelings are connected.

As you release one unpleasant feeling, you’re also releasing other feelings connected to it. Even though your unpleasant feelings might look like a bottomless pit to you, you are making progress by using the letting go method.

You might release a certain anxiety, like fear of heights. And you will realize that your public speaking anxiety is also diminished.

As your social anxiety decreases, you might realize that your anger, shame, guilt, desire, and sadness also decrease because they are all connected to each other.

You might feel anger because you might not be enjoying your life due to your social anxiety. That might also trigger sadness in your psyche.

Your social anxiety might also trigger an intense desire in you because you might be missing certain aspects of life such as friendship, romance, and sex.

As you release a dominant unpleasant feeling, you also release a body of connected unpleasant feelings.

Your dominant unpleasant feeling might be anger. And that might cause sadness because anger might keep you from having a joyful social and family life.

So, you don’t need to be overwhelmed by all the unpleasant emotions that you feel. They are all connected to each other and releasing one help you release others as well.

Just pick one unpleasant emotion and work with it. If your major unpleasant emotion is public speaking anxiety and you don’t dare to work on it now, pick another fear that you can work on, and start facing and releasing it.

As you release various fears, you’ll realize that it will be much easier to work on your major fear, like public speaking anxiety. Until then, it might disappear altogether.

There’s a catch to this method though. You need to face your unpleasant emotions. If your dominant emotion is fear, you need to face your fears. If it is anger, you need to face your anger. If it is shame, guilt, or sadness, you need to face all of them.

You can’t release an emotion without facing it. You need to experience those emotions, let your body process them, and consciously release them from your body. That’s the way to true freedom.

Surrendering to Success

What comes up to your mind when you think about a successful person?

  • A hard worker who forces themselves to work day and night?
  • Self-discipline, lots of stress, even anger?
  • Aggressive, competitive, argumentative?
  • A take no prisoner approach to life and work?
  • A go-getter?

Sure, that’s a way to become a success if you manage not to kill yourself or someone else in the process. There’s another gentler way to success, which I’ll call surrendering to success.

What Does Surrendering to Success Mean?

Surrendering to success means letting go of what keeps you from succeeding.

Surrendering to success is not forcing yourself to work. It is relaxing yourself to work.

Think about a minute and answer the following question.

What keeps you from succeeding?

  • Is it your distractions?
  • Is it hanging out every night?
  • Is it lashing out to your colleagues?

Or

  • Is it not getting yourself to sit down, concentrate, and do the work?
  • Is it not summoning the courage to take risks?
  • Is it not being able to make that hard decision?

Whatever it is that keeps you from succeeding, it has an emotional charge that is powering it. Your urges are pulling your strings to distract yourself. Your anger makes you lash out to your colleagues.

It is the stress of unprocessed emotions that keeps you from concentrating on your work. Your fear is preventing you from taking a risk and making that hard decision.

Look for the underlying emotion that fuels your obstacle to success. Is it anger, fear, desire, or another intense emotion?

Whatever that emotion is, you can discharge it. Once you let go of the emotions that keep you from doing your best work, you’ll do whatever is necessary and reach success on autopilot.

Forcing Yourself to Success

Forcing yourself to success is like driving a car while the emergency brake is on. You’ll wonder why you can’t accelerate even though you drive at full throttle.

You’re spending a lot of effort, but most of it gets wasted on your inner resistances. You don’t make much progress to justify the energy you expend.

When you release the emergency brake, you realize that you accelerate at a much faster pace even without slamming the throttle.

How Can We Release Our Inner Resistances?

We can release our inner resistances by discharging the underlying emotion. That means becoming aware of the emotion, staying with it without trying to express, suppress, or change it, and waiting until it subsides.

Yes, that’s a lot of emotional labor, and it takes time, but so does forcing ourselves to override those emotions.

The advantage of the letting go method is that the unwanted emotions dissolve over time. When we force ourselves to overpower them, those emotions stay where they are. Same or greater amount of force is needed to overpower them.

The story of Michael A. Singer is an excellent example of surrendering yourself to success. He has documented his life from a confused college student to the CEO of a billion-dollar software company in his book The Surrender Experiment.

Summary

There are two ways to success, forcing yourself to success and surrendering to success.

Forcing yourself to success involves trying to overpower your inner resistances with ever greater force. It is like driving at full throttle while your emergency brake is on.

Surrendering yourself to success is about letting go of your inner resistances in the first place. It is like releasing the emergency brake such that your car accelerates much faster at the touch of the throttle.

Why Does No One Care?

If you ask a why question to yourself, ask yourself whether you’re really interested in finding an answer or you’re just venting off.

Asking why questions repeatedly can be helpful to find the root cause of a problem. You can solve a problem by addressing its root cause.

If your problem is drinking too much coffee, you might question why you do that. You might find out that you do that to cope with the stress of dealing with your colleagues.

You might decide to use other stress management techniques instead of relying on coffee when you interact with your colleagues. Self-awareness can help you solve a lot of problems.

If your why question doesn’t lead to the root cause of a problem, you might be making thinking errors on three levels.

Responsibility

The question in the title of this post doesn’t sound constructive. It would be a constructive one if it were formulated like one of the following.

  • Why doesn’t anyone care about my cause?
  • Why doesn’t anyone care about my content?
  • Why doesn’t anyone care about me?

Even the last question is more constructive than the one in the title.

When you ask those questions, you might find answers like the ones below.

  • People already have enough on their plates.
  • There’s already enough content online.
  • People already have enough people in their lives to care about.

The follow-up questions will be the following.

  • How can I formulate my cause so that it stands out among the issues that people have to deal with?
  • How can I compose and promote my content so that it catches the attention of people?
  • How can I find the people who are willing to care about others?

If asking a why question doesn’t help you make progress with the matter at hand, formulate it as a how question. How questions require you to take the responsibility and can be more empowering than why questions.

Projection

In psychology, projection means denying the existence of an undesired property in oneself and seeing it in others. For example, I might deny that I’m selfish and blame others for being selfish.

If you’re asking yourself why others don’t care, ask yourself whether you care. If you really cared about the problems of others, you might not have the time to ask yourself the question in the title.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

I saved the most intricate one to the end because it’s the most difficult to understand, but once you understand it, it will change your life.

When you look at the world through a certain filter, you won’t perceive the events that don’t match your filter. I see this very often in online forums like Quora where people are discussing their problems.

Some of the questions discussed in online forums aren’t actually questions but rants. Here are some examples.

  • Why doesn’t anyone care?
  • Why are people so angry?
  • Why do people not respect me?

The people who are asking these questions are actually making a statement.

  • People don’t care.
  • People are angry.
  • No one respects me.

When you look at life with that filter, you won’t see the people who care, who aren’t angry, and who respect you. You’ll only see the ones that match your concept of people.

You’ll expect people to match your beliefs and treat them accordingly. As a result, they will fulfill your expectations. This is called self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you expect people not to care, you won’t make an effort to make them care, and they won’t care. If you expect them to be angry, you’ll act passively, and as a result, they will be angry. If you expect them not to respect you, you will act submissively, and they won’t respect you.

If you find yourself asking questions that are in reality a rant, just formulate the question as a statement. Accept that you have that statement as a limiting belief. And take the responsibility and start replacing that limiting belief with its opposite.

  • People do care.
  • People are calm.
  • People respect me.

Look for people who satisfy those statements. If you look carefully, you’ll find those people in your environment.

Summary

When you find yourself asking questions like “why doesn’t anyone care,” ask yourself whether you’re really looking for the root cause of your problem or venting off.

If you’re just venting off, formulate the question as a how question, which will empower you to take the responsibility to solve your problem. Instead of “why doesn’t anyone care,” ask “how can I make people care?”

If you find out that your questions are actually rants, ask yourself whether you’re projecting your own unwanted attributes on to others. Do you care about other people?

Last but not least, formulate your question as a statement. “People don’t care.” If you’re just venting off, this statement is most probably a limiting belief. Now, replace this limiting belief by cultivating its opposite. Look for evidence of its opposite, and you will find plenty of evidence, because people do care!

Beyond Awake

For the sake of simplicity, let’s define two degrees of awareness, asleep and awake. When you’re asleep, you aren’t aware of much. When you’re awake, you’re aware of your environment and yourself. What if there was a degree higher than the state of being awake?

That degree is called meta-consciousness or metacognition. When you reach the level of meta-consciousness, you become aware of your consciousness, your thought and emotional patterns.

There’s nothing esoteric about meta-consciousness, it’s a highly practical concept that you can use in your daily life.

Our Biases and Fallacies

Our biases and fallacies are reported extensively. Yet, most of us aren’t aware of them. In various cases, we can correct our cognitive and behavioral errors just by learning about them.

If you want to learn more about biases and fallacies, I recommend the book You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney. It’s comprehensive and easy to read.

One of our instincts is our urge to impact our environment. Yet, most of us aren’t aware of that urge and fall prey to it. That included me until I heard about it in the audiobook Outsmart Yourself by Peter M. Vishton.

We can improve our thinking and emotional patterns and our behavior just by learning about our biases, fallacies, and instincts. But there is a level beyond that. On that level, we become aware of our thinking and emotional patterns.

Becoming Aware of Our Thinking and Emotional Patterns

Suppose that you want to give up a bad habit. You can use sheer willpower to resist the cravings when they come up, but you have an alternative. You can observe your cognitive patterns and explore what causes the cravings in the first place. You can either eliminate the triggers in the first place or find more constructive ways of handling them.

Suppose that you want to eliminate drinking too much coffee. You realize that your coffee machine acts as a trigger. You can simply eliminate that trigger by getting rid of your coffee machine. However, you can’t do that at your job because other people drink coffee too.

In that case, you might want to observe your cognitive patterns. What is triggering you to drinking coffee? You might realize that every time you feel stressed, you feel the urge to drink another cup of coffee.

When you take one more step backward, you realize that you feel stressed when you have to deal with your colleagues. Through self-observation, you realize that the stress of dealing with your colleagues is triggering you to drink coffee.

Breaking Dysfunctional Patterns

Now, that you’re aware of your cognitive and behavioral patterns, you can expect when to feel stressed and when to feel the urge to drink a cup of coffee. You anticipate both conditions in advance and prepare for them.

You can find alternative ways of dealing with stress such as deep breathing and drinking a glass of water. You can use those relaxation methods when you’re dealing with your colleagues.

Becoming Aware of Subtle Patterns

Some of our cognitive and behavioral patterns aren’t as obvious as the example above. They might be obvious to others, but being aware of our own patterns is much more difficult. It’s like a fish becoming aware of water.

There are two behavioral patterns that I became aware of recently. The first one is apathy and giving up, and the second one is being reactional and making hostile comments. When I observed my cognitive patterns behind both behavioral patterns, I realized that they both stemmed from anger.

When I get angry, I either express it or suppress it. When I suppress it, I fall down to the level of apathy and give up. When I express it, I make hostile comments. Needless to say, neither method is pragmatic.

Moreover, acting upon them reinforces them in my psyche. Every time I act on them, I increase my tendency to use the same dysfunctional patterns next time. The behavior becomes even more automatic. It is ingrained deeper in my psyche.

Becoming Aware of Repressed Emotions

My patterns of expression and suppression were so deeply ingrained in my psyche that they happened almost in light speed. I wasn’t even aware of feeling angry before I react or give up. It required some study and self-observation until I could recognize these patterns in me.

Now, when I’m about the give up or make hostile comments, I stop myself and acknowledge the anger underneath those behaviors. I use the letting go method on the anger, while I look for a constructive behavior and do my best to act on it.

In letting go, you don’t push through with force. You tap into your power by releasing the breaks. When you release your breaks, your inner power drives you.

Conclusion

Studying psychology is definitely interesting, but there is something even more interesting, which is recognizing your own cognitive and behavioral patterns for the first time after 39 years of existence.

I highly recommend that you learn more about psychology, observe your psyche, and apply what you have learned to your own cognitive and behavioral patterns. Your results in life will justify the time and energy that you invest in it.

If You Don’t Know What You Want in Life, Read This Post

When someone says that they don’t know what they want in life, I call BS on that. We all know what we want in our lives, but some of us don’t dare to admit it, not even to themselves. Let’s start with why they don’t do that.

David Hawkins introduced the map of consciousness in his book Power vs. Force. There are 17 levels in the map of consciousness. People who claim that they don’t know what they want in life are likely to be on the lower levels of consciousness.

There’s nothing wrong with being on a lower level of consciousness as long as you recognize it and work your way up. We all have our journeys in our lives, and I haven’t met many enlightened people, including myself of course.

If you find yourself on a lower level of consciousness, I hope this post would inspire you to work on getting to higher levels by letting go of your dysfunctional emotions and thoughts. Now, let’s go over a few levels of consciousness and see how they relate to the subject of this post.

Shame

People on the level of shame think that they are inherently bad. How can it be otherwise? They’ve been judged by their parents, teachers, or other authority figures as bad boys or bad girls.

Some of these folks realize that being a bad boy or girl is a lot of fun later in their lives, but most of them spend their lives believing deep down that they are bad people.

“How dare you think you deserve something nice when you’re such a bad person?”

That’s the undercurrent of their psyche that they aren’t aware of. Hence, they don’t admit what they want in life, not even to themselves.

Guilt

Guilt is similar to shame with a slight difference. Instead of thinking that they are a bad person, people on the level of guilt believe that they have done something wrong. Most of the time, that belief is indoctrinated into them by the authority figures in their lives.

Apathy

If the people on the level of apathy would admit what they want in their lives, they have to take action toward it. However, they’re so overwhelmed by their experience that they don’t believe that they can reach their goals. This is the level of learned helplessness.

Grief

Grief is a reaction to loss. People on this level have many losses in their lives. They have to mourn their losses first before attempting to go after new goals. So, it’s understandable that people on this level don’t dare to admit what they want in life.

Fear

People on this level are afraid to admit what they want in life because they have two choices if they do that. The first choice is to go after what they want and face the inherent dangers on that path. The second choice is the pain of knowing what they want but doing nothing about it.

Anger

On this level, the energy of the person is focused on what they don’t want instead of what they do want. The challenge here is to let go of the focus on the negative and formulate a constructive goal to work toward.

Pride

The person on this level wouldn’t admit that they want something because they believe that they are already perfect as they are. They wouldn’t acknowledge that they don’t know what they want.

Conclusion

Not knowing what you want in life is a sign that you’re on a lower level of consciousness. You can use this symptom to work on your psyche to let go of your shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, anger, and pride. Once you transcend those levels of consciousness, you’ll be crystal clear about what you want in life and work toward it.

Discharging Negative Emotions Trapped in Our Psyche

Yesterday, I wrote an introductory post about the letting go method by David Hawkins. The letting go method is a simple and effective way to process and regulate intense emotions. It involves staying with the emotion without expressing, suppressing, or trying to change it in any other way.

When you stay with an intense emotion, it runs its course, and it subsides. The next time you feel it, its intensity diminishes. As you keep using the letting go method, the once intense emotion eventually disappears.

The Pitfall of the Letting Go Method

There’s a pitfall when applying the letting go method. When you stay with your emotion, thoughts stemming from that emotion will come up. The danger here is to dwell on those thoughts.

If you pay attention to those thoughts, if you invest more mental energy into them, or in other words, if you dwell on them, you’ll only make the emotion stronger instead of processing it and discharging it.

The trick here is to become aware of the thoughts, acknowledge them, and let them go while staying with the underlying emotions. This requires some mindfulness which you can develop over time with practice.

The Emotional Labor Required by the Letting Go Method

So far, the letting go method might sound easy. Make no mistake, it’s a simple process. It requires only some basic knowledge of your expression and suppression mechanisms, but it can require some serious emotional labor at times.

When you’re hit with intense emotions of anger, fear, or sadness, you might get overwhelmed when you try to stay with them. In such cases, David Hawkins suggests that you stay with the emotion to the extent possible, and then express or suppress the remaining part of the emotional energy consciously.

How Does Letting Go Heal Your Psyche?

The letting go method requires your mindfulness of your emotions, especially the ones that you’re suppressing. This can be hard at times because it requires self-awareness and honesty. You might be angry, but you might not realize that you’re angry or you might deny it.

You need to acknowledge your emotions to be able to stay with them and to let them go. The emotions that you’re able to feel, acknowledge, and let go are the ones that are closer to the surface. As you let those superficial emotions go, more emotions will come up from the depths of your psyche.

David Hawkins makes a distinction between suppressed and repressed emotions. Suppressed emotions are the ones that we felt but decided to avoid consciously.

Repressed emotions are the ones that weren’t recognized consciously. They are trapped in our psyche, impacting our thoughts, choices, and behaviors, and we aren’t aware of them.

By letting go of suppressed emotions, you enable the repressed emotions to come up. As they come up, you apply the same technique to the repressed emotions. That way, your psyche is being cleaned up from emotions that were trapped in your subconscious for a lifetime.

If you want to learn more about how the repressed emotions get trapped in our psyche and impact our lives, I recommend the books Breaking Free and the Disowned Self by Nathaniel Branden, which are available in Open Library.

Connections between Emotions

David Hawkins mentions shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire, anger, and pride as lower levels of consciousness. He suggests letting go of thoughts and emotions stemming from those levels. You might think that desire and pride are positive emotions, but Hawkins defines them as weakening.

Another interesting idea from the book Letting Go is that all the emotions from those lower levels are connected to each other.

For example, you’re afraid of heights, and you have public speaking anxiety. By working on your fear of heights, you’re also indirectly working on your public speaking anxiety. Moreover, by working on a fear, you’re also working on your anger, grief, guilt, and shame.

The connection between emotions makes the letting go method a power tool. You don’t need to figure out all of your negative emotions and to work on them separately. You can work on any negative emotion as it comes up. That work will have a healing effect on all others as well.

Hawkins encourages working on your negative emotions proactively. In other words, he recommends to go toward the eye of the storm. Do you have a fear of heights? Go to a high building and face your fear. Do you have public speaking anxiety? Find an opportunity to get in front of people.

Summary

The goal of the letting go method is to let go of the thoughts while staying with the emotions. Distinguishing between thoughts and emotions is a challenge at the beginning because thoughts and emotions are tightly connected. We need to be aware of the danger of dwelling on thoughts which would increase the intensity of emotions that we’re trying to discharge.

Intense emotions are hard to endure. That’s why our knee-jerk reaction is to express or suppress them. It requires some serious emotional labor to stay with them. It’s a muscle we develop over time.

The letting go method is like a detox mechanism for our psyche. It not only discharges the energy of the emotions we feel at the moment, but it also cleans up the emotions that are trapped in our psyche for a lifetime.

Emotions are connected to each other in our psyche. When you discharge the energy of a specific fear like social anxiety, you also discharge the energy of all fears. Moreover, you also discharge the energy of other emotions like anger, grief, shame, guilt, and so on.

Can you imagine how fulfilling, peaceful, and joyful your life would be if you let go of your fears, anger, shame, guilt, and grief?

What Does Letting Go Mean Anyway?

I often refer to the letting go method by David Hawkins in my posts. Today, I want to dive deeper into this method and answer two questions.

  • What is it?
  • Why is it useful?
  • How to use it?
  • How does it relate to our daily life?

What Is It?

The letting go method is an effective way to process and regulate our emotions. It’s simple. It doesn’t have any side effects. It’s useful in all areas of our lives. It has a healing effect on our psychology and life. It only requires learning a few basic concepts but some emotional labor to apply.

Expressing an Emotion

When we feel an intense emotion, we tend to deal with it either by expressing it or suppressing it.

Expressing an emotion means communicating it to others or to yourself. You might scream to a family member when you’re angry. You might journal when you’re sad. You might dwell in thoughts of disaster scenarios when you feel fear. In other words, you act on your emotion.

When you act on your emotion, even on a thought level, you’re reinforcing the emotion in your psyche. You might feel relieved when you shout at a family member, but this will only result in greater anger the next time. If you don’t want to reinforce an emotion, don’t express it, not even on the thought level.

Suppressing an Emotion

Suppressing an emotion means being aware of it but using an escape strategy to avoid it. You might turn to alcohol when you feel stressed. You might grab a cup of coffee when you feel sad. You might turn on the TV, radio, or scroll through your social media feed to escape boredom.

You might suppress emotions by distracting yourself with thoughts. When you suppress an emotion, it stays in your psyche. You don’t process it, and you don’t discharge it from your system.

Letting Go of an Emotion

The way to process and discharge an emotion is to stay with it without expressing or suppressing it. This can be overwhelming at the beginning. By not expressing or suppressing your emotion, you give your psyche a chance to process it.

The emotion runs its course, and it eventually subsides. It might come back later, but its intensity will be lower. As you keep using the letting go method on the emotion, its intensity gradually diminishes, and it eventually disappears from your psyche.

Application in Daily Life

Suppose that you waste time on social media before starting to work every day. When you observe your emotions, you realize that you use social media to avoid the stress at the start of your working day. The next time you start your working day, you try to stay with those stressful emotions as long as possible and let them go.

Maybe, you can stay with your stressful emotions for fifteen minutes on the first day. Then, you succumb to your social media habit. Congratulations, you have at least processed fifteen minutes worth of stressful emotions.

Every day, you work on increasing that social media free period using the 1% improvements principle. You stay with your stressful emotions as long as possible without expressing or suppressing them, every day a little longer. Soon, you’ll reach an hour, two hours, four hours, and eventually a complete working day without checking your social media feed.

Summary

The letting go method by David Hawkins involves staying with an intense emotion without expressing or suppressing. That means not thinking about it, talking about it, communicating it, but at the same time, not avoiding it, escaping it, or trying to change it in any other way.

When you stay with an intense emotion long enough, it runs its course, and it subsides. It might come back later, but its intensity will be lower. As you keep using the letting go method, the emotion will eventually disappear.

So far, the letting go method seems to be simple and easy. It is a simple method, but it has some pitfalls. It involves some emotional labor. Tomorrow, I’ll discuss the possible pitfalls and how to deal with overwhelmingly intense emotions.

Self-Coaching on Multiple Levels

Once in a while, you might come across a challenge that has solutions on different levels. Moreover, this challenge might point to a bigger problem on a deeper level.

Today, I’m going to work on a challenge that I had recently to give you an idea of how to process issues on multiple levels.

Last week, I started to answer self-help questions on Quora. My motivation was twofold. First, I wanted to learn what type of challenges people had so that I can produce relevant content for them. Second, I wanted to promote my blog there.

As a part of my second purpose, I included a link to my blog in my credentials. After a week, Quora warned me that my credentials weren’t displayed and I had to edit them. This didn’t land well with me.

The Mental Level

On the mental level, Quora removing my credentials was a minor issue. Maybe, not even that. Sure, not having a link to my blog in my credentials could impact the traffic to my blog, but how much? One person a week? Was that really such a big problem?

Quora had all the rights to impose whatever rules they wanted on their service. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t use it. It was as simple as that.

I believe that their service provided value to me even if I didn’t promote my blog there or answered a single question. It was a goldmine to understand the challenges of people and to produce content to address those challenges.

Can an obstacle actually be an advantage? I believe it can. In this case, I can use my creativity and embed persuasive links to my blog posts in my Quora answers. That practice might result in greater subscriber acquisition than a dry link in my credentials.

Long story short, there’s no need to be upset about Quora removing my credentials. On the contrary, I can use my creativity and turn this constraint into an advantage. That’s my conclusion on the mental level, but there’s a deeper level that I have to work on.

The Emotional Level

If I didn’t work on this issue on an emotional level and left my reflection on the mental level, I’d miss an opportunity. Every challenge is an opportunity for growth, and I believe I have a room for growth here.

How do I feel about this event? I feel upset because I feel like I’ve been punished. That means I made a mistake.

I don’t like to be punished, and I don’t want to make any mistakes.

That’s a deep belief I carry with me that regulates my behavior. You might say that no one likes to be punished or make any mistakes. But if you take that to an extreme, it might result in passivity, not taking any risks, and dwelling in your comfort zone.

How do I process this problem on the emotional level? The first step is to use the letting go method. Stay with the intense emotions that are triggered until they subside. Embrace the fact that I made a mistake and got punished.

The second step is to allow myself to make mistakes. I don’t need to be perfect. As a matter of fact, I can’t be perfect. It’s human to make mistakes and get punished by reality.

I can see how I adopted my limiting belief of perfection. When I was a child, I was expected to behave perfectly, and I was punished harshly when I didn’t. It’s time to let go of this irrational belief.

The benefits of letting go of my limiting belief are to be more relaxed going through life, taking more risks, and not being tormented when I make a mistake. It’s a liberating process that would contribute to my success and satisfaction in life.

Summary

Once in a while, you might come across a challenge that you can solve easily on the mental level, but the issue might still impact you on an emotional level.

If that’s the case, you need to go deeper into your psyche and ask yourself why you’re triggered by such a simple problem.

When you explore your psyche, you might come across a limiting belief that you picked up when you were a child.

Now is the time to let go of that limiting belief and replace it with a rational one to function better in the world and to improve your success and satisfaction in life.

The Reason and the Remedy of the Most Common Communication Problem

Google is great if you know how to formulate a relevant search query. To do that, you need to have some knowledge on the topic such as basic terminology. In other words, you need to know what you don’t know to search for it on Google.

Most of the time, we don’t know what we don’t know. That’s why reading books, articles, blog posts, and consuming content in other formats is so beneficial. However, sometimes, we have a burning question, and we don’t have the time to read all the books in that domain. We need a quick answer.

I such cases, Q&A sites are useful. As a programmer, Stack Overflow was a great help. I’d formulate a question and receive an answer within a day. I don’t ask questions on Stack Overflow anymore because nowadays, I can find my answers with Google fairly easy.

Google is great, but it doesn’t have the intelligence to understand what you’re really looking for if you aren’t clear about it. Q&A sites use human intelligence. If enough people read your question, there’s a good chance that one of them will have a more relevant answer than Google.

The Downside of the Q&A Sites

The online Q&A process isn’t perfect, and the reason for that is relevant to our day-to-day communication with our family, friends, and colleagues.

When you write a question on Quora, you describe the situation from your own perception, and your perception isn’t perfect. It’s clouded by your mental filters, biases, and fallacies.

When someone else reads your question, they understand the situation from their own perception. Their perception isn’t perfect because of the same reasons. As a result, that person answers a completely different question than you intend to ask.

You read their answer, and you interpret that answer using your own filters. You give a completely different meaning to their answer.

As a result, you misunderstand the wrong answer to the misunderstood question that was formulated wrongly, to begin with.

The same dynamic happens all the time in our day-to-day communication with our family, friends, and colleagues.

We misunderstand what others couldn’t express clearly, and in turn, they misinterpret our wrongly formulated responses. When these misunderstandings go back and forth enough times, we have a serious conflict.

How Can We Avoid the Misunderstandings in the First Place?

The first step is to know that your partner might have expressed themselves inaccurately or you might have misunderstood them. When you come from that place, you’ll be more kind and compassionate toward them.

The second step is to tell your partner what you have understood and ask them for confirmation. If your partner doesn’t confirm your formulation of their expression, you go back and forth until you agree on the issue.

Now, you express your views on the issue, and you repeat the same. You ask your partner how they understood your answer, and you go back and forth until you’re sure that they understood you correctly.

That way you’re sure that you understood each other correctly. There’s no room for assumptions or misunderstandings. You don’t have to agree with each other, but at least, you know where each of you stands on the matter at hand. This is a basic principle of communication.

Of course, you don’t have to clarify each sentence in each conversation, but you better do it when the stakes are high, and there seems to be a conflict and a chance of misunderstanding.

Summary

We express our views from our own mental filters and biases. We interpret other people’s expressions through the same filters and biases. As a result, there’s a great room for misunderstanding in our communication with each other.

To minimize misunderstandings, we need to ask each other questions to confirm that we have understood each other correctly. This might sound like overkill every time we have a conversation with our family, friends, and colleagues, but it’s a must when a misunderstanding can have dire consequences.

Equanimity: A Key Factor in High Performance and Success

According to Wikipedia, equanimity is a state of psychological stability and composure which is undisturbed by experience of or exposure to emotions, pain, or other phenomena that may cause others to lose the balance of their mind.

Can you see how crucial equanimity is for high performance and success?

Hardship Is a Part of Life

Imagine, you’re a salesperson visiting a prospect for a critical sales call. You got stuck in a traffic jam for a couple of hours. You had to deal with other drivers honking at each other and cutting each other off. You’re an hour late for the meeting. And your prospect makes sarcastic remarks when they see you arrive.

Imagine, you had to bring a loved one to a hospital before you go to work. When you arrived at work, your boss yells at you because of an unsatisfied customer. And on top of all of that, your computer crashes.

Those scenarios might sound exaggerated, but ask anyone who had a long enough career, and they’ll confirm the existence of such days.

How would you feel in such scenarios? Would you throw in the towel and quit? Would you take it on someone else, like a coworker, a family member, or a complete stranger? Or would you take it on the chin and move on? If you can choose the last option, congratulations, you have equanimity.

Equanimity in Daily Life

Equanimity is not only useful in disaster scenarios. Working toward a worthy goal can often involve frustrating episodes. Then, there are the disappointments, desperations, and boredom of our daily lives.

Even excessive happiness can feel uncomfortable at times and keep you from concentrating on the job at hand. Equanimity is the antidote to all of those common scenarios.

How to Cultivate Equanimity

You might think that acting out your intense emotions would calm you down. The real effect of acting out your emotions is actually reinforcing them. You might feel wound down when you act out, but the next time the same emotion hits you, it will feel more intense. So, expressing your emotions won’t help you with equanimity.

How about suppressing them? Avoiding them, or treating them with drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, caffeine, binge eating, sex, internet surfing, or with another distraction? Suppressing intense emotions won’t contribute to your equanimity either.

A reliable way to build equanimity is to stay with your emotions without expressing, suppressing, or trying to change them in any other way. David Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D., calls this practice the letting go method, and he has a book with the same name, which is one of my 12 recommended personal development books.

In some cases, your emotions might be so overwhelming that you might not be able to stay with them. In such cases, Hawkins recommends using expression or suppression consciously. You let go as much as you can, and you express or suppress the rest in a safe and sound way.

The Rewards of Equanimity

Letting go is hard work, but it’s worth its rewards. You reach equanimity and mental clarity. Both help you with taking rational decisions and behaving reasonably, which increase your performance and lead to success.

Moreover, in the absence of intense emotions, you reach a state of bliss. For many, this state of bliss is a greater reward than the material gains.

Whether your goal is to reach material success or spiritual rewards, you can take your practice to the next level by actively engaging in experiences that make you feel intense emotions and apply the letting go method. In other words, go toward the eye of the storm to reach equanimity faster.

Summary

Equanimity is the ability to stay calm and collected even in the face of the most disturbing experiences.

You can cultivate equanimity by staying with intense emotions without expressing or suppressing them, or trying to change them in any other way.

When you reach equanimity, your rewards will not only be mental clarity, high performance, and material success, but also spiritual bliss.