Get in Touch with Your Feelings
. . . especially your gratitude and excitement
Getting in touch with our feelings is easier once we’ve mastered a few fear management techniques. With these in hand, we can more confidently begin the process of understanding who we are as emotional beings and how we can use that to enhance our careers.
High energy is extremely important in becoming successful. Feelings are energy. Successful people create energy. We can feel it. We’ve all heard statements like, “You could just feel the energy in that room; was it ever exciting.”
What we typically describe as a desire for success is more specifically a desire for the positive feelings associated with reaching our goals. We all want confidence, joy, excitement, peace, security—and many other uplifting emotions that we associate with successful people.
We set goals because we know that achieving them will make us feel good about ourselves and the world. The feelings are first and foremost, not the goals. We will change a goal in a second if we think we can achieve another goal that will bring us the same feeling sooner. So what we really desire is positive emotion.
But trouble occurs when we can’t sort out the tangled web of emotions most of us have, and we can’t identify the specific positive feelings we want. This can happen when the emotions we want to hide from ourselves (often negative emotions) camouflage themselves among other emotions. It’s the kind of situation that leaves us feeling directionless or lost. Revealing those hidden emotions allows us to confront them.
There are many ways to confront negative or harmful emotions. I offer three good places to start. The first is to have a good mentor or psychologist, someone whom you can trust with the secret parts of yourself. The next is to gain an understanding of the law of attraction, explained below, and to put the magic of positive thinking to work for you. The last is to have patience with the process.
Humans experience negative emotions. Under the right circumstances, negative emotions can teach us to deal more effectively with problems. When the emotions are ignored, however, they become larger and larger in order to get our conscious attention. They take up more of our thinking, they affect the level of energy we have to deal with problems, and they block positive emotions that attract success into our lives.
Understanding the source of negative emotions will help us confront them and then find ways to realistically replace them with positive ones. Understanding our negative emotions comes when we share them in a safe environment with people we trust. That is why it’s important to have a good psychologist or life process mentor as part of our network.
We could look for support and guidance in places that might include our church, our personal network of trusted friends, a local university offering free basic counseling services from interns, inexpensive or free group organizations such as AA and internet clubs, or reading books such as this one. There are others. Think in options!
There is a universal law of attraction—some call it the law of cause and effect—that works in all of us. The Bible speaks of it. The Buddha speaks of it. Hinduism speaks of it. Most great men and women tell us in one way or another of the law of attraction: What we put out into the world comes back to us, some say threefold, some say tenfold.
The Bible says, “An eye for an eye,” but the phrase is often misinterpreted. Many people think it means that if someone takes our eye, we have the right to take that person’s. But we forget the other parts of the equation: When we take someone’s eye, ours will be taken—maybe both of them. When we give our eye to someone, we will be given an eye—maybe two.
Whatever we do, we get it back, usually in more quantity than we give. Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” He understood that whatever we do to others we get back.
The driving force behind the law of attraction is the energy of our feelings, not our thoughts and actions. When we release an emotion into the world, the law of attraction acts like a magnet, searching for situations that will trigger in us the same emotion.
In the moment we choose to release an emotion, we make the choice—pull the trigger—that begins a chain of events pulling us toward a situation that ensures we re-experience the same emotion. The law of attraction pulls a human into a circumstance like the law of gravity pulls a ball to the ground.
Consider that the reward of feeling any emotion is that same emotion. Joy attracts joy. Confidence attracts confidence. Love attracts love. Gratitude attracts gratitude. Excitement attracts excitement. Fear attracts fear. Deceit attracts deceit. Hate attracts hate. Anger attracts anger.
What are you feeling? What are you attracting? How can we attract a promotion at work if we’re stuck in jealousy about another’s successes? How can we start a successful business if we’re obsessed with what might go wrong? These are important kinds of questions to ask ourselves on the road to success.
As we get in touch with our positive emotions, we begin to attract what we want in life with more ease. We become more pleasant to be around, and our networks grow with less effort. We do become successful.
In the book The Greatest Miracle in the World, the first law of success is “Count your blessings.” Everyone has something to be grateful for. Everyone! Even if it’s just one a meal a day and a blanket to live on the street with. That meal may keep us alive for another few moments and that blanket may keep us warmer than we would have been without it.
Gratitude is a wonderful feeling. The more we feel gratitude, the more pleasant our lives become and the more we attract situations into our lives that bring us more gratitude.
Positive thinking offers a powerful way to replace negative emotions with positive ones. It can head off negative reactions when a feeling triggers us. It can help us turn roadblocks into building blocks or adversity into an advantage. It is the key to changing our emotions. The tricky part is to acknowledge, rather than deny, our negative emotions, and to do it without getting stuck there.
Someone may, for example, believe that owning a Mercedes is a real measure of success. That belief, however, often leaves this person feeling like a failure because maybe he’s forty-two years old and he still doesn’t own one. Positive thinking around this issue does not mean the man has to tape pictures and reminders of Mercedes all over his house in an effort to visualize owning one someday.
Positive thinking encourages him, instead, to confront his fear of failure by putting it in perspective. It encourages him to ask questions of himself and to discover the root of his fear. It asks him to focus more on what he has accomplished so far (to feel grateful for that) and to do what I’m asking you to do: to write down goals, go an extra mile, keep agreements, build healthy networks, think in options, ask questions, declare his rarity, develop healthy communication skills and get in touch with his feelings.
These steps, taken together, lead to positive, healthy thoughts and emotions that can be sustained over time. Like the quick-fix diets that were so much the fashion in the late 1980s and early 1990s, quick-fix positive thinking may work for a few weeks or even months.
Real positive thinking requires real commitment to changing fundamental habits of thought and underlying emotions, if it’s going to work for the rest of our lives. Only then will the law of attraction really begin to work its magic to our benefit.
We all have goals we haven’t achieved. Personally I’ve achieved a lot of goals but far fewer than I have set. I keep re-evaluating and re-setting them. This brings on that feeling of new beginnings and confidence, instead of the disappointment of failure.
The forty-two-year-old man, if he commits to real positive thinking, may decide that he still wants the Mercedes. As a positive thinker, however, he no longer has to feel like a failure if he doesn’t get the car. Instead, he knows there are other ways to get what he wants.
Another option for dealing with negative emotions is to replace them with positive ones. It how we turn adversity into benefit. When I want to concentrate on replacing a negative emotion with a positive one, I find it helpful to have lists. The list below is designed to assist me in concentrating on the kinds of emotions that attract success. When I wanted to attract friends, I use a different list.
- Belief
- Purpose
- Desire
- Patience
- Willingness to share
- Determination
- Honesty
- Willingness to learn
- Compassion
- Gratitude
Belief is first on my list for good reasons. Belief in myself and others must occur before I really understand and feel the other emotions on my list. Claude Bristol wrote a book called The Magic of Believing. Napoleon Hill writes about belief being the master key to riches. They understood that belief is a fundamental emotion for every successful person.
Belief is an emotion that builds in much the same way confidence does. Every time we accomplish another little goal, belief in ourselves builds.
Purpose is also on the list for a good reason. Napoleon Hill claimed ‘definiteness of purpose’ as one of the common denominators found while on a quest to discover wealth-building habits. Finding definiteness of purpose is done through a process of discovery. The discovery happens as we cross desires off lists, small ones and big ones. As we gain purpose we find confidence.
To balance my list of positive emotions, I have a list of negative ones that I consciously monitor to ensure they do not block my ability to attract success. Hill listed 26 in his book Grow Rich with Peace of Mind.
- Fear
- Greed
- Egotism
- Worry
- Procrastination
- Hate
- Unreliability
- Envy
- Intolerance
- Dishonesty
Your lists, if you chose to develop them, would be as individual and unique as you are. Some may feel that lists of emotions are a rather artificial means of developing personality traits. I like to think of lists as tools for examining my motives more objectively. Emotions are deeply complicated, interconnected things and difficult to sort out at the best of times. Developing a list may assist in that process.
For some, the process of attracting wealth into their lives through positive thinking and feeling takes a long time. It’s simple enough to change a few thoughts, but real change occurs when positive emotions become strong enough that they’re habitual or second nature. This process sometimes requires a great deal of commitment, but when positive feelings become habitual, positive circumstances begin to happen habitually.
Patience, a very healthy and positive emotion, is key to changing habits. Changing habits can take ten minutes or twenty years, depending on how deeply ingrained they have become. Personally, it took me eighteen years to deal with my fear of not having enough.
When I feel worried about money, I change my thinking to something like, “I have enough money to eat today, I have a roof over my head, and I feel grateful for that.” That pattern of thought helps me feel gratitude, a very healthy, positive emotion—more healthy than the worry I felt.
Imagine the power of the law of attraction! When we feel gratitude the law of attraction will bring us a circumstance that triggers more gratitude. Sometimes it takes years or even lifetimes, but the reward of any emotion is that same emotion. The reward of patience is patience. The reward of love is love. The reward of confidence is confidence. The best way to feel more positive is to feel more positive.
Make the choice! Start with gratitude. Confront your fears. Then move forward with confidence.
Previous | Next
|
