Building Emotional Success
How do we go about building emotional success? Today in our hectic world, life can be a roller coaster with our emotions being highly changeable due to circumstances, people and time.
Being able to regulate our emotions and building emotional success is vital to overall wellbeing, shaping how we present ourselves to the outside world and influencing both how we see ourselves and how others see us.
How do we learn to stay positive when faced with adversity, remain calm under pressure and avoid becoming overwhelmed by emotions e.g. disgust, anger or sadness?
To enable us to regulate our responses, it can be helpful to understand more about our emotions.
Plutchik identified just Eight primary emotions (middle circle) based on opposing pairs:
- Joy vs Sadness
- Trust vs Disgust
- Fear vs Anger
- Surprise vs Anticipation
All other emotions result from combinations of these primary emotions, with each emotion having the ability to vary in its level of intensity (breadth and depth).
The intensity of the emotion is seen as decreasing outwards and increasing inwards towards the wheel’s centre – indicated by lighter or darker shading on either side of the primary emotion. The darker the shade, the more intense the emotion. For example, for anger the highest level of intensity is rage (darker shading) and its lowest intensity is annoyance (lighter shading). Within each emotional intensity there is also depth as to the extent that emotion is felt.The emotions listed on the outer limits of the wheel, result from combinations of the primary emotions. For example, optimism is seen as a combination of joy and anticipation. Love a combination of joy and trust.
Plutchik recognised that our emotions are adaptive based on cognition (thinking) and behaviour (doing) processes based on several feedback loops that shape and influence how we feel and act.
As part of this process, it has five main elements:
Reactions and Responses
How we react to events, situations or people depends on how we perceive the situation but in essence they tend to fall into two categories:Automatic Reactions (AR’s) and Reflective Judgements (RJ’s)
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Automatic Reactions: AR’s are based on automated, evolutionary / survival reactions based on our brains perceiving an emergency threat situation which triggers fight or flight even before we may have consciously noticed it.
Reflective Judgements: RJ’s are subjective evaluation of events, which influence our responses dependent upon how we see the world based on our past, present or anticipated future. This is the reason why the same event can be evaluated differently by each individual, depending on their perspective. The difficulty, however, with RJ’s is that our evaluations may not be reflective of reality.
3 Simple Tips to Build Emotional Success
1. Identify the Emotion: Use the wheel on a daily basis to identify the emotion you are feeling. Notice if it is towards the higher level of intensity or the lower end. If you are at the higher level of intensity, observe what the lower level is. What combinations are at play? How does the emotion make you feel? What is the opposite of the emotion you are feeling?
2. Explore the Facts: Ask yourself whether how you are feeling is based on a rational view of reality or is your emotional response the result of an irrational story you’ve created in your head – based on incorrect interpretations of events. What are the facts? Do others share your evaluation? What are the consequences of this thinking and behaviour for you? Are they productive?
3. Create a Gap: Creating a gap to enable you to reflect and then make a choice as to how you wish to respond to the emotional effect. Are there alternative options? Is there a different narrative / story that could be possible? Consider what action can you take?
Emotional Awareness Training Courses
If you wish to attend one of our training courses on how to nurture and develop your emotional awareness and intelligence click here for current dates.