Emotional Mastery
November 19th, 2004 by Steve Pavlina
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I received much feedback on the previous post regarding the challenge of consciously directing one’s thoughts to feel a certain way.
First of all, recognize that there are people and corporations with a strong vested interest in conditioning you to maintain the (false) belief that you need some kind of external validation to feel a certain way. Marketers spend billions of dollars each year to convince you that you need to drink their soda, eat their food, wear their clothing, drive their cars, and shop at their stores to feel happy, cool, fashionable, popular, confident, successful, etc. Who benefits most when you adopt the belief that you need to dress a certain way to feel fashionable or drive a certain car to feel cool?
When you understand that you have the innate ability to consciously direct your thoughts to create any feeling you want, whenever you want, you’re not going to make such people rich. But you will be much more free, since you’ll gain the power of conscious control over your own emotional states. This is a skill that takes practice, but it is a learnable one. For example, in a matter of minutes I can get myself to feel any emotion I want, and for those I’ve already anchored, I can put myself into that state in less than 5 seconds. This is nothing unique — experienced actors can do it too. If an actor can laugh uproariously or cry rivers of tears or shout with intense anger over something completely fake, then you can certainly learn to be 100% confident on que as well (and really experience the genuine emotion).
My favorite emotion is the state of feeling “unstoppable,” which is one I anchored at a Tony Robbins seminar. Anchoring means conditioning a specific emotional state to be linked to a simple trigger, just as Pavlov conditioned his dog to link getting fed with the sound of bell. So if I make a certain movement, I automatically surge into this emotional state within a few seconds. In my old Tae Kwon Do studio, I noticed another student firing off an anchor several times during sparring matches. The tennis player Andre Agassi and the basketball player Byron Scott both used emotional anchoring in their athletic careers, and I’ve read that emotional conditioning has been used by German Olympic teams with outstanding results (the U.S. Olympic teams are generally much further behind in this area). Anchoring is well covered in Tony Robbins Unlimited Power book, and he also takes you through it directly in his live seminars and he covers it in his Personal Power audio program. Something really cool I discovered is that once I’ve conditioned an anchor, I don’t even have to physically fire it off. If I merely imagine myself making the particular motion, it still works. So Weds night when I was being introduced as the speaker, I mentally imagined myself firing off my trigger for confidence, and by the time I reached the lectern I was feeling 100% confident. Yes, 100% — no nervousness or self-doubt whatsoever.
Advertisers use anchoring on you all the time. This is why Pepsi will pay someone like Michael Jackson $20 million to be in a 30-second commercial (OK, so that was years ago). They want to condition you to link the emotions you get from hearing a particular song to their product. This emotional conditioning works a lot better than trying to logically argue why you should consume sugar water and chemicals. And it absolutely works … to the tune of billions.
Dr. Wayne Dyer said that when he was learning about self-actualization in college, a professor posed this question: If a totally self-actualizing person unknowingly showed up to a formal event wearing overly casual attire, how would s/he react? The answer: S/he wouldn’t even notice. That’s the state of total emotional mastery, where no external event can knock you into a negative emotional state. A mind like water.
The problem isn’t that external events have control over your emotions. The problem is believing that they do. Abandoning this belief and realizing that you have the innate ability to control how you feel at any given moment, regardless of your circumstances, is the first step to emotional mastery. Events are neutral. What causes you to feel a certain way is how you interpret an event, how you think about it. The same event (even one so serious as the death of someone close to you) will be interpreted differently by different people. You were taught to represent certain events to yourself as tragic, while other people on this planet were taught to celebrate those same events. The event itself has no meaning but the meaning you assign to it, and that act of assigning meaning (whether done consciously or unconsciously) is what causes you to feel a certain way.
Once you understand this, you can begin to take conscious control over these assignments. When stricken with a terminal illness, some people interpret it as terrible and go into a deep depression. Others interpret it as a challenge and find a way to overcome the illness. And still others see it as a wake up call to reevaluate their priorities and make the best possible use of the time they have left, developing deeper bonds with the people around them and living much more fully. To some people it’s an ending, while to others it’s a new beginning. But this doesn’t have to be a subconscious reaction — it can be a conscious choice. Whenever something happens that you would normally say “makes you depressed,” you can choose to find and assign an alternate interpretation that makes you feel empowered instead of disempowered. Instead of failure you can see a learning experience. Instead of a loss, you can focus on deepening your feelings of gratitude for what you do have. Instead of rejection you can see a temporary mismatch and a renewed opportunity to find the perfect fit. Just because TV teaches you to feel a certain way in response to a certain event doesn’t mean you have to blindly accept that interpretation, especially since the TV business benefits when you feel down and thereby tune in to try to change your emotional state.
Between stimilus and response lies the opportunity for conscious choice. You can be fired from your job and turn it into a victory instead of a defeat (Lee Iacoca did). You can go bankrupt and move on to even greater wealth (Donald Trump did). You can be injured to the point of disfiguration and turn it into an advantage to inspire others (W. Mitchell did). You can be dumped by your girlfriend, feel suicidal, and yet still bounce back (Billy Joel did). And on the other hand, you can enjoy outstanding external success and yet abuse yourself to the point of death (John Belushi did).
For any seemingly “negative” event, you can find someone who turned it into an empowering experience. And for any “positive” event, you can find someone who interpreted it in such a way as to destroy themselves. Avoid the trap of letting events subconsciously control you, and use the power of your consciousness to decide your own interpretation of events for the greatest good of all.
When you reach the point of becoming independent of external events, you’re truly free. This is the state of being detached from external events, knowing that you can exert direct conscious control over your thoughts instead of needing something external to do it for you. Dr. Wayne Dyer refers to it as being “independent of the good opinion of others.” No matter what happens to you, you can still choose to be at peace.
November 19th, 2004 at 6:03 pm
There’s a great audio book I have by Jack Canfield (whom I highly recommend) about building high self-esteem. One of the things he says is that the outcome of an event is the combination of the event and your reaction to it (E + R = O). You don’t have control over the E, but you do have control over the R. This is very powerful, because in essence this means you have control over half of the formula. That’s a lot more than most people believe they have.
One of the examples he gives is that if someone tells you something negative (that you’re fat, ugly, bad at golf) you’ll only feel bad about it if you believe it yourself. If after they said what they said you say to yourself “yeah.. he’s right, I am fat.” But you don’t have to think that. If the event is someone telling you that you’re fat, that’s just half the formula. The only way you’ll feel bad about it is if you agree with it. If on the other hand after hearing this you tell yourself that you’re at your most optimal weight, your self-esteem won’t go down, and might even go up.
November 19th, 2004 at 7:17 pm
Funny coincidence… I listened to that same audio program a couple weeks ago (checked it out from the local library). The ideas weren’t too original, but it’s always helpful to reinforce such concepts again and again and to hear them in different ways. I’ve read several of Canfield’s (mostly co-authored) books; of those I thought The Aladdin Factor was the best because it had an interesting perspective on the power of simply asking for what you want. I also had a brief email exchange with him several years ago about how to create a mastermind group, a concept his partner Mark Victor Hansen covered in The One Minute Millionaire (with Robert Allen).
Incidentally, the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book was originally self-published by Canfield and Hansen. So they started very much as independents and were later picked up by a publisher. Now their dozens of different books consume entire shelves at bookstores… not a bad couple of guys to model. They learned about book self-publishing from Dan Poynter, who is the same person I’ve been modeling for self-publishing my first book.
November 19th, 2004 at 8:56 pm
The Aladdin Factor sounds interesting, I’ll have to pick it up sometime. I’m currently reading The Power of Focus which is another book Canfield co-wrote.
November 19th, 2004 at 10:01 pm
I found The Power of Focus a bit generic, although others have told me it really helped them. I have a copy signed by Hansen who wrote, “Steve, Be focused!” Focusing Strategy #7 in that book is basically a mini-version of what’s in The Aladdin Factor. So if you grasp it there, you probably wouldn’t need to read a whole other book about it.
November 20th, 2004 at 2:36 pm
this line of thought was also suggested by the buddha when he asked people to ‘let go’ ie let go of interpretations which winds up in misery. “buddha” by karen armstrong is a wonderful book for more details.
complete ‘leting go’ is probably a hard state to achieve whilst being in the midst of the real world. surely one should try letting go as much as possible. what others think of us is a good concept to ‘let go’.
November 20th, 2004 at 2:58 pm
When you boil it all down, you end up with ultra-rationalization. Events can be good or bad, but controlling your reaction to them ultimately determines success or failure.
But what about dealing with people who simply aren’t rational? Heck, most human beings aren’t particularly rational on a day-to-day basis, though we pride ourselves on our rationality. So how do you deal with things like a moody boss or coworkers, whom you can never be sure where you stand with them? How do you deal with incompetent people in positions that have influence over you (BTW, not necessarily your boss…this can be someone in another department who irrationally doesn’t like you and has ridiculous influence and the ear of the boss…I’ve been in this situation). Often when you show confidence, others pick that up as over-cockiness and *immediately* dislike you forever. Or it could be a client who’s constantly changing the requirements but doesn’t want to pay. It could be lots of things.
Maybe it’s been that my own personal experiences are highly localized to myself and don’t apply to anyone else.
I’ve learned to deal with all these situations (my basic attitude is, “screw ‘em”…except substitute in a four letter word for “screw” 
). But then I come off as arrogant and uncarring. I can’t win! 
So after all that blabbering, how do you deal with fundamentally irrational people? Being a consultant with a business model consisting of putting quality things out onto the internet and waiting for the money to come in, I think you may largely be divorced from this. I envy you and it’s this kind of thing that makes me want to go into consulting myself.
November 20th, 2004 at 3:54 pm
this sounds exactly like neural linguistic programming. which is no bad thing
November 20th, 2004 at 4:04 pm
I’ll answer that one in a separate blog post, since it’s such a common problem.
November 20th, 2004 at 4:31 pm
Awww, I have to wait? So another thing I don’t do well is having patience.
November 22nd, 2004 at 9:30 am
Ayeee. That stuff (particularly Tony Robbins) has always felt kind of…I don’t know, fake and creepy to me.
November 22nd, 2004 at 10:51 am
IMO Tony Robbins’ marketing is a bit fake and overly emotional. But the material beneath the hype is incredibly useful and practical if applied consistently. I think it’s unfortunate that some people claim to be turned off by the marketing and presentation of Tony’s material, yet these same people will succumb to even worse marketing hype when it comes from the fast food restaurants they eat at, the movies they see, or the cars they drive; they conveniently ignore this incongruency. So I don’t buy it when someone says Tony’s style is a turnoff that prevents them from even taking a peek into his material. I think that’s just an excuse. What if Tony is (at least partially) right? Then what? Then we can no longer avoid facing… gulp… that we might actually have to do something about it. It’s easier to dismiss the messenger than to digest the message and deal with the consequences. Once we learn the tools that allow us to start living consciously, then we’re faced with the enormous burden of accepting responsibility for what that means.
On the other side though, you have people who blindly follow “gurus” without thinking for themselves. And that’s equally problematic. But between these two extremes are the curious seekers who are committed to studying ways to improve their lives, and for those I have to say that Tony Robbins’ material is certainly worthy of study. Having been up on stage with him briefly at one of his seminars and experiencing the exciting energy of the 1500-person audience myself, I can see where his enthusiasm comes from. If you spent most of your life helping people to change and grow and enjoyed the positive feedback that results from such work, that could make you a bit hyper as well.
February 24th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
Continuing from the previous blog post, in my opinion one shouldn’t try to mentally program themselves to the “point of becoming independent of external events”. Instead of mentally facing a fear, one should really face it (which then TRULY leads to the mental acceptance of confidence). I believe that’s the only way of gaining courage (and then confidence).
I’ve tried a couple of times to imagine being confident, and sometimes it works. But the problem is I don’t feel good about being in that state. It doesn’t lead me to that great feeling and peace that I find when facing my fears and conquering them.
Would you say that this is just a lack of practicing it all mentally?