Our emotions are caused by others?

Not long ago, I gave a talk at a national healthcare corporate office. The subject was on EQ at the workplace.

The audience in general was quite active and this got the discussion/talk going in an interesting way. Then, I asked the question, "Do other people and situations in life create your feelings/emotions?" About 50% of the people present said yes, and the other 50% of the people were not sure...

And when I said, "No. People and situations do not create how you feel. YOU create how you feel." Everyone looked puzzled!

In our world today, what is accepted as norm seems to be right in the eyes of many. How often have we heard people say, "he/she/this made me angry"? And we accept this as the truth. We think and say this so often that we truly believe that other people and situations in life have the power to make us feel a certain way.

Most successful life coaches and spiritual psychologists like Dr Joshua Stone will tell you that your thoughts create how you feel, your feelings motivate your actions, and your actions give you the result you want. So as you can see, this can have a spiraling effect, either upward or downward. If you have a negative thought, it breeds negative feeling which can generate negative actions or inaction. But if you have a positive seed thought, this generates positive feelings and emotions which will spin positive actions.

When we realise that indeed we are the cause of our own feelings/emotions, we are empowered because we realise that, "hey! no body and nothing can make me feel a certain way unless I allow it" I think this is liberating.

However, the tricky bit here is the mindfulness to realise this whenever we are faced with challenging situations in life. More often than not, even as we know we are the cause of our own feelings, we allow our buttons to be pushed by the outer world. It takes a whole lot of practice, like learning to ride a bicycle to find that steady balance within ourselves. Along the way, we will fall and make mistakes but ultimately, we will experience the sense of peace, happiness and freedom that everyone on earth is yearning for, if we keep at it making it our personal goal to be the master of our feelings/emotions.

Stay happy, it is your choice.

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