[Neurons] 2024 Neurons #23 EMOTIONS AS SKILLS

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2024 Neurons #23

May 27, 2024

Emotional Intelligence Series #22

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EMOTIONS AS SKILLS

 

While we have looked at emotions in many different ways in the past
articles, there is yet another perspective by which to view emotions-you can
think of emotions as skills.  Because as you think, so you feel, and because
you can set an anchor on an emotional state thereby putting it under your
control for ready access- emotions offer you a wide reportoire of ways to
respond.  And if a wide range of responses, then a set of resources as
things you can do.

 

If we think of each emotion as a skill-then you have the skill to love and
to hate, to get angry and to get calm, to appreciate, to stand in awe, to
accept, to play, to enjoy, to be curious, and on and on.  The emotion itself
is not the external action, it is your internal, somatic response, but it
can certainly infuse an action and give any action a certain feel.  You can,
and you do, texture your behaviors and activities with certain emotional
qualities.

 

Because you can anchor an emotion and attach it to new triggers, you can
access an emotion and then re-access it as you wish.  This gives you the
ability to create an emotional environment for yourself in a multitude of
contexts and experiences.  For example, what emotional environment would you
like to set up for yourself when studying?  When you engage others in
conversation?  When you work out at the gym?  Does your current emotional
environment bring out your best when you are negotiating, selling, doing
your taxes, handling the kids, etc.?

 

Beyond first level emotional anchors, you can also set up meta-level
emotional anchors.  This is what you do when you meta-state an emotional
state.  If you ask, "What would I like to feel when I feel X?" you can begin
the process.  Let's say you want to feel respectful when you feel angry.  If
you access respect and apply it to your state of anger, thereby creating
respectful anger.  Repeat that several times, future pace it, and set up
something to remind you of it- and lo and behold, you create a strategy for
respectful anger as a meta-emotion.

 

The next step might be to turn the anchor it into a ritual.  Doing that
usually consolidates the process even further, giving you even more access
to the new emotional strategy.   It is in this way that you can choose your
emotions and your emotional response.  In doing this you are making a
decision or several decisions about an emotion-which emotion to feel in a
given situation, how to feel it, how to express it, etc.  In this sense,
rituals are originally designed to induce emotional states.  If a ritual no
longer does that, then it's probably time to refresh the ritual and/or
invent a new one.

 

As you think of emotions as skills, how skilled are you at loving?  Being
compassionate, enjoying everyday life, learning from every experience,
counting and validating even small improvements, hold firm to your values,
being curious, being playful, etc.?  And if emotions are skills, how often
do you practice one or more of your emotional skills?  You could, for
example, practice empathy.  You could practice wonder.  Emotions as skills
allows you to think about them in terms of degrees. 

 

Emotions-love them or hate them.  Of course, that's thinking about them in
an either/or, polarized way, one that implies that you don't know much about
emotional mastery.  Yet there is a much better choice now that you know a
lot about emotional mastery, learn to develop them and apply them so that
they make you more alive, more effective, and more able to do the things you
want to do.  You can manage your emotions!  That's what we train in the
Neuro-Semantic training, Emotional Mastery.  And if it is a possibility,
then it is a choice that you could step up to.

 

Emotions no longer have to be mysterious or unfathomable.  "As you think, so
you feel."  Any complexity in emotions implies complexity in your thinking.

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

meta at acsol.net

 

 



 

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