Manage your emotions! How?

Emotions are a fact of life, we all have them and they are available all the time, either getting in the way or getting you on the way. They are constantly, continuously and automatically influencing your actions and inactions thereby affecting the results you end up with in any area of your life. They affect your success, whether to you success means wealth, great relationships, spirituality, career, good health or mental growth. Emotions affect your relationship with everything around you, money, yourself and other people.
 Have you ever been afraid of not having enough and that stressed you? That fear of not having enough also affected your wellness and the quality of decisions you make as a result. Yet for many of us we have never really been educated around emotions, the best we were ever taught is ‘’think with you head and not your heart’’ or ‘’ don't be emotional about it’’. These lessons are not quite useful when you are going through a negative emotion that is interfering with the outcomes you want. How can you not be emotional when you are an emotional being and we all know there is no thought without an emotion and that means there is no decision where emotions are not involved. So suppressing, denying, ignoring exaggerating them might not be useful and the question to ask is how do we manage them for success? How do we leverage emotions to get us on the way to the results we want instead of getting in the way and blocking us from achieving the outcomes we want.
Think about it, what are your dominant emotions? We live in a world where people are dominated by anxiety triggered from fear of traffic, fear of crime, insecurity, fear of loss, fear of failure and so forth. This anxiety triggers in us the ‘’fight or flight’’ syndrome and we react to some of life’s natural, usual and necessary challenges as if they were life and death threats. You lash out at your partner as if they were a lion about to tear you apart and they from their side may also do the same. The result is a lost relationship, emotions got in the way and in this case the emotions may not really be coming from an issue in the relationship, they have just been displaced. Or if they are, one lost perspective because of the alarm bell from the survival instincts triggered by other life events.
Emotions have to be navigated with awareness and some ways to navigate include:
•Be aware of emotions and notice how they affect your behavior
•Don't flow back on yourself, that is emotions are supposed to move through and out, not to be hoarded. Tools to use include the Emotional Freedom Technique and Transforming Emotions through questioning them
•Be present, most negative emotions are triggered by a past or future event
•Celebrate the hero in you
•Become conversant with your life story, most of us are tripped backwards by unprocessed negative emotions from the past