Emotionally Yours

“I do not know what came over me last night,” Or “I do not know why I reacted the way I did.”

Do these words sound familiar to you or have you experienced something like this yourself where an emotional response took control of you in such a way that you lost control of yourself and of what was happening around you? A feeling that over powered you or overwhelmed you.

Taken to extremes, these feelings of being overwhelmed and being out of control can scare people. They can affect your career and social life and people question whether such a person can be trusted in responsible situations.

“When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his master.”                                                 ~ Baruch de Spinoza, 1632-1677 ~

We all have emotional responses all the time, some of these are great and resourceful like joy, pleasure, love, enthusiasm, motivation etc. and some not so great and un resourceful like, anger, fear, sadness, anxiety, pain etc. Some of these enhance our lives and therefore empower us and some others limit our lives and therefore disempower us. So……….

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to control our emotions so that they didn’t control us? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to experience more of our great and resourceful emotions and to be able to call upon empowering emotions / states whenever we need to?

Good news is, that we can…………………

State management or self management as called in emotional intelligence (EI), is defined as, “the ability to remain in control despite our emotional state.” In the world of NLP, however, we prefer to refer to it as, “The ability to control our emotions so that they don’t control us.” The difference lies in the fact that we choose to change our state once we become aware of it being detrimental to our desired outcome, rather than trying to control it.

The problem with state management does not lie in the fact that people do not have personal resources to do such. The problem lies in knowing how to access the resources, how to amplify the resourceful states, and how to do so when we most need such resources.

Using Neuro Linguistic Programming or NLP, (which is the art and science of personal excellence, which involves using our own mind in more powerful and effective ways to produce results in all areas of our lives.), and combining it with the power of written word, a one day workshop has been created to provide participants with the necessary skills to manage their emotions / states.

This powerful workshop combines the efficacy of NLP and the healing nature of putting one’s thoughts on paper, specifically in this case, in the form of a letter. The participants write a letter to themselves starting with pinpointing or selecting one particular emotion that they want to work on and why. They then go through the process of understanding their emotion, its transformation and then learn tools and techniques to manage their resourceful emotions / states.

This process includes various hands on exercises which the participants go through with other participants. These exercises are carefully designed and chosen to facilitate change and transformation along with providing tremendous insights about their emotions and the working of the human mind. All along they record their insights and learnings which eventually becomes their letter to themselves.

This letter, in addition to being a transcript of their learning and transformation, also serves one important function which is usually missing in other workshops, that it serves as a strong reminder of what they have gone through during the day and a consistent reinforcement (in NLP terms, an “Anchor”) to their change and transformation. This letter will be mailed to the participants and they will be required to go through it on a regular basis, atleast for 21 days so that the change and learning can become permanent and ingrained as a habit.