Using Your Emotional GPS
A Tale Of Two Lives
It was a dark, cold and miserable morning when the alarm broke through the sanctuary of Pete’s peaceful sleep and awoke him to another day. He dragged himself up, sleepily making a strong coffee to inject some life into his dis-spirited body. His mood perfectly matched the weather.
As he dressed and prepared with a sense of doom for another day at work, his mind drifted to fantasies of escape. Winning the lottery. His summer holiday. The weekend even. Just to be able to get off this non-stop treadmill and have some time to think clearly and relax. Do what he wanted to do and not live on someone else’s schedule. In twenty years I’ll be retired and then I can do the really fun stuff, he consoled himself.
On the other side of town, Susan had already bounded out of bed and was showering after her morning exercise. As the water lashed against her skin, she savoured the euphoric rush as endorphins flooded through her bloodstream.
She was playing the day ahead through in her mind. Imagining, the interactions, situations and projects that she eagerly anticipated challenging her creativity and inspiring her to greater levels of performance. She loved this time of day. The peaceful quietude that brought forth the most inspired and creative solutions that set the tone for the whole day ahead.
Two snapshots of two very different people living very different lives. Yet if you think about it, each of us are really two (or even more) different people, aren’t we?
There’s us when we are at our best. When we are happy, loving, patient, full of energy, productive and capable. Then there is us when we are just not in the game. When we are grumpy, easily irritated, tired and just can’t seem to get anything done.
We Are Individuals And Can’t Live Happily By Prescribed Rules
Now so many people want to give you a list of rules and prescriptions for living. They would say Pete needs to get enough sleep, eat a healthy breakfast and exercise every morning.
But that is such an oversimplification that completely misses the point.
Pete could try to sleep earlier, but end up more frustrated after a restless night tossing and turning. He could moan his way through a strict daily routine and grudgingly eat his fruit breakfast, but it wouldn’t automatically get him the same results as Susan sees.
You see, everyone is different. What really matters isn’t what we do, but that what we do fits into our physical, psychological and emotional abilities. In other words we need to be authentic. We need what we, as an individual, need to be able to take the next step. The key to high performance, success and happiness is never in what we do, but in the emotional state we perform from.
Susan’s life works. Not because she’s ticking off activities and recommendations that someone thinks will make it work. It works because these feel like the natural actions for her to take based on her emotional state.
Let’s take a contrasting situation. Every day, thousands of children are sat at their school desks and forced to attend lessons with the intention that they will learn. So, aside from skipped classes and sickness, over a twelve year school career, every pupil is expected to have 14,040 hours of education. Now even if we say, that someone has a terrible school record and has only been in classes for 7,000 hours, it’s still a hell of a long time.
Yet even with all those wasted hours, many people still reach leaving age without the ability to read and write adequately. One government study showed;
‘that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not “able to locate information in text”, could not “make low-level inferences using printed materials”, and were unable to “integrate easily identifiable pieces of information’
Yet once they want to learn, three months in an Adult Literacy Class and they suddenly learn.
It’s not they couldn’t learn, it’s not the teaching style, it’s simply that they are in a more receptive frame of mind. In school they closed their mind to the ability to learn.
And in just the same way, we could do every activity that some Researcher finds correlates to happiness and success, yet because it wasn’t congruent with our emotional state, it would fail to make us happy and successful.
There are no set rules or set prescriptions. Instead there is the unique emotional position that we are in. And we must start not where we or anyone else thinks we should start from, but from where we are towards where we want to get to.
Learning To Use Your Emotional GPS
That is the point of Your Emotional GPS. It’s an honest understanding of where you are, where you want to get to and finding the quickest point between these.
The journey of life is not primarily one of action. Our actions and behaviours are a consequence of many factors. Our genetics, our family history, our Cultural history, our personal experiences and many specific situational factors of which we have little or no ability to change or control.
However, once we understand that there is one factor that is completely under our control and that factor has the determining impact on how well we feel and react, we can gain a sense of control over our life again.
The Key To Success In Every Situation Is Emotional Readiness
Life is a series of situations that we meet over time. How well our life goes in general or in a given situation depends on how ready and prepared we are to meet each situation.
As an example, imagine a situation where the weediest kid in school gets into a fight. He’s poorly prepared, physically and emotionally, and will probably be lucky to walk away unaided.
In contrast, imagine a 5th dan black belt in the same situation. He’s supremely prepared, physically and emotionally, so much so that he will exude such confidence that only a drunk, or a fool, would even engineer such a situation.
Of course, we’re not going to have the technical skills for every possible situation, but we can get so sure footed, that we are emotionally prepared for anything. Really, what determines the quality of our life are not freak occurrences, but how well we handle the everyday stuff.
We got our jobs because we were qualified for them. We get given projects because we have the potential to handle them. The relationships we are in, come from a sequence of past interactions. We have the ability to handle all these things.
The real issue is not as so many people ask; ‘do I have the ability to succeed at this?’
It is ‘how can I achieve my potential?’
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race”
Calvin Coolidge
Unleashing Your Potential
To answer this question of how we can perform at the level we are capable of, it can be helpful to look at people who are judged by their performance, such as Athletes, Musicians and Actors. All that reach the highest stages of public displays have proven that they have the technical skill. But what really determines who wins, gets gold or the Oscar is not raw skill, but their ability to ‘get in the zone’ at a given moment in time. The skill of achieving that peak emotional state where distractions are eliminated and every cell of your body is focused on a co-ordinated drive towards perfection in your performance.
And this is all about meeting the challenge, the situation brings in a peak emotional state.
You can see at any sports event of either teams or Individuals, people who are incredibly talented, but they just can’t get it together on the day. Even all conquering stars like Tiger Woods and Roger Federer have off days. It seems that everything is against them, their timing is just that split second off. However hard they try, it just doesn’t work out and they only get more and more frustrated. This can be the beginning of a slump for some as they lose confidence in their ability to perform.
It’s easy to see this in highly competitive situations such as sports competition, but the key point is that this dynamic affects every aspect of our lives. Ever been lost for words or said something stupid and later cringed about it? That’s just a situation along your path you encountered where you were emotionally unprepared to deal with it effectively.
Ever had a huge row with your Partner that you later regretted? Again in a different emotional state, you might have responded differently and avoided all that emotional trauma. And of course, so might they.
Ever blew a deal, lost a Customer or made a big hassle out of a minor issue? Again it’s just the consequence of meeting a situation in an ineffective emotional state.
The key to success and happiness in life is your ability to access the optimal emotional state. You see, just as we walk about in the physical world, we also roam an emotional landscape. Much of our actions, behaviour and habits are derived from being emotionally lost.
Why do people smoke, drink, buy things they cannot afford and don’t need or comfort eat?
Often it’s to relax, to cheer themselves up or in some way numb an unpleasant emotion. Life is much easier and more fulfilling when we are aware of our emotional location and we have the ability to move to where we would prefer to be.
This site is focused on helping you to raise your awareness of where you are at the moment, where you would most like to be and how to get there in the quickest and most comfortable way.
You’ll find a great deal of information on these pages. But if you want to really learn how to navigate your emotional landscape there’s a hidden membership level which goes much deeper into the concepts.
