Control of Feelings
The starting point to taking personal responsibility begins with getting some clarity around how you are responding to any given situation or how you instigate any given situation yourself. It’s about making a proactive decision to be responsible for the actions that you take.
In other EPiC Insights (Owning It Part 1 – Physical Control, Owning It Part 2 – Emotional Control) we touched on the importance of the Hierarchy of Control™. This is required to identify and correct the state of our minds, bodies and responses before we communicate with a sense of personal responsibility.
The Hierarchy of Control™ is:
- PHYSICAL control
- EMOTIONAL control
- Control of FEELINGS
- Control of THOUGHTS
- Control of ACTIONS
Once our physical and emotional states are under control we can then move on to address the control of our feelings.
The Hierarchy of Needs™ is a process that allows us to unravel the jumble of physical, emotional, feelings, thoughts and actions that we have inside us and that, if we are not under an overall state of controlled awareness, we will respond inconsistently and fail to make the desired impact on any given situation.
We talk about the control of feelings or the feeling state in 2 layers:
Feelings when your emotional state is satisfied;
Feelings when your emotional state is not satisfied.
So, in other words when you are clear about your emotional state (i.e. when you have read, acknowledged, understood and managed the emotion, very often, with practice, instantaneously) then you can pinpoint the feeling you have about it and communicate it clearly either to yourself or others.
Examples of emotionally satisfied feelings:
Affectionate
Confident
Grateful
Peaceful
Inspired
Loving
Examples of emotionally unsatisfied feelings:
Confused
Embarrassed
Angry
Tense
Suspicious
Vulnerable
Sad
Feeling Exercise
This exercise is great to test how the feelings that you are wishing to convey might be interpreted. Very often, we might think that we are conveying a particular feeling but the interpretation may be quite different!
Choose an action and practice changing the feelings you want to convey with that action. Notice how it makes you feel and how other people interpret your actions – choose a friend to demonstrate it to.
For example:
Action: rocking arms to and fro
Feeling: tenderly
Outcome: sense of comforting a new born baby to a gentle sleep
What about if you rocked your arms suspiciously/sadly/angrily – what might this convey?
To find out more about how to be an EPiC leader, click here to arrange a conversation with one of our Consultants.
Best wishes
The Insights Team
