How to Coach Yourself and Others Essential Knowledge For Coaching | Page 479

people. And when we cool down, we would wonder how we allowed
ourselves to get in such a messed up state in the first place.
The answer is: Very easily. Allow me to explain.
Emotion is our body’s response to a thought, which could be triggered
by an external situation. But this situation is seen through the lens of
our own interpretation. Our lens is colored by the mental concepts
unique to each of us; concepts like good and bad, mine and yours, like
and dislike, right and wrong. Keep in mind we all have different lenses,
thus interpretation conflicts are inevitable.
For example, we feel very little emotion when someone else loses their
wallet. But when it is our own money, we suddenly feel pain and the
desire to hoard it back to us.
The moment we’ve labeled something as “mine”, we will experience
mental distress when we’ve interpreted that we have ‘lost’ it or are at
the risk of losing it. Whether it is my wallet, my pride, my money, my
house, my car, my job, my child, my stocks, my feelings or my dog, as
long as we feel that it is lost or threatened, we will experience pain in
the form of anger or other strong negative emotions.
We experience pain, because we have been trained since children to
believe that the things which we have labeled as ‘mine’, are something
that define who we are. We’ve identified with it and falsely believed that
if we lost it, or face losing it, we lose ourselves. Suddenly, our ego has
nothing to identify itself by. Who are we? This hurts our ego
tremendously.
In our minds, we feel entitled to more, whether it is more money, or
more respect, or a better job, or a larger house. Amongst it all, we fail to
see that our mind will always want more. Greed is a highly addictive
state of mind, always growing, blinding us of reality, while convincing
us that we’re doing a reasonable thing.

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