How to Coach Yourself and Others Influencing, Inter Personal and Leadership Skills | Page 118

2. The emotional balance
Emotions are how we genuinely feel about things.
We all experience both pleasant and unpleasant
feelings in our lives. Emotional balance is about
getting the balance of pleasant and unpleasant
feelings right. When we get the balance right, we
can flourish – this means feeling happy, getting
the most out of our lives and giving the best that
we can give.
So how do we find emotional balance in our lives?
How do we maintain a healthy balance of positive
and negative emotions?
Positive and negative emotions don’t just happen
to us - they are affected by the way we think. In
turn, how we think affects what we do. So, our behaviour is affected by our thoughts
and emotions. In addition, the way we behave, and the outcomes of our behaviour,
affects how we think and feel. There is therefore an ongoing relationship between our
thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
So, we can take control of our emotions by changing the way we think. We can decide
how we are going to respond when bad things happen to us. And we can think positively
about our lives to help encourage positive emotion.
We can push negative thoughts out of our mind, by doing something to try and take our
mind off them for a while, like going for a walk or a swim or phoning a friend. The
physical exercise or contact with a friend can also give us a little boost of positive
emotion which opens our minds to possible solutions to our problems. Also, solutions to
our problems often come to us when we’re not thinking too hard about it.
We can’t just magic up positive emotions – for example, we can’t just decide to be
joyful. But we can decide to think about the good things in our life to help us experience
joy by asking ourselves questions like, "What’s going well in my life today?"
We can also argue with our negative thoughts by clearly examining the facts of the
situation. Thinking things like "I’ll never get this work finished – I’m just hopeless at
this" makes you feel pretty low, but may not actually be true.
Effectively managing negative emotions involves identifying negative thinking and
replacing it with realistic and balanced thinking. Because our thoughts have a big impact
on the way we feel, changing unhelpful thoughts to realistic or helpful ones is a key to
feeling better. “Realistic thinking” means looking at yourself, others, and the world in a
balanced and fair way, without being overly negative or positive. For example:
Know what you’re thinking or telling yourself. Most of us are not used to paying attention
to the way we think, even though we are constantly affected by our thoughts. Paying
attention to your thoughts (or self-talk) can help you keep track of the kind of thoughts
you typically have.
Once you’re more aw