Jan 9
The Power of Calm in Today’s Ever-Dynamic World: 6 Ways to Keep Yourself Balanced
If we have to address the most sought-after virtue in today’s world, perhaps we’d point out the talent of keeping calm.
Sometimes I really try my best to think of situations when strong emotions served me justice. Perhaps you know well what types of instances I refer to — something happens and all of a sudden a wave of emotions washes all over us, leaving us exasperated and oblivious to what is the best possible course of action and reaction.
Although emotions are incredibly important to people (it is because of them that we are able to address what’s been happening in our inner world and find peace, if we are lucky), most of the time we find the hard way that being overly emotional rarely leads to any good in a dynamic situation. Just think about the plethora of instances when people have expressed regrets about reacting too quickly and too vigorously. In fact, they share they wish to turn back time and give themselves a moment for the emotion to subside before engaging in whatever actions or reactions.
With time, people come to the realization that keeping oneself calm and balanced proves to be the best strategy against overreacting and being quick to judge. Of course, keeping your posture and managing to tame your emotions sounds like a great plan, but in reality, it turns out to be a rather daring experience.
In today’s article, I’d like to discuss the art of staying calm, what good comes out of it, why it is so hard and how can we in fact implement balance when it comes to our inner world and addressing our emotions and reactions to our surroundings.
Let’s get to it.
Why emotions are important but not our best advocate?
We’re used to hearing how important emotions are: trusting our gut feeling, following our intuition, and listening to what our heart has to say are all popular sayings many people implement in their daily lives. And they are all true.
Being aware of your emotions and what has triggered them is the ultimate path toward self-awareness and self-development. When we well know how we feel and what is the apparent reason, be it a thing that happened years ago, yesterday or at the moment we speak, is a powerful tool that we can use to grow into wise and self-confident individuals.
But there is a big difference between being aware of how we feel and letting that same emotion take its toll on how we react, and what we say and do.
Both in our personal and professional lives, we frequently fall victim to our emotional reactions. Once the emotion hits, we oftentimes feel so overwhelmed that we can’t help but react right there on the spot. What happens, however, is that later on, we come up with more fruitful and appropriate ways of reacting once the emotional trigger has settled and allowed us to think more clearly.
In business, for instance, reacting emotionally oftentimes leads to unresolved conflicts or conflicts that tend to get worse.
Imagine an employee being late for a meeting that leads to the client getting frustrated — an emotional response would be us getting furious, yelling at the employee, or perhaps even going to great lengths like firing them. Later on, we might discover they had a very good reason for showing up late and wish to turn back time and react otherwise which would then have resulted in the company not losing a key expert figure.
In this situation, it’s best for us to be aware of our emotions but perhaps wait for a moment for them to subside — once this happens, we might be able to engage in an honest conversation and find other better alternatives to dealing with the matter in a more productive and constructive way.
If we truly want to become masters at emotional intelligence, we need to learn how to navigate through our emotions in a productive way — the stronger the emotion, the longer we need to wait before we act upon it. Especially in business settings where we communicate with dozens of people daily.
Why being calm has been named a superpower and why is it so hard to let emotions subside?
Being able to maintain a balanced composure is a virtue mainly because it appears that you have things under control.
To some extent that’s basically true — what you’ve managed to control is your emotional responses and outbursts. Staying calm in triggering situations points out that you have learned and mastered the art of witnessing your emotions objectively and not allowing them to devour your entire existence right then and there.
Staying calm has another tremendous benefit as well — it allows you to take a step back and witness a situation from a perspective. Once we distance ourselves from a difficult or triggering circumstance, we usually get the chance to see the nuances among the vivid colors. If something or someone is bugging us or bringing discomfort to our lives, we can investigate further in an attempt to see their reason for acting in a certain way. This brings harmony, balance, an explanation, depth, and an alternative we can choose to further explore.
Of course, it takes a lot of training and elevated self-development for people to stop overreacting and choose to sit down first and think things through. Emotions are immensely strong triggers and withstanding their power is indeed incredibly difficult. Once emotion begins to rule us, it’s like we feel empowered to say or do whatever would make us feel better at the moment. But will this feeling remain as days go by and emotions step back, making room for calmness to enter the picture?
If you want to learn how to stay balanced and calm, perhaps you might want to check out the following 6 strategies
As we’ve mentioned numerous times so far, keeping yourself calm and balanced has in fact many benefits. Calmness keeps our physical and emotional health and it also elevates our mood in the long run.
Nowadays I witness more and more people wishing for calmness and balance in their lives which means we all in fact need those from other people and life circumstances. And since every change starts from within, today I’ve decided to share 6 useful tactics that may perhaps welcome calmness into your life.
- Take the time to search for the reason behind all things. I know for a fact that one of the best ways to allow emotions to subside is to try to search for the reason behind them. Every emotion, trigger, action, or word has its reason and once we opt for searching for it, we might be able to put emotional reactions on pause and observe things objectively. This brings a sense of wisdom and calmness into our lives simply because we connect with people and things on a deeper level.
- Breathe in, breathe out. As cliche as it may sound, mastering various breathing techniques can have a tremendous effect on our minds and emotions. Whenever strong emotions arise, I think it’s best for us to retreat to a safe space in our minds and simply breathe in and breathe out till the emotional trigger begins to fade and make space for acceptance and calmness.
- Learn not to judge quickly. This goes for both ourselves and other people. Usually, when we feel emotional, we tend to judge others or ourselves and quickly toss the blame around. But when we stop for a second and search for the reason behind it all, we oftentimes begin to understand why someone behaves in a certain way or says the things they say. Once this happens, we are capable of coming from a place of understanding and calmness and judgment steadily resolves in our minds and hearts as something rather unnecessary.
- Realize that people react in certain ways not because of you but because of themselves. This powerful calmness technique aims at teaching you not to take things personally. One of the main reasons people get too emotional is merely because they believe it’s them at the core of anyone’s reactions and behaviors. But the truth is, they are not — remembering that people react and behave in certain ways because of their own background, predispositions, beliefs, and experience is a rather liberating thought that can help anyone welcome calmness into their lives. It’s rarely personal.
- Try to focus on the positives of any troublesome situations. The truth is mistakes happen and hard times enter our lives. Although they are inevitable and part of life, it’s our reaction to them that matters in the end. If we learn how to focus on the positives and view every hardship as an opportunity to learn, we’d be so much closer to actually mastering calmness and balance. Plus, we’d be much happier and hopeful.
- Pick wisely who you surround yourself with. If you’re constantly in the company of quick tempers, you’d find it more difficult to keep yourself balanced and calm in the majority of situations. Surrounding yourself with grounded and relaxed people who you can discuss important matters with is perhaps one of the strongest inspirational aspects of communication that can help you be more present and calm.
Wrapping things up
Being calm is definitely a virtue in today’s overly dynamic and reactive world. Calmness allows you to further investigate both your and other people’s behavior and search for reasons why things happen the way they do. Essentially, being calm goes hand in hand with being much wiser and willing to adapt, understand and accept people and situations while also learning and further elevating your development.
