
3 Practical Ways to Expand Your Emotional Awareness and Take Control of Your Life
Have you ever felt lost and confused, completely stressed out, or on the verge of burnout?
I’m sure you have. We all go through periods of challenge. Unless you’re a spoiled child, you’ve likely had to overcome difficulty in your past.
Inversely…have you ever felt at ease in your life? Like everything was going right and you could afford to relax and enjoy the moment?
I hope you have.
You might be wondering: “What is the point of this kind of self-inquiry?” It turns out that reflecting on our life experiences calls awareness to our emotions.
While seemingly intangible, emotions are something everyone agrees exist. However, many of us don’t invest time into learning to identify them and ultimately control them for our benefit.
But how can calling awareness to our emotions allow us to eventually benefit from doing so?
Famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung devoted many years of his life conceptualizing the mechanics of the human psyche. He argued that things that bother us about other people i.e. how they speak, how they look, or what they do and do not do, are uncomfortable emotions that are actually a result of unsolved problems that we have with ourselves. He coined this concept as: the shadow self.
Think about the last time you were treated poorly by a friend. Maybe you had plans to hang out and they just stood you up for the third time in a row to do something else. There’s no question that being treated like that is painful. However, that pain is there to act as a message.
You ultimately can’t control the behaviors of others; you can only control your own behavior. Instead of placing blame and wallowing in negativity and hatred for the way this friend is treating you, instead you could listen to your pain and adjust so that you’re not placed in the same painful situation again. Practically, this might look like letting the person go from your life or calling awareness to how their behavior is making you feel so that the friend (if they are really your friend) can be more mindful of how their actions impact you.
Learning to become aware of, manage, and ultimately direct our emotions like this is not only possible, it is incredibly empowering.
I am going to introduce three things you can start doing today so that you can reclaim this kind of control over your emotions and your life.
1. Develop a mindfulness practice
Meditation has gone mainstream and as a result, it can be difficult to decipher what kind of meditative practice works best for you. Mindfulness, luckily, is something that you can practice any time, any place, and no matter what you are doing. The practice itself simply involves calling awareness to what’s already there. I personally enjoy simply calling my awareness to my breath. This is something you can do anytime, anywhere. Simply be present with whatever it is you’re doing and feel how easy it is to breathe in and breathe out. You’re mind may wander, but you can always bring back focus to your breathe.
Here is a list of some other ways you can bring mindfulness into your life
- Pay attention to your surroundings. What can you see? What details can you notice?
- What kind of sounds can you hear? Is it completely silent? What about the sound of your breath?
- How does the temperature in your location feel? Is it hot or cold? Dry or wet? How does the air feel on your skin?
You can also try to come up with your own ways to call your full attention to the present moment. After all, it’s always there!
2. Start a journal
If you’re anything like me, your mind is bouncing from thought to thought, task to task, and daydream to daydream throughout most of your waking hours. When you’re constantly jumping from one thought to another like this, it can be hard to focus on what’s most important. This is where a daily journaling habit can help.
When you first wake up in the morning or when you are about to go to bed at night, take 5–10 minutes to reflect on your day. Ask yourself questions like:
“How did I feel today?”
“What was my biggest challenge?”
“What would I have to do to have an ideal day today (or tomorrow)?”
You can get creative with the questions but record your thoughts as they are - not as you’d want them to be. Try to give yourself the space to feel all of the ways you feel.
Over time, you’ll begin to identify patterns in yourself and with a separated perspective on your past thoughts, maybe even identify solutions to your problems.
3. Find an accountability partner
We all have blind spots and sometimes it can be difficult to figure out where we keep slipping up. Having a close friend or acquaintance as an “accountability partner” can help. The idea is to have a trustworthy person in your life agree to call you out on your bullsh*t.
In an ideal world, all of our close friends would do this with us already and we’d understand that they’re trying to help. Unfortunately, many people are afraid to receive criticism or feedback and even more don’t know how to give criticism without worrying about or actually sounding offensive to the other person.
Find someone who knows you well and ask if they’d be willing to help you improve yourself. Establish some ground rules about what parts of your life you’d like to receive feedback on and then most importantly, listen.
Will the accountability partner’s feedback be inaccurate sometimes? Sure. But I often find that even if I have no desire to change the behavior in question, it’s helpful to hear how my behavior is interpreted by another party.
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