← Anthony Robbins - Get the edge
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Welcome to day number five or session five depending upon how you're going through this program. Listen. Yesterday we talked about the power and importance of energy in your body. But you can have a lot of physical energy and have it shunted by investing the energy and emotions that pull you down. Now, we all have times in which we get frustrated or overwhelmed or depressed or angry. We also have times when we feel euphoric and joyous and we feel excited about our lives. The secret is not to never feel the negative emotion that's not real. This is not about positive thinking. This is not about denial. It's about the power of using your emotions as action signals. You see, every emotion you've ever felt in your life is really a call to action. And what I'm going to show you in this tape is how to make that happen. Now think about something for a moment. What is more important to you than the way you feel? Is there anything you know? In my business seminars for years, I've asked people, I said, tell me anything you want in this world. And people say things like, you know, I want more money, I want a better relationship. I want to know that the world has been better because I was here. And invariably when I ask people, whenever they say I want these things or they say I want to be fed because I've kept them there too long in the session, the bottom line is they'll say, well, if I had some food, I would feel better, or if I made more money, I would feel like I had more power or more control or more freedom or more security, or if I was in a better relationship, I'd feel more love. But in reality, they don't really want the relationship. Then they don't want the money. They don't even Want the food. They just want to feel better. They want to change the way they feel. They want to change the emotional content of their life. In that moment, I think it's real important for us that we take a new look at emotions that we see that some of the emotions that we consider sometimes to be negative emotions that we think are most painful may in fact be our best friends. They may be giving us signals that we need to make changes. If we heed these signals and if we utilize them, we can change the quality of our experience and our life immediately. So just remember, emotions are the ultimate power. They start wars. They cause us to get married, they cause us to get divorced, to create children. They can even make us ill, or they can make us healthy. In essence, the history of your life, the history of this world, is the history of emotion. Emotions are the core that call us to action and change our entire lives. So where do they come from? What's their real purpose? What are some of the most intense emotions that we experience day to day that shape our destiny and that most of us never really learned to master? And then how can we master them? And how can we utilize those to increase the quality of our life? Those are, in essence, the questions I want us to answer together today. Let's start with a simpler question, though. How do you deal with your emotions? Right now I'm curious, because I found that people deal with emotions in one of basically four patterns. Either one, they avoid them. They literally try to not feel. They try to not have to feel. Let's say, the feeling of rejection. And there's a problem with that, what would you guess it is? Well, yeah, if you're always trying to avoid rejection, you're never going to succeed. Because anything in life that requires you to deal with other human beings on a massive scale, where you're taking a step forward and you're trying to create change, exposes you to a point where somebody may disagree with you, they may reject. You see, the ultimate fear of rejection keeps people out of relationships. They never get to have the feeling they do want, which is love or intimacy or a feeling of connectedness, because their fear of rejection keeps them out of it. So you can't ever avoid completely negative emotions. They're part of life and they cause us to grow. Some people don't try to avoid their emotions. Instead, they go into the I'm going to endure it phase, or worse, I'll endure it, but deny it. Those people, usually they try and disassociate from their feelings. They try to Say, well, it doesn't feel that bad. But meanwhile, they keep stoking the fire inside themselves by thinking about how horrible things are or how someone has taken advantage of them, or how they do everything right, but things still turn up wrong. And why is it this always happened to them? In other words, they never change their internal conversation, they never change their internal focus or their physiology. They keep feeling like heck, but they try to pretend like it's not there, deny it or disassociate it. And inevitably this erupts. Because the more you don't listen to the messages of your emotions, the more intense they get. They keep hammering on the door louder and louder to try to get through to you, and all of a sudden you feel worse and worse and worse. Or the third thing I see people do is they use it for competition. You got it bad. Let me tell you how bad I feel. It's really going to make your life better. And I hear people do it all the time. Yeah, my work's so horrible. Let me tell you how terrible things are. You think that's bad? I'll show you terrible. And sure enough, people get in a match to see how bad they can make each other feel about their own lives. You want to stay out of that place, hopefully you go with a fourth way of dealing emotions, and that is to learn from them and utilize them. Now, where do they come from? Do they just attack us like a virus, where all of a sudden we feel something? Or as we all know, they come from other people, Right? For example, if you feel loving, it's because of what somebody else did. They came over and told you they loved you, or they hugged you, or they touched you a certain way, or they kissed you, and that's what made you feel love. Is that really true? When somebody touches you and you feel loved, the reality is you feel loved because you choose at that moment to create those feelings within yourself. You allow yourself to have those sensations. You have some rules, some criteria that say, when XYZ happens, then I get to feel loved. And then at that moment when all those criteria are met, somebody hugs you, kisses you, says they love you, et cetera, you then in your own body, create these sensations that you call love. You release those sensations. You put yourself in that physiology at that moment. Conversely, if you feel bad, if you feel angry, if you feel overwhelmed, depressed, frustrated, lonely, all of these emotions are also created by only one person. You. By what you choose to focus on, or to be even more specific, by the meaning that you attach to any experience. In life. Let's repeat that so we remember it. How you feel at any moment of time is really the result of the meaning that you've given to your experience. In other words, let's say a man opens a door for a woman. How does that woman feel about that? Well, the answer has nothing to do with the actual event, but rather her interpretation of the event, what she chooses to label that event as meaning. Some women feel demeaned by the process. How dare you, you male chauvinist pig. You can imagine how some guys look back and go, what is the matter with her? Because what it meant for him was respect. Or it may have meant for him. He was doing it out of appreciation or love or just simple caring. See, what we feel is not based on our experience, but, again, on our interpretation of our experience. It's the way we represent our experience that determines how we feel. And look again at that word represent. It means, if we spell it out, re present. In other words, something just happened. Now, after it happened, you take it in through your five senses and you make a re presentation, another presentation of what happened inside your head. The way you represent those events will determine how you feel. So again, in this case, this woman took the simple act of a man opening the door with a smile on his face, and she represented it inside of her head as he's trying to take advantage of me. He's trying to make me less than him. He's trying to dominate me in some way. We must be very careful of the meanings we attach to things because those meanings basically determine the quality of how we feel in our lives. We must make sure that the emotions we feel are appropriate. That, in essence, they empower us instead of disempowering us. There are no negative emotions. There are no bad emotions. Every emotion serves us as long as we interpret it in a way that adds a powerful meaning to our life, something that moves us forward instead of backwards. Now, let's go a step further. Why don't you just analyze the difference between two emotions for me just by experiencing them? If you would stop for a moment right now, and I want you to think about something that you'd like to have happen in the future. And what I'd like you to do is hope that it will happen. Just take a moment, stop for a second. Close your eyes if you can. Now, if you're in a car, this is not a very useful exercise. Okay? You might have to hope with your eyes open. I hope you keep your eyes open while you listen to me. Here but right now, I want you to think of something you want to have happen in the future and just hope that will occur. Just hope. Notice how this feels. Now I want you to notice. Do you see, like, two different possibilities when you hope? I'm curious, do you see it working out, not working out? How does it feel to hope? Now open your eyes, Kind of change your state a little bit. You know, move your body around, change your physiology. And then secondly, I want you to try another emotion. I want you just for a moment to close your eyes and think of this thing you want to have happen, but expect it to happen. Put yourself in a state of absolute expectation where you absolutely expect. You know it will happen. And as you expect this will happen, as you know it will happen, you create that in your body right now, I want you to notice how that feels and also notice how this is different than hope. And then as you do, open your eyes. And what was the difference? Now, when I ask people to do this in seminars, one of the first differences that people will tell me is that hope for them when they hope, they saw two different examples. They saw it working out. They also thought of the possibility of not working out. In other words, they held two different options of what was going to happen in the future, and they didn't feel very certain. When I ask them which one they like better, they always say they like to expect better than they like to hope. In addition, they'll say things like, well, I felt like when I was hoping that I was passive, but when I was expecting, I was active, I felt moved forward, I felt more intensity. So what I begin to hear is the difference in these emotions for a lot of people is the way you represent them. That is, you focus on both possibilities when you hope, when you expect, you just focus on one possibility. This is what's going to happen. And that's all you picture, that's all you notice, that's all you think about. In addition, there's this movement when you expect this sensation, this tension, but it's a positive tension. All emotions have different components. We will learn how to use those components to intensify our positive emotions and to lessen our negative emotions. I just had you do this exercise for another quick reason. I wanted to reinforce something. Were you able to hope this thing was going to happen in the future a moment ago? And were you in fact able to expect it to create that feeling in your body? Then once again, I've proven to you that you do control your emotions, don't you? There was no Reason to expect it. Nothing I said had changed the content of whether or not you would succeed. I just told you to choose to expect something would work out. And you did it, didn't you? And did it feel better? So remember, you're always in control of how you feel. Nothing in the environment controls you. It's the way you interpret the environment, the meaning you give, the rules you have that determine what positive or negative feelings you give yourself. So why do we have emotions in the first place? What's their purpose? Especially, why do we have these painful emotions? You might say, I know what these powerful positive emotions are for because I deserve ecstasy. Well, I agree with you. You deserve to feel great. And they're a reward system. And some people look pain as if it were the punishment system. And sometimes it is. When we don't follow our own rules, when we don't live by our own values, by our own life standards, then we certainly give ourselves pain as a way to keep ourselves on track, because we want to avoid pain. But I think negative emotions serve a very powerful positive purpose. And that purpose I've already alluded to when we started this tape. Negative emotions are a signal that a change is needed. Let's think about this for a moment. When you feel an emotion like fear, an emotion that most people try to avoid at all costs because it's just too painful, or any variant of that emotion, like worry or concern or terror, when you feel those emotions, those emotions are giving you a signal. Rather than just try to avoid the feelings, you should listen for and notice the signal and utilize it. The signal of fear is you must prepare. Boy, that's a valuable signal. It's in your body for a reason. It's saying to you that something may be coming in the near future that you better be prepared for, either prepared to cope with or prepared to deal with. That's valuable information. We don't want to deny that emotion. We don't want to avoid it and pretend it's not there. That's how Niagara happens. That's how people get in trouble, emotionally, physically, financially, their relationships. They don't want to feel the fear that the relationship's not working out, so they pretend it's still going great. Until one day they find themselves five feet from Niagara Falls in a boat with oars and going, oh, shoot, it's too late. They take an emotional fall, a relationship fall. Make sure that these emotions serve you. And the way to make them serve you, I think, is to realize that every emotion has a message for you. And what you want to do is not make it wrong, not avoid it, not freak out about it, not make yourself wrong for feeling it, but to do six things. Number one, identify what the emotion is. Two, acknowledge and appreciate the message it's offering you. Three, get incredibly curious about what it's offering you. In other words, how could you use this to make your life better? Is this really what you want? And do you need to change the way you're looking at the world? Do you need to change the way you're acting? Do you need to change the way you're communicating? And then four, get yourself to feel reassured by seeing that, hey, you've worked this out in the past, you've made it through this emotion before. Five, get yourself certain that you can handle it anything like it in the future by rehearsing using this emotion as a tool of empowerment. And six, take action and change your whole life. Those six tools that I just whipped through real fast are in essence what we're going to learn to utilize, not just in changing how we feel, but using how we feel, even those negative feelings, to make our life better. Now I want to mention something. You know, in working with people in Date with Destiny seminars, I've learned an incredible amount about human emotion. In order to attend the class, people have to fill out like an 18, 19, 20 page questionnaire, as it turns out to be for most people, describing every emotion that you feel in your life and what triggers it. What do you value most about each of those situations? If there's any one thing I've learned by going through all of these forms is that human beings seem to have unlimited ways of describing negative emotions. I get to read about how people get to be frustrated and insecure and lonely and bored and sad and angry and impatient and annoyed and anxious and unsure and guilty and unworthy and depressed and just disrespected and humiliated. Can you believe I do this for a living? I can't believe this. But the good side is this. I get to also read about how they get to have joy, love, success, abundance, contribution, flexibility, creativity, power, impact, curiosity, wonder, beauty, spirituality, respect, sincerity, integrity, kindness, confidence, ecstasy, you name it, we have lots of pleasure we can have in our lives too. The challenge is that most people, though, spend more time in the negative. They spend more time trying to avoid those negative emotions instead of using them. So what I've tried to do is to sit down and say, okay, there are all these different ways of describing emotion. The question is, do enough of them fall into a group of categories that we could chunk them down. In other words, you might say, well, I'm really feeling concerned or worried or anxious or scared or terrified. But that really all is just forms of fear, right? So what I'd like to do in this session, at least just for the sake of our conversation and for our ability to deal with our emotions and, is to take and create a model for each other, a model that I've created where basically I fit all emotions into 10 categories. Now, the challenge with this is we all have different labels for what a feeling means, so yours may not agree with the ones I'm putting down. But just for our ability to have a conversation and for our ability to deal with our emotions, we're gonna say there are 10 types of emotions just for the sake of conversation. Is that okay with you? I hear, yes, I just hallucinate. That's another kind of emotion, I guess. But here are the 10 emotions, and I'd like you to jot them down. Now, I know if you're driving in your car, it makes it a little more difficult, but if you can take out your get the edge journal and let's Write down these 10 emotions. I'll wait for one moment. Moment's up. Welcome back. Here are the 10 categories of emotions. Here's the first one. Uncomfortable emotions. You say it's a pretty big category. You're right, but I'm basically describing here emotions that don't have a tremendous amount of intensity, but they do bug you. They bother you. Feelings of boredom, for example, or being impatient or uncomfortable, uneasy or distressed or maybe mildly embarrassed would probably fit under uncomfortable for most people. The second category of emotions would be the emotions of fear. Those could be things like concern, apprehension, worry, anxiety, feeling scared, or even terrified. These are all different types of emotions that we're going to relate for sake of our conversation, to fear. The third category of emotion, I call hurt. Any kind of feeling you would link to hurt. And we're going to talk about how most of our feelings of hurt come from a sense of loss. Fourth category, anger. And anger, again, has a large variety. Everything from mildly irritated to angry to livid to resentful to furious to enraged. Anything in that category we're going to talk about as an anger emotion. Fifthly, emotions of frustration. These are any emotions you would link to being held back or hindered in your pursuit of something. Sixth, emotions of disappointment. Anything that makes you really sad or defeated as a result of something you expected that didn't work out well. 7. Guilt emotions. Maybe another way of describing them would Be the emotions of regret. Number eight, feelings of inadequacy. Any emotion you've ever experienced it would consider causing you to feel like you're less than or unworthy would fit into this category we call inadequate. Number nine, feelings of being overloaded. Now, again, overloaded I'm using to make it soft. But most of the emotions you probably link in here would be feelings of being overwhelmed or even hopeless or depressed. Anything that makes you feel like there's more than you can possibly deal with would fit into the overloaded category of emotion. And lastly, number 10, lonely emotions. Anything that makes you feel alone, like you're lonely, like you're apart from or separate from would fit into this category. So again, the ten one, uncomfortable feeling. Two. Any feelings of fear. Three, any feelings of hurt. Four. Any feelings of anger. Five, any feelings of frustration. Six, any feelings you would link to disappointment. Seven, the category of guilt and regret. Eight. Feelings of inadequacy. Nine. Feelings of overload, overwhelm, hopelessness or depression. And ten, any feelings you link to loneliness. Okay, it's a big set of categories, but here's why I've done this. I want to train you and myself. I just started to use this technique on myself because I just came up with it and it's pretty fantastic. I've enjoyed it, if I do say so myself. I'm quite humble. Really. It's really fantastic. I've had a good time with it, and I hope you will as well. All of these emotions, these categories of emotions are there for a reason, and they're to give us a message, a message that something needs to change. Now, one of two things has got to be changed when we're feeling any of these emotions. And before I tell you this, let's make sure you're enrolled here. How would you feel in your life if you knew, no matter what emotion you felt, you could go, okay, am I feeling uncomfortable? Or is that a feeling of fear? Or is that hurt feeling or an angry type of feeling or a frustrated type of feeling, Or a disappointed or a guilty or inadequate or overloaded or lonely feeling? How would you feel if you knew that in a moment or two you could instantly get out of that feeling, no matter how intense it had been? Would that be useful? Then stick with me, okay? Because I know this may seem a little bit cumbersome at first. So listen to me carefully. At any moment you feel any emotion, the first step you're going to always want to take to master your emotions I mentioned earlier, I say it to you again first Step always will be to identify the signal. What I mean by identify the signal is figure out if you're having a feeling, which one of these categories does it go into? So let's take a look at how this might work. Let's say something happens between you and a loved one, and as a result, you feel rejected. You look at Your list of 10 here and you say, rejected is not on here, Tony. Well, step number one is identify which category it most fits. Well, when you feel rejected, you really could feel a lot of things about that rejection. You might feel uncomfortable, you might feel actually hurt, or you might feel angry about it, or as a result of rejection, you might feel lonely. What I'm trying to do is get down to the core emotion that really is controlling you, rather than just this giant word called rejection, which really isn't the essence of what you're feeling. As you go down, you look through your list. And by the way, I know you're not good at this list yet because it's brand new, but you'll memorize it simply by listening to this tape over and over again. What we're going to call them from now on is action signals, because that's exactly what they do. They are signals for you to take action, to reevaluate the way you're perceiving something or the way you're proceeding, the way you're communicating your feelings to other people, or the way you're behaving around other people or situations. In other words, they're going to tell us we got to make a change in order to get what we really want. And that's what these action signals are all about. They're not negative, they're not bad. They're there to serve us. But for now, let's come back to the example we said. Step number one, then always is identify the signal. That simply means where does it fit in here? So in this example, we've said that rejection really was just uncomfortable for you. Maybe what happened is you turned to kiss your husband or wife and they were busy reading or writing or something, and they didn't really reciprocate. You felt, you know, kind of uncomfortable about that. You didn't feel lonely, you didn't feel hurt, you didn't feel angry. You just felt a little uncomfortable. The signal of being uncomfortable is calling to your attention a message. And the message of uncomfortable feelings is one realize you need to change your state, that right now, no matter what happens in the state you're in, you're not going to appreciate it. You're not going to be resourceful in understanding what things really mean. Say, for example, you're feeling in a state of being uncomfortable about that. You're going to start hallucinating, well, gosh, my husband or wife, you know, they weren't really loving to me. Does that mean they're not interested in me anymore? Does that mean that, you know, that our relationship's not as strong? We tend to hallucinate when we get an unresourceful state. So when you feel uncomfortable, first message from that signal is, hey, change your state. Second, clarify what you want immediately. You got to clarify what you want. That's what the signal is trying to tell you says, yeah, don't just be uncomfortable. What do you want? If you want your husband or wife to be closer to you, get clear. That's what you want. And step three, immediately take action in that direction. And the way to take action in that direction is communicate your desire or do something that expresses it. Make sure you do something until you achieve what you want and you're no longer uncomfortable. It's literally that simple. Don't just sit around and go, gosh, I feel bored, I feel foolish. I feel insecure. You know, I feel kind of rejected. I feel uncomfortable. Say, great, I need to change my state. The fact that I'm uncomfortable is a signal. It's giving me a message to immediately change my state. Two, clarify what I want. And three, take action in that direction. If you do that, you've conquered this motion immediately. Let's say you felt rejected to the point where you called it hurt. You really felt hurt inside. Well, what's the message of hurt? When you feel the sensations you call hurt feelings, that signal is giving you a different message. And the message there is that there's an expectation you have that's not been met and you have a sense of loss. That's why it's more intense than just being uncomfortable. You feel like you've actually lost something. Now, the challenge with this, as with all these emotions, is that when you identify the message, you must immediately clarify what has to be changed. I've mentioned this twice on the tape in passing, but I want you to hear this right now. Whenever you have what you used to call a negative emotion, you're now going to call an action signal. You know that that action signal is signaling you need to change one of two things, either your perception or your procedure. Now, let me clarify what I mean by that. Your perception might be, for example, that, gosh, you feel hurt. You feel like your Husband doesn't love you so much anymore. Your wife doesn't love you so much anymore. Because, gosh, when you first met Boy, all you had to do was look at them, and they dropped their newspaper and came over and hugged you. And now they don't. You have a sense of loss, and that hurts you inside. And that hurt is a lot more painful than the feelings of just being uncomfortable. The point, though, is, is this an appropriate emotion for you to feel based on this situation and this time with this person? That's really the question we want to ask ourselves. Whenever we have an emotion, we know that we have that signal. We need to first identify it and then secondly, immediately appreciate. This signal is offering us a message. And the message is, we need to change again, our perception or our procedure. So our perception might be, person doesn't love me. Do we need to change our perception? Do we have some rules that are inappropriate in this situation? And the answer here probably is yes. Wouldn't you agree? This person is just wrapped up in what they're doing because they're just immersed. It doesn't mean they love you any less. What this emotion is telling you is you need to change your perception because otherwise you're going to feel pain for no reason. You might also look at the same situation as a symbol that you need to change your procedure. Procedure means the way you're proceeding with this information. In other words, what this may be is a signal to you that you really aren't communicating your real needs to your husband or to your wife. Maybe what you need to do is change your procedure. And instead of feeling hurt or instead of feeling uncomfortable, turn to your husband and wife and say, honey, you know, I know you're wrapped up in your work. I know you're totally immersed. I know you're trying to do stuff that supports the whole family here. But you know what? I just need three minutes with just you, just you and I, because I really need right now to just feel loved by you. I need to hold you. I need to feel connected to you. Now, if that person starts to get upset. But obviously you're getting feedback that your procedure still didn't work. You have to be a little more flexible, a little more creative, or maybe a little bit more loving in the way you do it, or maybe change the timing in which you go about something. But that's changing procedure, changing the way you communicate. Or another way of changing procedure might be it's a signal that says that the way you're communicating, your husband or wife doesn't make them want to make you feel loved right now, that your present behavior may be turning them off. For example, let's say you feel rejected by them because when you come in the door, they don't rush up and give you a hug. They're immersed in something. Now, how do you respond to that? Well, what a lot of people do when they feel rejected is they feel uncomfortable with it or they feel hurt, or some people get angry when they feel rejected. Now, what's the message of anger? The message of anger is you have a standard for your life, something that's important to you, and it's not being met by another person or maybe even not being met by you. Sometimes we get angry because we're not living our own standards. Huh? So let's say as a result, one of your standards is that people who love you, they run up and they greet you in your home. They don't do that today. You feel angry, one of your standards has been violated. Something you believe important is not happening, and now you're angry about it. How do you respond now to your spouse who doesn't even know what's going on? Maybe you give them a dirty look, or maybe you make some snide remark, or you find something wrong with what they're doing. As a result, this person may very well purposely reject you. Now, when you're feeling this rejection, you're feeling this hurt or this anger, and you say, okay, this anger means I have a message here, a signal. Signals I need to change either my perception or my procedure. Maybe you don't need to change your perception. Maybe they really are rejecting you deliberately. Maybe the procedure is. Is not only how you communicate, but how you're behaving. Maybe you need to look and say, you know, I'm not treating this person in a very loving way. No wonder they're giving me this feedback. I need to change me. Are you following me so far? So we're always getting the message. We're identifying the signal, we're appreciating the message. And knowing the message is telling us we either need to change our perception or our procedure. Way we're communicating, the way we're behaving. I know this may sound complex at first, but I plead this tape back and listen to this little section a couple of times. You'll get this down. I want to change either my perception or my procedure. The way I'm communicating to this person or the way I'm behaving, or just the way I'm looking at the whole darn thing and making it so I don't have pain. I need to look at things, communicate or behave in a new way. That's the message of pain. Let me say that again because I think you'll get this one. If you're feeling pain, it's a message you need to change the way you're looking at things and therefore what they mean to you. Or change the way you're communicating your desires or needs to someone, especially if the pain involves somebody else. Or change the way you're behaving the way you're treating others. And that'll get you a new response. That's in essence, the basis of all these action messages. They're telling you you gotta set a new outcome and move in a new direction, otherwise you're gonna stay in pain. And by the way, let me mention something to you. If you ignore a message, if you ignore one of these signals, one of these action signals, whether it be the signal feeling hurt or fearful or angry or frustrated, disappointed or overloaded, that signal doesn't go away. It intensifies. You'll feel even more hurt, even more angry. It intensifies until one day you get smart enough to say, hey, I got to change something here. I got to change my expectations, the way I'm evaluating this thing, the way I'm looking at things, the way I'm feeling about it, or the way I'm communicating what I need. Or I got to change the way I'm behaving, period. I'm going to keep feeling this until I make one of those three changes. It's that simple. Next, once you've identified the signal, that is, you've identified, you said I was feeling rejected. And what that really means is I'm feeling uncomfortable, or it really means I'm feeling hurt or angry or lonely or whatever. Then the second step is appreciate the message. Respect that emotion. Don't make your emotion wrong. So many times we say, well, I don't want to feel rejected, or I don't want to feel bad, or I don't feel angry, I don't want to feel hurt. Don't do that. Appreciate. It has a message for you. It means you got to change. But it also means something very specific depending upon which emotion of these 10 categories. So before going further, let me review with you what the messages are that each one of these 10 signals is giving you. We've already said that if you're uncomfortable, the message is simple. You got to change your state, clarify what you want, and take action in the direction of what you want, and immediately you won't be uncomfortable anymore. If you're feeling category number two, emotions of fear, whether that be concern or apprehension or worry or anxiety or scared or frightened or terrified, no matter what intensity it is, any one of those still are fearful emotions. And fear emotions deliver one message to us. We need to prepare ourselves to deal with something or to avoid the negative consequences of something that's coming up, something that's about to happen, a situation or event. Basically, fear is get prepared, get yourself so you can deal with something. And that's a valuable message, isn't it? Now, the problem is what most of us do is we get fearful and we don't take the message. We either try to deny the fear and act like we're real strong and all it does is get stronger and stronger or worse, we just surrender the fear and we don't get the message. All we do is we get caught up in the emotion and we get more and more scared and we amplify it and we start thinking, enough of the worst that can happen, rather than figuring out, okay, what do I need to do to be prepared to avoid the negative consequences and make this work. For example, people have fear of failure. That's a valuable fear. It's saying, get prepared so you won't fail. You might have a fear because the IRS is coming to visit you and you get a little note in the mail. You get this feeling of anxiety. That's probably useful fear. It's probably saying to you, hey, you better go get all your paperwork in order. If you didn't have that message, if it wasn't painful enough, you might slough it off. They might show up and it may cost you a lot of money, not because you weren't accurate or honest, but because you weren't prepared. Same thing happens if somebody asks you to give a speech and you get a little fear inside. Maybe it grows into anxiety. The more intense it gets, the more we tend to surrender to the emotion rather than get the message. That's why we may want to convert fear and say, well, I'm a little concerned. And what I'm concerned about is I need to prepare for the speech so I do the best possible job and I'll feel confident instead of fearful. Now, again, with each of these emotions, we want to hear the message and see is the message appropriate. You may already be prepared. You may be as prepared as you can get. There's a limit to what you can do, right? There's a point where you have to have some faith at that point you might just have to say, you know what? This is a message. I need to change my perceptions, not my procedures. I'm prepared by my procedures. I know what to do. I know how to do it. But I gotta stop focusing on this thing being the worst possible situation. I just need to decide to become confident now, to focus on it working instead of it not working. The third category of emotions, those of hurt feelings, give us a signal and a message that says you have an expectation that's not been met and you have a feeling of loss. That is, you expected somebody to keep their word and they didn't that hurt your feelings. Or you expected someone never to share something that you told them privately and they told somebody else, and now you feel hurt. You feel a sense of loss of intimacy with them or loss of trust. And that sense of loss is what creates that feeling of hurt inside of us. What do we need to do? It tells us immediately that we have to evaluate, is there really a loss here? Again, do we need to change our perception? Maybe you just didn't communicate to this person that when you told them this, you wanted them to keep this information private. Maybe you haven't lost anything. Maybe you just have to change your way of communicating your needs or again, change your behavior. The next category is anger. That's the fourth category. And again, emotions like irritation or feeling livid or furious or enraged or resentful, all of these fit into this category. Any of these emotions are simply signals giving you a message. And the message here is that an important rule that you have in your life has been violated by someone else or maybe even by you. See, when we think something's really important and somebody violates that rule, we get upset about it. How we deal with that upset will determine a great deal how much pain or pleasure we really experience in our lives and how close we get to other people or how much we push them away from us. In other words, if somebody violates your standards, that's the message. What you're supposed to do with that message is real simple. Communicate that. You have a standard. Communicate that. You know it's only your rule. It isn't necessarily their rule, but you need their help. So if we use the earlier example where you shared something in confidence with someone, but you didn't tell them it was in confidence, you expected them to know that, and you didn't just feel hurt, you felt angry about it. And the bottom line is, instead of beating that person up, you need to go to that person and communicate in a different Way, right? Change the way you're communicating. Change your procedure and say, you know, I know you didn't understand this to be private, but this is really important to me and you need to deal with it as quickly as possible. Anger is usually an outgrowth of hurt. In other words, when you're hurt, you have a feeling of loss, something you expected didn't work out. When you're angry, it's because it's something you think is really important, that wasn't handled, or you've got a lot of hurts that have built up and you've not expressed them, you've not communicated them. So anger is usually a signal that something you believe is really important has been violated by someone or yourself, or that you've had a lot of hurts that you've not expressed that have built up until their anger. How do you deal with it? Change your perception. Maybe this person wasn't trying to hurt you at all. Change your procedure. Communicate better what your real needs are or change your behavior. Tell people up front, hey, this is private. Promise me you won't share this with anybody, because it's real important to me. Either way, you'll get out of your anger quickly. It's simply a signal that says you need to clarify with other people what your rules are and get them to agree to meet them, or you need to compromise them, possibly. You know, some things you get angry about, you're going to get angry about for the rest of your life. And you better identify those things and realize that those are just your standards. They're not everybody's standards. And if you go around being upset because everyone doesn't live by your rules, you're going to be upset your whole life. So again, maybe you need to change your perceptions, change your rules so that life is a lot simpler and a lot less painful for you. The fifth category of emotions, frustration. These action signals are telling you you need to change your approach to achieving your goal. Whatever you're going after, you're not going to get it the way you're doing it right now. That's why you're frustrated. You keep trying to get the same result by doing the same thing over and over again. There was a definition given a long time ago about insanity. They said insanity is attempting to get a new result by doing the same thing over and over again. It'll never work. So you've got to change your approach. When you feel frustrated, just know, hey, that's a message. I gotta change my approach. I need to be more flexible in this situation. Category Number six, disappointment. If you start to feel disappointed, that's a signal. And that signal is bringing you a message. And the message is that you need to realize an expectation you had, an outcome you're going after is not going to probably happen unless you change your expectation and make it more appropriate for the situation at hand. In other words, maybe you wanted something to happen in too short a period of time. I was doing a seminar about a week ago and I was in Fort Lauderdale and I was in the restroom and this man recognized me and came up to me. It's always interesting when you're in a restroom and people come up and ask you for advice about how to change their life. Seems a little inappropriate. But anyway, the bottom line is it made me uncomfortable, actually. And I guess I had to clarify that I needed to change my state, clarify what I wanted, and take some new action, which I did right then and there. I won't give you the details, but the bottom line is this man told me, he said, you know, gosh, I'm hoping you can help me and turn my whole life around, he said, because I've been doing everything I know. I've been listening to every tape there is, I read every book and I've been doing it all, and nothing seems to be working. He said, you know, I feel like I'm so disappointed. You know, I did everything but. And my life still isn't working out. He says, I just feel like I just could take my life. And I said, well, you want some help? And I didn't say that harshly. I did it to break the guy's pattern. He looked at me like I was crazy, and then he saw me smiling. He kind of was brain fried for a moment there, and he saw that he was being ridiculous and so was I. And so he said, well, you know, I said, listen, I said, what you need to realize is that the reason you're disappointed is you're getting feedback. Disappointment says that you set some pretty strong goals within a certain time frame and you didn't meet those. So you got to change your goal a little bit. You got to make it more appropriate for where you are right now, make it a little more realistic for where you are right now. I said, remember something, God's delays are not God's denials. See, you may just be in what I call lag time. Lag time means if you go out right now and you plant a seed, you don't come back the next day and look for the plant. You don't expect all of a Sudden reap your reward the next day. See if you planted a seed and then you ran back the next day and you went to the soil and you said, hey, soil, where's my plant? So I will just giggle at you and say, hey, what are you new? It doesn't work that way. You know, you gotta work through all the different seasons and stuff. How can you be disappointed already? But some people manage to do that. I said, so you may be in lag time. Sometimes you put a seed in, you plant something and it takes a season for you to get the reward. And you're still in springtime and you're expecting it to be fall realize disappointment says you need to change your expectations. You need to change simply your view of things and come up with a more appropriate outcome for the time that you have involved, the people you have involved, the situation you have involved. So that's the message. Listen to it, utilize it. Don't keep re experiencing disappointment and stacking it till you feel overloaded or overwhelmed or hopeless or inadequate. Which are emotions we'll talk about later. But first let's talk about the next one. The seventh major category of emotions are guilt or regret. Emotions. Hey, when you've got feelings of guilt or regret, a lot of people say, well, don't feel guilty about anything. Garbage. Guilt serves you if you hear the message. And the message of guilt is really simple. It says you violated one of your own standards and you must do something immediately to ensure that you're not going to violate again in the future. That's why you have the pain of guilt. Now what most people do is they do one or the other. They either deny the guilt, take themselves out of it, and don't feel guilty at all. Which I agree, you shouldn't stay in guilt. But if you just deny the guilt and don't get the message, the guilt's going to come back. It'll get you sooner or later. It's back there, it's deep, it's dark, it'll get you. So with that fear, maybe you should turn that fear into getting the message. Instead of being overwhelmed and again surrendering to guilt. That's the other extreme. People just walk around and they allow themselves then to feel inferior for the rest of their life. They feel so regretful about what they once did. That is not the purpose of guilt. It's to make sure you clean up your acts. It's to make sure that you don't violate this again. It's that you make things right when you screw up. That's what you got to do now? Sometimes you can't. Sometimes someone has passed away or something's occurred where you feel guilty about something that happened in the past. You really can't change. The only thing you can change is your present and future behaviors. When you do that, you can let go of the guilt. That's the message it offers you. And again, when you immediately feel the signal, what do you do? You identify the signal and you realize, hey, I'm feeling regret or I'm feeling guilt. Secondly, you appreciate the message. It's a message that says you need to change something, either your perception or your procedures. Maybe you're feeling guilty about something you shouldn't feel guilty about at all. Have you ever done that? I know I have. I felt guilty one time because I didn't help somebody feel happy enough. I used to run around if everybody around me wasn't happy. I'd feel guilty if I felt good. How stupid. We don't want to fall into that category. You might want to change your rules or your perceptions or you might need to change your procedures again. Maybe the procedure is you feel guilty about the way you communicate to somebody. You were too harsh. Go back and clean it up. Say, hey, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do this. I really regret what I said. I was wrong. Boy, the guilt will disappear or change your behavior in the future. Change the way you're going to communicate to that person or people like them. Any one of these three changes again will immediately eliminate the guilt. And then guilt has served a good purpose, hasn't it? It's kept you on track. It's moved you forward. It's made you a better person. That's why it's there. Utilize it it, don't wallow in it. Let's go to category number eight, inadequacy. Boy, if you feel inadequate, those are any of those emotions again that make you feel like you're less than feelings of being unworthy, for example, would be inadequate feelings. Whenever you feel this emotion or emotion like it, get excited. Appreciate. It's offering you a message. And the message is simple. It's saying, you need to do something to get better in this category right away. It doesn't mean you have to be perfect at it. Inadequacy just says, you gotta do something. Don't sit on your duff anymore. You're feeling inadequate because you haven't done anything to be really good in this area. Now, the first thing you gotta do is, as you go through this process is ask yourself, is this really an appropriate emotion that is, am I really inadequate or do I need to change the way I'm perceiving things? Maybe I got some rules that say in order for me to be adequate, you know, I have to go on the dance floor and outdo John Travolta. That's probably inappropriate. Perceptions. You need to change the perceptions. Or it may be changing the procedures, which is, ah, I need to prepare myself by doing something right now to get better. One thing you could do is just go practice. One thing you do is go out and initiate some communication. So inadequacy is a message to get up and do something to become better or to change your criteria, to look at what you're doing and make it easier for yourself to feel adequate. You probably got rules that are too harsh now. Category number nine. This is one of the categories that I think immobilizes and destroys more people's lives than virtually any of the others combined. And that is a feeling of being overloaded or overwhelmed or hopeless or depressed. They all fit together. I use overloaded to make it sound simpler because if you say, gosh, I'm depressed, you'll immediately feel much more intensity than if you say I'm overloaded. The key here is to realize that this is a signal when you feel hopeless, depressed, overwhelmed or overloaded. The message that's offering you is that you need to reevaluate what's most important to you in this situation. Sit down right now and decide what is absolutely important. What's a necessity for you versus what's a desire. Write down all the things that are most important for you to accomplish. Then two, put them in order of priority. And then three, take the first one on your list and do something about it. It's the same thing with depression, the same thing for being hopeless. Sit down and saying okay. Instead of saying it's hopeless, I need to change my state. Number one, that's always the message of all these emotions. Number two, I got to clarify what's most important to me. Write it all out. Three, what's the order of the importance? And four, what's the first thing on my list? Let me go handle that. The minute you go handle anything and you deal with one simple issue, your brain can handle it. And as soon as you handle that situation, you will feel like you're in control of your world. You will not feel overloaded, you will not feel overwhelmed. You will feel like there's hope and you won't feel depressed. Your self esteem grows when you do something to take control of events. Instead of having events take control of you, and all you have to do to take control of events is chunk them down. Pick one thing and master it. Go to number two and master it. The message is simple. You're trying to do too much in too short a period of time. You're looking at the whole world and expecting everything to be perfect overnight. And you're feeling like you can't handle it all. Chunk it down. Here's the final category. Category 10, feeling lonely. Have you ever felt really lonely? Gosh, I don't think there's anybody alive who hasn't. But what does it mean when you feel lonely? What is the message that you should get from that signal? I think the message is really simple, what we really need at that moment. The message is telling us we need a certain connection with people. The challenge with that message is a lot of times people take the word connection or the idea of the need for a connection with another human being, and they make it into a sexual connection or instant intimacy. And then they feel frustrated because even when they have that, they still feel lonely. What we really need to do is identify what kind of connection. Maybe you do need an intimate connection. Maybe you just need some basic friendship or someone to listen to or somebody to laugh with or someone to talk to. It's real important. When we feel lonely, just say, hey, this is really neat. What's great about being lonely is it says, I really care about people, I love to be with people, and I need to find out in what way I want to be with somebody right now, and then take an action immediately to go in the direction we want. In other words, all 10 of these emotions are a message to our brain to say, hey, what you're doing right now isn't working, and you need to change it either. Change your perception, change what criteria you're using, your way of looking at things that makes you feel this way because your perception is not appropriate. Or change the way you're communicating. You're not communicating things in a way where people know your needs or just change your behavior, what you're doing isn't working. Change your approach. So whether it be fear, where you're saying, hey, what you're doing is you're not prepared enough. Get more prepared or change your perception. You are prepared. You're just making a criteria for yourself. You have to have too much to feel prepared. You're feeling fearful because your criteria are too intense, your rules are too hard to meet. Change it and look at it and see that you really are prepared, or there'd be something like regret, where again, your brain is saying, hey, something you did isn't working. You broke your own rules in a way that doesn't work for you. Either you really didn't break your rules, your perception's unfair, or you broke your rules and you need to change it. You need to do something so that you will never again break these rules. You'll never again go through this kind of pain because it's not appropriate. That's in essence how we want to deal with these 10 emotions. And what you want to do is get to know these 10, review them over and over again so that when, hey, you have an emotion and you say, my gosh, I'm feeling jealous. First step, identify the signal. Which of these 10 categories does it fall into? Well, gosh, jealous, what is that? Do I am feeling angry feelings or am I feeling fearful feelings? About the jealousy, you might say, well, I'm really feeling angry. Well, then there's a standard that I have that's been violated. First step, do I need to change my perception or my procedures as I respect the emotion? What is the meaning I should take from this? What's the message? Well, maybe, you know, the fact that they said hello to this other person, maybe I need to change my perception. Maybe that's not so bad. Maybe I shouldn't feel jealous about that. Maybe that's an unfair rule, an unfair way of looking at things. Or maybe I need to communicate my needs that it wasn't just a conversation, it's giving that person a kiss. Like that doesn't meet my rules. And I need to communicate that to that person so they know, so that they can respect my values, so they can respect what my needs are. Or maybe I can change my behavior and when I start to feel jealous instead, I can just go and share more intimate feelings, more loving feelings to this person I was jealous of. And maybe they'll change the whole quality of the relationship right then and there. So now that we understand the messages, the 10 messages and again, I know you'll need to review this. Let's take a look at the six steps I've given you. The first two and I've repeated them over and over again so you'll remember them. What's step one? You feel an emotion. I don't care what it is. Let's say you say I feel destroyed. Number one, immediately identify the signal. What is destroyed? Is that uncomfortable? No, it's more than that. Is it fear? No. Is it hurt? Yeah, it feels really hurt. That's what it is. So you identify what it is. Two, appreciate the message saying, I got to change something. Okay, do I need to change my perception, or do I need to change my communication to my needs, or do I need to behave differently? What do I need to do there? And what's the specific message? What is the specific message that hurt offers me? Hey, there's an expectation I have that's not being met, and I have a feeling of loss. Then I go to step three of the six steps, and that is, I gotta get curious. What I need to do is get curious about what do I really want to feel and what would it take to make that happen? So here are the four questions you're going to ask to get curious. You've identified the challenge. You appreciate the message. You respect the fact that your emotions are helping you. They're giving you a signal to take some kind of new action. And now you're curious, and your curiosity is, well, how do I really want to feel? Let's say you were feeling destroyed, which is really just hurt. How do you want to feel? Well, I want to feel confident, or I want to feel loved, or I want to feel connected. As soon as you identify what you want to feel, you're moving in the direction you want to go. All these emotions are telling you is you need to refocus on what you want and take some new action. So ask yourself, what do you want? How do I want to feel? Second question that you want to ask from a curious state of mind is, what would I have to believe in order to feel this way right now? So you might say, well, what I want to feel is close friendship instead of pain. And so the next question you ask is, what would I have to believe in order to feel that way? Well, I'd have to believe that nothing could ever violate my sense of friendship with this person, that they really do care about me, that that feeling is really there. Third question, what am I willing to do to handle this right now so I can feel this way? Well, I'm willing to believe that. I'm willing to trust. I'm willing to have that faith. I'm willing to communicate to that person that I love them no matter what. I'm willing to ask them, what does it take for us to really have friendship here and not to be in a position where I feel destroyed by the way somebody communicates? And the fourth question is, what's great about this? Or what can I learn from this? You might want to ask yourself, well, one of the Things I learned is that I contributed to these feelings by my rules, by the way I looked at things, or by my intensity. So what can I learn from this? So in the future I never have to go through these feelings again again. If you can get curious about your emotions and what created them and what you can learn from them and how you can make sure you don't have to go through the pain again, then sure enough, you can accelerate your growth in life. Experience a lot more pleasure and a lot less pain. Step four, you get confident. How do you get confident? You reassure yourself that you can handle these emotions right now by remembering times when you've handled it in the past. Are you following me on this? Have you ever felt jealous before and then you got over it? Can you remember a specific time, or have you ever felt destroyed, really hurt, but you got over it? Go back and remember a specific time when you really felt hurt and somehow you got over it. You didn't think you could, but maybe you communicated to the person or maybe you changed your state or you asked yourself a good question, like, what else could this mean? Maybe this person isn't trying to destroy me. They're not trying to hurt me. Maybe they're just stressed out. Maybe it's not even about me. Maybe people are doing the best they can with the resources they have. Remember a time when you're able to deal with the emotion, and that'll make you confident you can deal with it right now. Step five, get certain. And what I mean by that is to be certain you can handle this. Stop right now in your mind and imagine coming up with different ways of handling this emotion. Come up with three or four different ways where that jealousy comes up and you communicate it to somebody else in a way where they're hearing you. If one doesn't work, you try another one. You rehearse it in your mind several times where you see yourself, okay? One time expressing it by saying, you know, I know I'm wrong and I have this misperception. Another time you may say, you say it with a smile and say, you know, I'm a little crazy at times, but, you know, this is how I felt here. Another time, you do it by giving the person a hug and whispering, you know, I need your help. See, you look at many different ways of communicating something. So you deal with the emotion and you rehearse it until pretty soon you feel confident. Gosh, I got lots of ways of expressing my emotion in a way that empowers me in my relationships rather than disempowers me. And finally, step six. Get excited and take action. Do something right away that reinforces that you can handle this emotion. Go make that communication to the person you need to so you don't stay stuck in any emotion. Go express your emotion in some way that reinforces that what you've rehearsed inside your mind and what you got curious about, the new distinctions you made really do work for you. That really you can change the way you feel and you're doing it right now. Six simple steps. Ten emotions that you can recognize. How do you get good at anything? The answer's pretty simple. Practice. I hate that word, practice. Though I'd rather say do it because practice implies maybe you're not very good at it. The way you get good at something is you do it. And every time you do it, you try and do it even better. You don't ever practice. You're always going for it full out, having fun with it as well. And the best way to deal with emotion, as you remember, is kill the monster while it's little. Make sure you deal with those anger emotions when they're at the level of a little bit irritated, not when they're enraged. If you handle them at the level of a little irritation, they're a lot easier to deal with with. Also remember the tools you've already learned. If you start to feel like you're enraged, connect yourself and say, well, maybe I'm not enraged, maybe I'm a little annoyed, or I'm a little bit inconvenienced by this conversation. That'll break your pattern and make it easier for you to hear the message of those emotions and take new actions instead of being caught up in those emotions and surrendering to them or being defeated by them. The emotion's there to serve you, but you've got to hear the message and act upon on it. And by the way, the very best way to get what you want is to focus on it. That is to experience it, to plant it. Think of your mind, your emotions and spirit as the ultimate garden. The way to make sure that you harvest what you want out of that garden is not to keep practicing planting disappointment seeds and fear seeds and saying, boy, I'm really good at taking those things out and learning from them and showing what got to change. But instead to plant seeds like love and warmth or appreciation. In fact, let me offer you 10 quick emotions that if you plant them every day and you cultivate these emotions, you focus on these being the way you want to feel every day. You hold Yourself to a standard that says, every day I want to feel these 10 emotions. What you'll have done is planted the seeds of greatness. You have planted the seeds that create a tremendous, juicy life. A life where you don't need a lot of action signals because you're already acting. You're already living life at its fullest. See, a weed in your garden is a call to action. It's not negative, it's a call to action. It's, you've got to do something, you got to pull this out, and that way things can grow. Well, one of the easiest ways to keep the weeds out is to keep cultivating the kinds of plants you want right there in the garden so their roots are bigger and deeper and stronger, and there's not much room for weeds. Here are the 10 emotions that add juice to life, and you want to cultivate them. Number one is love and warmth. Listen, if you want to create a behavior, I don't care what the behavior is. The best way to get yourself to do something is put yourself in an emotional state where that behavior is automatic. Let me give you an example. If you want to have close relationships and do the things that make you close to other people, the easiest way to do that is to cultivate an emotion of being loving and warm. If you put yourself in a loving and warm state, you don't have to think, well, what should I do to make my relationships work? It just happens automatically. The second set of emotions is to be appreciative and grateful. That also builds relationships. If you're always feeling loving and warm and appreciative and grateful, then you're going to do whatever's necessary. You're not going to even think about it. You're going to do more than is necessary to nurture the people around you, and you'll have that deep feeling of caring. Third emotion is curiosity. Gosh. If you really want to grow in your life, learn to be curious. Curious like a child. Children know how to wonder, and that's why they're so darn happy. That's why they're never bored. See, you want the cure to boredom? Be curious. And if you wanted to get yourself, let's say, to study more and you're in school and you trying to push yourself to study, that's a hard behavior to create. But if you're curious, studying is automatic, isn't it? You don't have to work at it. Cultivate the emotion of curiosity, and life becomes an unending study of joy. 4. Get excited and passionate. Every Day. See, excitement and passion add juice to anything. I think it was Benjamin Disraeli who said, man is truly only great when he acts from his passions. Passion adds to life enjoyment. It can turn anything that seems to be a challenge into a tremendous opportunity. We want to make sure we add that passion and excitement each day. And the way we do that, the way we have the love, the warmth, the appreciation, the gratefulness, the curiosity, the excitement and the passion. Guess how we get that? We decide to feel it. You see, I teach people my date with destiny to create what I call a code of conduct. It's a set of emotional states that you put in front of you. And you say that every single day you are committed to live those emotions. Even if things don't go well, even if it rains on your parade, even if all your expectations are not met, you choose to feel this way anyway because cultivating these emotions makes life work. And out of these emotions, it causes you to do the things that make life for you. Successful in every sense of the word. Mental, emotional, social, spiritual, intellectual, physical, financial. Every sense of what success can mean for all of us. So we want to cultivate each of these emotions. Fifth major emotion to cultivate, determination. Hey, you want to go on a diet? You want to get yourself to follow through? It's really hard to do, isn't it? Most people fail because they try to push themselves to go on a diet rather than putting themselves in a state of determination. See, if you're determined now, diet is easy because you're in an emotional state where the appropriate behaviors happen automatically. The sixth powerful seed to plant to make your garden grow with joy and passion and energy. Flexibility. Boy, if there's a seed to plant that will guarantee success, it's the ability to change what's going on. All those action signals, all those things you used to call negative emotions, are just a call to be more flexible. Be more flexible in the way you evaluate things, your perception of what things really mean. Be more flexible in the way you communicate. Be more flexible in your behavior, and your whole world changes. The seventh major emotion, confidence. When you're confident, you're willing to try things, you're willing to put yourself on the edge, you're willing to really experience that one emotion that every single religious book on the planet talks about, Faith. Now, one way to get confidence, one way to develop faith, is to use the muscle more often, to practice it, to exercise it. I often ask people, you know, are you confident in tying your shoes? And people say, well, of course, say, how confident they say, absolutely confident. I say, how come? I say, well, because I've done it a few billion times. Well, if you want to have confidence, the best way to have it is exercise it every day. Utilize it. Have some faith, have some trust. Choose to be confident in a situation and you'll discover that you're going to do well. For example, most people are fearful about things that they think someday may happen, and they feel bad about it in advance. How many of the things you used to be fearful about never came about? Just think if those times you'd chosen to be confident, you would have reinforced that confidence is the way to live. Choose confidence over fear. 8. Be cheerful. Gosh, you know, I added to my values list cheerfulness not long ago, and when I did, people around me commented, God, there's something about you. You seem so happy. I thought I was always happy. But you know what? There's a difference between being happy on the inside and being cheerful. Being cheerful means that when you're happy, you tell your face about it. Everything works together. That when you're communicating with people and you're feeling happy on the inside, they feel happy being around you. You. It means that you're trying to be happy in a way that not only makes you feel happy, but the people around you as well. And cultivating that emotion enhances your self esteem, makes life more fun, causes people to respond to you in a way where you need a lot less of this stuff like fear and hurt and anger and frustration and disappointment and overload and depression and guilt and feelings of inadequacy. All those seem to disappear in an environment that's cheerful. Cultivate this emotion. You won't need so many of those action signals to get your attention. Here's number nine. Feeling healthy. Gosh, feeling physically vibrant and healthy is a great way to make sure that anything else bounces off you. Have you ever noticed how when you got tons of energy, you feel alive, you feel vital? The challenges, even the challenges that used to really destroy you, you seem to handle so much better, so much easier. It's like those action signals aren't really necessary. When you feel vibrant and alive, cultivate the feelings of being healthy and practice the things you know will make you feel physically vibrant on an ongoing basis. And finally, the 10th seed to plant, maybe one of the most important ones of all, is a sense of contribution. If every day you can feel like what you do add something more than just to your own life, but to others as well, then life takes on a new, deeper sense of meaning. I Think we all have a need to feel like our life matters. Like, because we lived, other people's lives were better, they were greater, they were more enjoyable. We all want to leave our mark, and each day we can do that in little ways. We can do it by the way we smile at somebody we don't even know, or by giving a compliment, or just by appreciating someone who really needs to be appreciated. So often people get angry because they don't feel appreciated. Maybe the next time you start to feel angry, just realize that you've got a standard there that says, if I do this, people have to respond to me, and maybe that's inappropriate. Maybe from now on, you learn to make yourself feel good. You learn to appreciate yourself. Or you learn to communicate to people and say, you know, I'm not feeling very appreciated. I love a few strokes here or there. You know what? You get yourself out of anger in a heartbeat. You've taken on new tasks, a new direction. But in your own life, why not? Every day, just focus on how you can contribute and how you already have contributed. Notice the little things you do to support other people. They'll make you feel good about yourself, and it'll make you want to do even more. And the more we contribute, the more addicted we get to giving more to other people. And if everybody in life got addicted to this feeling of contribution, imagine what the world would be like. So those are the ten seeds. Love and warmth, appreciation and gratitude, Curiosity, excitement and passion, Determination, flexibility, confidence, cheerfulness, health, and a sense of contribution. Plant these emotions daily and watch your whole life grow with a vitality like you've never dreamed of before. Well, I've dumped a lot on your brain for emotions. I think this is a tape you'll probably want to listen to a couple of times to really get good at using these action signals as well as planning the positive ones. Remember the six steps. Identify the signal. This feeling I'm having right now, which of these 10 categories does it fit into? 2. Appreciate the message, respect it. Don't make the feeling wrong. Just immediately look at it and say, okay, this is a message. I need to change something. Number one. Maybe I need to change the word I'm using. Maybe instead of being devastated, I'm a little concerned. Maybe I need to change my perception or my rules about this. Maybe it's inappropriate to feel this way. Or maybe I need to change my procedures in order to get out of this emotion. I need to communicate more effectively and tell people, you know, this is really what I need. I want to meet your needs too. Can you help me out with this? Or maybe I need to behave differently. Maybe I need to just treat people differently and they'll treat me differently. And I won't feel this hurt or this anger or this depression or this upset. Or maybe I need to be more flexible in my behavior. And then I won't feel like I'm stuck anymore. I won't feel so frustrated again. I've got a lot of choices. Third, get curious. Get curious about what you really want. Ask yourself, what do I really want in this situation first? Second, what would I have to believe in order to feel that way right now? Maybe you already believe it and can start feeling that way instantly. Thirdly, what am I willing to do to make it the way I want it? And fourthly, what can I learn from this? What's great about this? Did I contribute to this? And how can I make it better so I don't have to experience it in the future? How nice to be able to move on. Fourthly, get confident. Remember times when I've dealt with this. Remember some specific times you dealt with this emotion and you handled it. You turned it around. We all need a little hope, and one of the best places of hope is that we've handled it in the past. Hey, I've done it in the past, so I can probably handle it in the future, and I can probably handle it right now. And then get certain, number five. Get certain. Because you're not just confident about the past, but rehearse in your mind. Imagine dealing with it coming up in the future, situations where it would have come up, and now you handle it easily. The best way to get good at something is practice it. And there's a good thing to remember. Remember, our brain can't tell the difference between something we vividly imagine and something we actually experience. So if we imagine dealing with it enough times, we'll start to feel absolutely certain we can deal with it in the future. And we will. That mental program will be in place. And finally, get excited and take action. Go out immediately and use your new feeling and take some kind of action that supports you in expanding your sense of freedom, your sense of love, your sense of appreciation, gratitude, curiosity, or whatever emotions you want to feel more of. And finally, I'd say this to you if you remembered nothing else from this tape but this one thing. It's probably the most important thing for you to remember about emotions. Every feeling you have, good or bad, is not based on the actual reality of life, but rather your interpretation as to what things mean. And remember, nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning you give it. So if you don't like the way you're feeling, change the meaning. And the way to do that is ask one question. And again, if you remembered nothing else in this tape, remember this right now. Whenever you start to feel bad, ask yourself this. What else could this mean? You start to feel like somebody's hurt you. What else could this mean? Maybe they didn't mean to hurt me. Maybe what this means is that they're just frustrated in their own life. They're just confused. They don't know what's going on. They're scared. I wonder what's going on with them that makes them treat people this way. What else could this mean? Whenever we get absolutely certain we know exactly what things mean, we tend to create some pain for ourselves. So if you start to feel like you're in pain, what else could this mean? Maybe what this means is I need to be more flexible. Maybe this means I'm about to learn something. Maybe the fact that I'm frustrated means I'm about to have a breakthrough. Maybe the fact that right now I feel a little overwhelmed is because I'm about to grow and expand. And when I learn how to deal with this, I'll be able to deal with almost anything. What else could this mean? See, you and I, at any moment can choose a new meaning and therefore choose a new way of feeling and a new way of behaving. And you know what? We're never going to know the absolute meaning of anything. When somebody passes away, you really cared about them and they die. You can feel really bad. You can feel disappointed, you can feel frustrated, you can feel angry, you can feel hurt, you can feel sad. And all those are appropriate emotions. But make sure you take a message from it. And the message you got to eventually come out with is, what's an empowering way of looking at this? What else could this mean? Maybe it doesn't mean that I just lost somebody. Maybe it means this person has gone someplace they need to be. Or maybe this means my connection will be even stronger with them now than when they were here. Maybe this means I will value my own life and give more while I'm here because I realize that life is delicate. Choose meanings that empower you in life instead of assuming meanings that disempower you. It's a final message to remember. Now let's use these six steps and these 10 emotions over the next two days. Just concentrate directly on any feeling that comes up, that feels disempowering, that feels negative. And immediately as it comes up, identify it. Recognize that it's valuable, that it's giving you input. You need to change something. Find out if you should change what it means to you, or if you should change your procedures, your communication, or your behavior immediately. Then get curious. Hey, how do I really want to feel? What would I have to believe in order for me to feel that way? Now, what am I willing to do to make it the way I want it it, and what can I learn from this? Then immediately remember times when you've handled it before and get yourself confident. Get certain by rehearsing dealing with that situation in the future. And then go use it. Go do it right away. I want you to do that for the next two days deliberately. Then just carry your list around. And whenever it seems appropriate, you know, over the next month, just glance at it. When you're having an emotion, when you're having a feeling that doesn't feel good, and run yourself through the process. But do it deliberately and consciously for the next two days so you develop a habit in your head. Second assignment. Make a list of all things you can do to make yourself feel good. Now do you understand what I'm saying here? Just a list of anything you could do at any moment in time that makes you feel good. Because I think most of us have never sat down and said, gosh, how many different ways do I have to feel good? Most of us only have a few ways consciously to do it. Smoke, drink, eat, make love might be a positive one. Exercise, you know, maybe go watch TV or a movie. But maybe you want to expand your list. And I did this recently for myself, and it was fantastic. I came up with 62 things that I can do to make myself feel good at any moment in time, no matter where I am. That's pretty darn exciting. I'd never realized I had that level of choice. And once I brought it to my conscious awareness, I have that list and I feel like, wow, there's so many ways to feel good. I can do it any moment, no matter what's happening around me. And by having that many choices, I could throw out some of the old ones, like eating as a way to feel good. Maybe eating just becomes fuel then, because you got so many other better ways to feel good. I just realized how powerful music is for me in terms of changing my state. I was in my car, and I have a stacking CD disc player, and in there I have classical music and I have pop music. And rock music. I mean, I go from listening to Aida and Bocelli to Blink 182 or Lenny Kravitz. All the ranges of emotions, I can change them in a moment or two. I go from being excited and ready to exercise to just being deep in emotion. All that within a few moments, using music. And you know what? There's no negative side effects. Except maybe the volume I use every now and then. But other than that, it's not there. So what are all the ways you can make yourself feel good that have no negative side effects? Make a list and then put them in order of what you'd be willing to use in any environment. Like, for example, taking the right kind of breath to just change the way I feel is a fantastic gift I can give myself. And I can do it anywhere, anytime, anyhow, even if there's not music around. So make a list for yourself. It'll expand your world. It'll expand your emotional choices and how to trigger yourself. Thirdly, look at these 10 emotions that you used to think of as disempowering. We keep calling them action signals, but the truth is, if you could avoid them all together, if you didn't need them to give you action signals, you were already acting. That would be the preference, wouldn't it? Or if you never got into the deepest part of those emotions. In other words, if you felt mildly annoyed instead of absolutely frustrated, that certainly would be to your advantage. So you might want to develop a belief, a singular global belief that really helps you to not have to feel these feelings very often at all. I'll give you an example. I've done this for a lot of these feelings. For me, if you look at an emotion like, for example, feeling lonely, a lot of people are afraid of being lonely or they're afraid of being abandoned. I've always told people, I'm never afraid of being abandoned. You could never abandon me because I just follow you. I'll go after you. So I have a belief that says no one could abandon me because if I really care about somebody, I can always make that relationship work. Or another one might be if a person is feeling like they're depressed or they're overwhelmed, a belief that I have is this too shall pass, you know, and that the best is yet to come. See, if you adopted that belief and you started to feel certain that the best is always yet to come, think how that might change your life. It might not only wipe out feelings of hopelessness or depression or overwhelm, but it also may cultivate that feeling of excitement and passion for life. Maybe more that gratitude as well. And a final one that many of you are familiar that I offer. If you really start to feel disappointed, just remind yourself that, hey, there's always a way. If you're committed, you can still turn this thing around if you adjust your approach. Maybe an antidote to feeling angry towards someone or hurt by them would be to remember that people always do the best they can with the resources they have. And lastly, just remember, nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning you give it. If you don't like the way you feel, choose to create a new meaning. Have fun with your emotions, play with them, learn from the ones that used to be painful, and choose to live and enjoy and experience the ones that create for you tremendous pleasure. And by the way, our next session is on finances, on money. And money is driven by our emotions. I mean, how you feel determines whether you spend or don't spend, whether you save, whether you give up. It's still an emotional device. That's why we want to cover our emotions first. So until tomorrow, my friends, smile big, enjoy your life, convert pain into pleasure, and most of all, live with passion. Tyler reddick here from 2311 Racing, Victory Lane. Yeah, it's even better with Chumba by my side. Race to chumbacasino. Com. Let's Chumba. No purchase necessary. BTW group void where prohibited by law. CTNCs 21/plus sponsored by Chumba Casino.