Oscar Wilde is said to have remarked:
“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
I think he has a point!
We can become imprisoned by our emotions—or we can use them as a masterful source of insight and action.
Well, if you want to master your emotions and strengthen your emotional intelligence (EQ), there are various techniques you can apply to improve over time. The world is full of advisors, but YOU are the one in charge of your life. You are the only one who can choose at the crossroads between being a prisoner or a steward of your emotions.
In his book “Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny,” Tony Robbins shares what he believes optimists do differently when they reach that crossroads.
Robbins outlines six steps that can help us access and shape our emotions more effectively. He writes:
“With these six simple steps, you can master virtually any emotion that comes up in your life. If you find yourself dealing with the same emotion again and again, this six-step method will help you identify the pattern and change it in a very short period of time.”
Let’s take a closer look at each of the steps. If nothing else, it’s a useful mental exercise to ask ourselves:
Do emotions have to dominate us every time the pressure is on—or can they, in fact, be masterful?
Alright. Picture yourself stepping into a tough situation one day. Emotions rise up. And, as usual, they start directing how you respond.
But what if this time wasn’t as usual?
What can you do instead?
1. Identify what you’re feeling
Pause.
Yes, you can actually do that—even when your emotions want to rush you back into your old behavior patterns.
But you don’t have to obey.
You can pause.
And in that pause, ask yourself:
What am I actually feeling right now?
If you manage to identify what you’re truly feeling, you might ease the intensity somewhat—and give yourself a better chance to learn from the emotion.
Often, we get tricked by the familiarity of a feeling—we think, “I’ve felt this before,” and go straight down the usual path. That’s when we miss out on nuance and rob ourselves of the chance to learn something new, act differently, and achieve a better outcome.
Robbins writes:
“If, for example, you say, ‘Right now, I feel rejected,’ you might ask yourself, ‘Am I feeling rejected, or am I feeling a sense of separation from a person I love? Am I feeling rejected, or am I feeling disappointed? Am I feeling rejected, or am I feeling a little uncomfortable?’”
Do you see how different emotions lead to different actions and outcomes?
There’s no reason to miss out on a good outcome just because we jumped to the wrong conclusion at the start.
So pause. And really tune in.
Even if the emotion is uncomfortable, I can promise you this:
A poor outcome from that emotion will feel worse than sitting with the discomfort just a little longer before making your next move.
2. Your emotions are not against you!
Emotions we don’t acknowledge will persist.
I choose to believe this instead:
My emotions are not against me.
That’s why I try to value all of my emotions—even the ones that sting.
They’re neither gods nor tyrants in my life, but they are masterful—full of vital information about me for me.
Robbins writes:
“You never want to make your emotions wrong. The idea that anything you feel is ‘wrong’ is a great way to destroy honest communication with yourself as well as with others. Be thankful that there’s a part of your brain that is sending you a signal of support, a call to action to make a change in either your perception of some aspect of your life or in your actions.”
3. Get curious about what the emotion is telling you
Becoming curious about your emotions helps you master them, solve the challenge they reflect, and prevent them from steering your life into the ditch next time.
Why?
Because when you get curious, you start to recognize that emotions differ in content and meaning.
That they’re not all the same and don’t call for the same actions every time.
That one emotion may require reflection, while another calls for action.
Here’s a simple example:
Is what you’re feeling a misinterpretation of the situation?
Or is it a prompt for action?
That one question—driven by emotional curiosity—can change everything.
For you, and for those you’re in relationship with.
Robbins offers four helpful questions to guide your emotional curiosity. I think they’re excellent:
- What do I really want to feel?
- What would I have to believe to feel the way I’ve been feeling?
(Right—your feelings don’t come from a blank slate. They come with your entire history…) - What am I willing to do to create a solution and handle this right now?
- What can I learn from this?
4. What you handled yesterday, you can handle today
Give yourself some credit.
You are not inferior to your emotions.
They are yours.
They are part of you.
They are not against you.
They just want to tell you something important.
A fast way to tap into emotional confidence is to remember a time when you’ve dealt with this emotion before—
Because what you managed yesterday, you can manage again today!
Robbins writes:
“Get confident that you can handle this emotion immediately. The quickest, simplest, and most powerful way I know to handle any emotion is to remember a time when you felt a similar emotion and realize that you’ve successfully handled this emotion before. Since you handled it in the past, surely you can handle it again today. The truth is, if you’ve ever had this action signal before and gotten through it, you already have a strategy of how to change your emotional state.”
5. What you handle today, you can handle even better tomorrow
One thing is to remind yourself, “What I managed yesterday, I can handle today.”
But here’s the next step:
Make a plan for how you’ll handle recurring emotions going forward.
The quicker you recognize the emotion—and do so with curiosity—the quicker you can make wiser, more masterful decisions about your next step.
Robbins writes:
“You want to feel certain that you can handle this emotion easily in the future by having a great plan to do so. One way to do this is to simply remember the ways you’ve handled it in the past, and rehearse handling situations where this action signal would come up in the future. See, hear, and feel yourself handling the situation easily. Repetitions of this with emotional intensity will create within you a neural pathway of certainty that you can easily deal with such challenges.”
6. You are not a prisoner — You are a steward
There’s something powerful about being able to use your emotions for insight and action.
That moment comes when you stop accepting the role of a prisoner and step fully into the role of steward:
Your emotions are your employees—not your boss.
Robbins writes:
“Now that you’ve finished the first five steps — identified what you were really feeling, appreciated the emotion instead of fighting it, gotten curious about what it really meant and the lesson it was offering you, learned from it, figured out how to turn things around by modeling your successful past strategies for handling the emotion, and rehearsed dealing with it in the future situations and installed a sense of certainty — the final step is obvious: Get excited and take action! Get excited about the fact that you can easily handle this emotion, and take some action right away to prove that you’ve handled it.”
Your emotions are (just) informants.
Your masterful internal spies offering you priceless input—about you, in the middle of your situation, and about the steps that might now be wise and effective to take.
Use them well.
Don’t let them use you up.
Source and inspiration:
Robbins, Tony. Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny (1991).Verktøy
DREIESKIVA|Roald Kvam 
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