You’ve been planted, provided the resources to grow to your potential, and now it is time for you to weather the seasons. Emotional wellness is essential to the growth of the seeds you’ve planted because it is one of the forces that make the human experience. Through this dimension, we experience love, joy, fear, jealousy, and so many more emotions that inform our decisions. How we deal with these emotions is important to how we navigate toward our desired frequency.

In this dimension, I encourage you to become attentive to both your positive and negative emotions to understand how to handle these emotions. Learning how to better manage your emotions within yourself and interpreting the emotions of others is a skill that you can improve. This skill is called emotional intelligence and has been linked to optimal emotional wellness^[1]. Thus, gaining control over your emotions will allow you to navigate effectively to your desired frequency and really contribute to the effectiveness of your frequency broadcast.

This dimension allows you to understand and cope more effectively with your frequency shifts (change in relationships, relocation, new professions, etc.) How we cope with these shifts within ourselves, with what’s in our control and not in our control, contributes to optimal emotional wellness.

To fuel this dimension of wellness, allow yourself to feel. If you accept your emotions, you begin to understand those emotions. To gather the appropriate information to engage in this dimension, ask yourself:

• Where did I learn about emotions and feelings?

• What informs how I express my feelings (parents, society, stereotypes, friends, romantic partners, television, etc.)?

• How do I know when I’m feeling angry, sad, jealous, alone, etc.?

• How do I feel when I’m feeling these emotions?

• How does feeling these emotions benefit me?

• How does feeling these emotions hurt me?

• What makes me feel this way?

• How do my feelings affect my relationships with others? Or my ability to interact with others?

• How do I want to express my feelings?

These are only a few questions that can aid in understanding how you feel throughout your journey to your desired frequency.

There are several practices that you can use to improve your emotional intelligence. Since emotional intelligence is broken up into two dimensions, I will share the fundamental practices to help you develop your own.

1. Keep a Journal. Take 10-20 minutes in your morning or evening routine to write whatever you want. Writing with an actual pen and paper is much more powerful for connecting intimately with your thoughts. This simple practice allows you to improve your self-awareness, discover your motivations, and work through emotionally difficult situations in private.

2. Use a programmed relaxation response. Develop a programmed response by visualizing a peaceful image, sound, or phrase in your mind. Try to focus on this one thing, and if your mind wanders, don’t worry and just come back to the thought. Try this daily for 2 weeks and progress to imagining a difficult situation and switching your thoughts to the programmed response. After another two weeks of this practice, try practicing this in a real-world situation. This practice will improve your self-control.

3. Write yourself a positive script. You can simply improve your self-confidence, motivation, and self-control by creating yourself a positive script. What you have to do is write positive affirmations about yourself and repeat them to yourself when you are in a difficult moment of doubt or in a bad mood. These positive scripts should be short so they can be applied in moments of need, but also long enough to encompass the best parts of you.

4. Pre-plan how you will respond to stressful situations. Having a plan of how you will deal with situations can help you control how you express your emotions at the moment. You can also plan to have a safe space where you can go to process your emotions. That safe place can be the gym to exercise, a room where you can read, or a place you can work on something meaningful to you.

5. Look at the situation from a different perspective. We can often assume the worst of someone’s intentions or emotions. Allowing yourself to challenge those initial thoughts can be beneficial to you. There is always more to someone’s actions than what you were able to interpret. Instead, challenge the negative thoughts with ideas like “maybe they had a reason for this” or “maybe it wasn’t meant to be taken in the way I took it.” This allows you to improve your self-awareness and empathy.

6. Make a mental video of how you would like the situation to go. If you allow yourself to clearly visualize and work through a situation, you will be able to react more naturally at the moment. You are more likely to manifest the results of what you visualized than if you never visualized it. It is because your mind will be ready to react to the cues you have already played out in your mind.

The next fundamental practices have to do with social interaction. The more you practice these fundamentals, the more emotional balance you will find in your relationships.

• Take a walk in their shoes. If you are finding yourself having a difficult time understanding why someone is frustrated with you or someone else, take a moment to ask questions and actively listen to what they are saying. Try to find a moment where you may have experienced this in your life and allow yourself to connect with the person emotionally. Even if you can’t find a moment where you may be able to connect emotionally, you can at least aim to understand. Take a moment to think deeply about the person, their background, the personal stories they’ve shared, and more to get a better understanding.

• Focus on why and how. When dealing with others, instead of focusing on what, you can aim to focus on the why and how. Why are you in a difficult situation? How are you contributing to the difficulty of the situation? Why is it difficult? How can you and the other parties work together better? These questions allow you to think differently about situations, potentially resulting in a resolution.

• The Three-Step Method.

  1. Ask to listen to the other parties’ part of the story first.

  2. Tell your part without laying blame.

  3. Approach the situation in a problem-solving way: “What can we do to prevent this situation from happening again?”

• Look for similar/ Look for the good. Look for similarities between you and the other person. Also, seek the good that each person in your life holds. It is easy to identify what you do not like. Make it a game to identify all the good things a person does in your life, on a project, and other areas where you’re in this dimension.

If you have taken all the recommended self-guided practice in this book, or through your own research, I recommend seeking a professional psychiatrist in combination with what’s shared, if your emotional state becomes too overwhelming to bring this dimension back into balance alone. Remember, everything needs a repair at some point in its lifetime, so take the initiative to make the repairs, and do the practices as soon as you can. The car that only has one issue, over time without being addressed, begins to break down the other components that make the car operable.

References

1. Nicola S. Schutte, John M. Malouff, Maureen Simunek, Jamie McKenley & Sharon Hollander (2002) Characteristic emotional intelligence and emotional well-being, Cognition and Emotion, 16:6, 769-785, DOI: 10.1080/02699930143000482

2. Sterrett, Emily A. The Managers Pocket Guide to Emotional Intelligence: from Management to Leadership. HRD Press, 2002.