Every event/experience that has been in
your life comes to teach a lesson, it all lies with you to develop a Positive
mentality. Picture all the events in your life as three dimensional pictures,
at first when this picture is presented to you (when an event occurs), you are
only viewing one side of the picture now when faced with what you would
consider to be an unpleasant event you need to try to switch your 3D picture
and view it from a positive angle well it’s not as easy as turning a picture (literally)
but it can be done.
We all need to know that in what we
perceive to be our lowest moments depending on our attitude we can learn the
greatest lesson which can be used as our key to succeeding in life, and to
learn such a lesson we need to stop looking so much to the pain and through the
pain hold the greatest lesson to get ahead in life, we need to be accountable
we must stop playing the victims in life we need to take on the role of
leadership and take charge/control of our lives.
I am sure there has been certain times in
life where you have stopped to ask yourself which route to take moments when
you find yourself at a cross roads, When you feel like giving in and throwing
in the towel when such moments occur its one of those times that you need to
tap into your inner dragon and unleash your full potential, One of the Skills
needed in order to win in life is Emotional Intelligence (EI)
although it’s not the only skill needed for success it is an essential Ingredient to have, EI
covers many of the Skills needed for one to turn things around when EI is
developed it can Help to break bad habits and equip one with the necessary
skills needed to achieve success .
So what is Emotional Intelligence and how
does one develop EI and how does it really help one to be successful?
Emotional Intelligence is defined as a set
of skills in perceiving understanding, and managing emotions and feelings.
Emotions possess a lot of power they control thoughts and influence every
aspect of one’s life and Emotional Intelligence acts as the key to
understanding ourselves it helps a lot in building healthy relationships with
the people around us, With Emotional Intelligence it becomes easier to control
our emotions, it is the key that enables us to evaluate our own emotions as
well as other people’s emotions thus helping in determining the behaviour in
other people meaning you will then be able to interpret and respond
appropriately to others emotions. The journey to fulfilling your goals/ success
is filled with many emotions and success can never be achieved without
interaction with others thus this skill is essential to develop.
Once EI is developed you can be able to
Guide your thoughts and Actions which means you are then able to develop your
Emotional strength, what is Emotional strength?
Emotional
strength is defined as emotional stability and resiliency in the face of
extreme stress meaning you are definitely going to face stress it doesn’t mean
you will not be stressed, Emotional strength simply refers to your ability to keep calm
when faced with adversity, Emotional
strength allows you to have a positive attitude during challenges or
difficulties to build emotional strength you must learn to control your
thoughts and emotions which is obviously not an easy task to do but with enough
dedication you can be able to monitor and control your thoughts, in any
situation you are faced with however hard/Emotional it may be you must take control of your
emotions be a master of your emotions(we need to be aware of the relationship
that thoughts have with emotions, our thoughts cause our Emotions as well as
our behaviour and physical feelings thus the importance to controlling your
thoughts) what is important to know is the fact that we are mostly affected by
what we think it is our own perception
if we can change our views on situations then we can be able to gain control
and lead a positive life, It is important however to note that when we talk
about positive thinking it would be denial to actually believe that we can
avoid negative thoughts altogether, negative thoughts will always be there but
if we develop positive thinking it can help us not to give up when negative
thoughts try to take over .Positive thinking is all about defense it is used to
build up your hope and to fight off negative thoughts.
Back to Emotional intelligence, EI is very
helpful in the pursuit of your dreams the reason why it is so helpful is because
it creates self-awareness and management which are the required traits if
success is to be achieved hence the strong relationship between emotional
intelligence and success. Now Coming to Emotional self-awareness, what is
self-awareness?
Emotional Awareness is the ability to
listen to your emotions and to come to an understanding of how those emotions
make you feel, how it affects your thoughts and actions as well as how these
affect you and everyone else around you. Meaning with self-awareness you are
able to evaluate your emotions and relate them to your behavior thus making it
easy to manage your emotions thoughts and actions, emotional awareness aids you
in developing an optimistic mentality which enables you to focus on solutions
rather than difficulties. Emotional awareness is a skill that will take time to
develop but once developed it becomes a natural ability say you are under
stress with emotional awareness you are able to recognize the feeling immediately and also identify what it is that
is causing your stress thereby you are able to remain calm and act cautiously.
During emotional challenging times it helps to use positive self-talk, you are
your own life-coach The best person to help you keep calm is you this is
because nobody knows you better than you know yourself even with Emotional
Intelligence no one can ever know you better. The topic of self-awareness
brings to light the issue of bad habits, what are bad habits?
Bad habits are
described as harmful qualities(An example of a bad habits that many can relate
to is procrastination) that one has developed overtime, this type of qualities
are adopted without realization but end up as a normal or natural way to
behave, Bad habits affect us in negative ways and are harmful to our growth
They are what prevents us from achieving our goals Bad habits are hard to
change/eliminate this is because many people are accustomed to them as normal it is however easy to
replace them , easy in a sense that it is not as hard as trying to eliminate
them altogether.
Now looking at
the definition of emotional-awareness it can be said that through awareness bad
habits can be pointed out and once we are of knowledge we can be able to
develop good replacement habits. It is however important to note that replacing
bad habits won’t come easy it is going to be difficult and it will require a
lot of dedication and patience The activity of replacing bad habits will rely
on your ability to control thoughts for example whenever we start to
procrastinate we need to coach ourselves i.e.
We need to channel our thoughts into a can-do spirit meaning we must
control our thoughts which then brings me to the law of attraction, what is the
law of attraction?
The law of
attraction is the idea that everything that is coming into your life you are
actually attracting, I know it is an idea that many will find to be ridiculous
but it is proven to be true you see worry actually attracts the bad that is
happening in your life this is because worry focuses on the bad that is
happening in your life it doesn’t focus on what you want hence you must avoid
worry at all times ,to actually say avoid is unrealistic let me rephrase that
by saying whenever worry is present try to change your mentality and
instead focus on what you want
the minute you think of what you don’t want you are actually attracting it in
your life so at all times focus your mind on what you want , it is very simple if
your thoughts are negative you attract negative things if your thoughts are
positive you attract positive things the universe responds to the energy we
send out to the world this means that
the power to get what we want lies within our reach we have the power to
determine our future, through our minds
we can change our destiny all we need to do is Imagine, Believe, Act, and
Achieve but it starts with us gaining control/ managing our thoughts .
Overtime I have learnt of ways to help me
cope with negative energy, although many can find this method to be helpful for
others it may not hit the spot this is because as humans we are different and
everyone needs to find what works for them. I am a writer It’s what I have always
wanted to do I always feel so complete and happy when I am writing and
unknowingly sometimes when I was upset or when I was feeling uneasy I would
feel comfort in writing, what I would do is I would always turn to my notepad, at
first I would go through the emotional roller coaster and then when once I was calm
I would write my feelings down and as the years went by and I became more aware
of things I started using my writing as a way to help me cope when I felt like
breaking down sure there are many times that I can think of when I was too
frustrated and I couldn’t bring myself to hold a pen but presently
my emotional strength has developed and I am able to talk myself into
doing something even if I feel like not doing it this is because I have knowledge and
I know it works for me I mostly start off writing about how bad a situation is
until eventually I find myself writing positive things, somehow in me writing
out my frustrations I end up thinking of positive thing to write but it’s not every time that I have the luxury of sitting down with a pen in my
hand or being able to type on my Personal computer or mobile phone so for times when I can’t write I use self-talk I still use the same
strategy as when I write which is asking myself a round of questions, what am I
feeling ? I think of all the emotions that I am going through and I analyze
what could have brought this feeling and emotions I also try to manage my
reaction so that I can be able to keep calm
The difference between then and now is that now I am more aware of my emotions and I am able
to monitor my thoughts , earlier this year I had to drive to Johannesburg I was taking my brother there to his new
residence as he was starting varsity and since it was his first time in
Johannesburg he had no idea where the place was all we knew was the street name
and we were using the GPS from my phone, this was my first trip driving to
Johannesburg and we spent hours and hours getting lost the GPS didn’t help us that much and after many hours of driving in the same area I
was irritated and to make matters worse we were late as the residence offices
close by 17h00 we had 30 minutes left
before closure and I was frustrated I
lost complete concentration I had no hope
I failed to remain calm and
suddenly I heard a loud sound
which was the sound coming from my busted tire because I was not concentrating
I drove straight to a sharp pavement corner
which caused the tire to burst , by not remaining calm I had only caused
more problems and added to the delay now just a few days ago I volunteered to
take my cousin back to his place after a weekend visit and I have never been on the drivers sit when
driving to his area and I am very bad at memorizing directions and as you can guess I got lost on my way back
I missed an off-ramp and there was no way I could go back my best bet was to
continue until I find a route that would take me where I needed to go for the
first few hours I remained calm but as I
drove on seeing the boards I knew I was far away from where I needed to go and
it was very late for me to be driving alone at night with all the hijacking and
killings well this were the thoughts that were building up in my mind I have to say for a few minutes in that car I
fought a battle in my head I tried so
hard to win the war within my thoughts
and nothing beats positive self-talk as I managed to remain calm and
positive I had to make a decision and I
made the right one if I didn’t remain calm the worst could have happened but
because I was positive the world reacted to my energy the minute I decided to
off-ramp which I did based only on impulse I saw a board directing me to the route that would take me
straight home and I was safe.
Look
Change doesn’t come easy but through change dreams can become a reality for
change to take place we need to develop a new way of thinking we need not fear
change because change doesn’t come to take away what is good but it comes to
pave the way to getting what we desire.For success to come about chances are
you will experience failure and today I want to say to you, do not fear or avoid failure embrace it learn
from it and grow from it, failure is there to teach an important lesson it is
the stepping stone to success there is no way around it you have to go through
it, Would we be proud of success, would
success be so fulfilling if we knew where to go, if the was a detailed map written
with each corner and turn that we needed to take? Most certainly It would not
be worth so much to us if it was that easy, it is the unknown that makes life
fun a few wrong turns here and there leads one closer to their true purpose but
a few wrong turns do no good if we refuse to learn, if we refuse to change our
approach in life, then we can never get up from the ground life will continue throwing
punches at us and we wouldn’t even know how to defend ourselves, we would
continue playing victims.
We need to not dwell so much on the pain,
believe me for every unpleasant situation I’m sure there is also some good that
has been in your life, it is probably painful because it means so much to you.
Use the pain/failure (which is experience) to fuel your growth there is no
secret take punches and blows as they come and refuse to be knocked down by
life if you’re knocked down refuse to tap out and to be counted out get up and
take the pain and be tactical and rise to your greatness. Successful people are
not those who have never failed in life but it is people who didn’t give up
after failure it is people who continued after failure, success begins at the
end of failure.
