Are you letting your reactions and responses be dictated by your past experience and beliefs…or are your responses a result of what is actually happening in the moment?
Life is varied and we have to react to lots of different things through our days and weeks. We react to other people’s conscious, or unconscious desire, or ability to ‘push buttons’, or to situations without operating in the now moments. Subconscious reactions stem from learned attitudes, beliefs, expectations, prejudices, values or historically directed emotions. But his puts us at the risk of:
over-reacting
under-reacting
reacting inappropriately
reacting too quickly
reacting too slowly
The question is how many un-resolved personal feelings are coming out in your auto-pilot responses and how much stress is this causing you? When a person reacts without being totally conscious or thinking out of the now, they’ll often say or do things they’ll regret later.
Here are a few strategies to consider the next time you find yourself out of emotional control
1. Take a pause; a brief 2-3 second to say “I have a choice. I can react on autopilot or I can react differently.” A powerful pause.
2. Develop the habit of counting to 5, slowly, before you speak or act. Just to give your brain time to process everything in the now. No knee jerk reactions.
3. Ask someone you are close to to alert you when you are reacting without pausing or taking the time to think through your response.
4. Create personal anchor points that kicks in every time you find yourself losing emotional control. An example might be an elastic band around your wrist and each time you find yourself into negative thought, or losing emotional control…just pull the band back and let it go. Anything that grounds you.
Living life in auto-pilot is to live incompletely…to live the past. To live in the present…the now…only requires that you become conscious every time you are functioning from memory, expectations, or in the future. And that’s worth thinking about…
