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Triumphing Over Emotional Challenges Begins with Awareness:
- Being fully present
- Seeing reality clearly
- Recognizing choices
- Making choices based on the present
The experience of life is already taking place. It just keeps coming at us, one event after another, and it includes a myriad of experiences from joy to sorrow. Being aware does not change that. However, being aware does put us in the driver seat of our lives. It allows us to pay attention to what is going on and interact with it proactively rather than reactively.
We can't change whatever we are unaware of or refuse to admit. Lack of awareness includes living in the past, distorting reality, reacting, making choices based on the past, or being passive and dependent. The consequences of being unaware include making mistakes, getting into accidents, being inefficient, letting others decide for you, communicating poorly, or being reactive rather than proactive.
We are effective and successful in most aspects of our lives. This is important to remember as we are often unduly negative and critical of ourselves. When we have self-defeating feelings and behaviors, the strategy for changing them is to do something – anything – that is incompatible with, or short-circuits, our negative feelings and behavior. For example, if we are down and depressed, we want to select behaviors that are active and energetic. If we are agitated, we want to choose relaxing and calming behaviors.
In our next blog we continue to look at some strategies for understanding our adversities and dealing with them effectively.
Until next time...
Sheryl Tuchman, SPHR, SHRM-SCP
http://tools2succeed.com/
Although life offers tremendous blessings, beauty, wonder, and joy, most of us need not look far to discover life's adversity. Most lives are characterized by some degree of difficulty and struggling, whether they are traumatic events or everyday hassles.
We begrudge our adversities, wishing they would go away. Yet they do not. Rather, they keep coming at us in a seemingly unending series of challenges. Learning to understand our adversities and developing strategies for dealing with them effectively will help us to conquer life's challenging moments.
Conquering our key moments begins with awareness. Awareness could be thought of as the mental state in which we are conscious, awake, and paying attention to what is going on within and around us. Awareness is the state of being mentally: Alert -- Present -- Focused.
A "Key Moment" is a triggering event or situation which presents a challenge and elicits or demands a response. In order to overcome our key moments, we need to explore our beliefs, our interpretation of the events, our feelings, and our behavior. We can justify our behavior and blame others, or we can seek to understand ourselves and learn from our experiences. Our core beliefs are the root cause of the entire response chain. Shifting our core beliefs is the key to conquering our key moments.
Until next time...
Sheryl Tuchman, SPHR, SHRM-SCP
http://tools2succeed.com/
