Consciously Creating Emotional Triggers
Witten by Shaun Killian http://leadershipskills.org.au
This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Successfully Managing Emotions
Successfully Managing Emotions
• Understanding Your Emotional State
• Consciously Creating Emotional Triggers
• Reframe & Change the Way You Feel
• Managing Emotions Through Physiology
Mastering the art of emotional management essentially involves being able to change on
command how you feel. This is quite different from slapping on a happy face and faking
it. Such attempts at emotional suppression interfere with your ability to think clearly,
and over the long term, have a quite dire affect on your health. Emotional management
involves changing how you feel, not masking it.
Managing Not Suppressing Emotions
An understanding of the three factors that contribute to your emotional state equips you
with the knowledge you need to successfully manage your emotional state. If you
haven’t done so already, read the first article in this series, Understanding Emotional
States. This article outlines a proven technique for changing the way you feel whenever
you want to by consciously creating emotional triggers. You will need to spend a little
time and effort in establishing your emotional triggers, but once you have done so, you
will be able to trigger any emotion on demand.
As I discussed in my earlier article, emotional triggers refer to events that produce an
automatic, subconscious emotional reaction. While some of these reactions are innate,
most have been learnt through a process I call associative conditioning. Your mind has
been conditioned to associate an event with a particular emotional reaction. A special
song may bring a smile to your face, sitting down for a morning cup of coffee (despite
its chemical make-up) may lead you to feel relaxed and flashing police car lights in your
rear-view mirror may bring on an instant low. Why? Because through experience, you
have learnt to associate these triggers with a particular