Ep #68: Emotional Intelligence

Our entire lives are controlled by how we feel. If we have not developed emotional intelligence, we end up suffering under the perceived negativity of emotions we think we have no control over. In this episode, we get into what it means to develop emotional intelligence and how it makes us free.

We talk about how humans tend to seek out good feelings while avoiding bad ones, but how that tendency leads to buffering and addiction. A far superior strategy is learning how to manage uncomfortable emotions by seeing them as chemical reactions which are neither negative or positive.

We also speak about the cause of emotions which is our thoughts. The best part about this is that because we can control our thoughts and therefore our emotions, we can manufacture the types of emotions that fuel massive action, so make sure you catch this episode to find out exactly how this all works!

Want to know more about what I do and how I can help you? Sign up for a free 45-minute session with me, and I’ll show you how this works!

What You’ll Learn from This Episode:

  • Difficulty people who haven’t mastered emotional intelligence face moving through life.
  • The idea that our entire lives are controlled by how we feel.
  • Tendencies for humans to seek out good feelings while avoiding bad ones.
  • Differences between emotions (controllable) and sensations (uncontrollable).
  • The real cause of emotions: thoughts, not circumstances.
  • Why it is necessary to feel sadness: it helps contextualize happiness.
  • How emotions are chemical reactions thus neither positive or negative.
  • The freedom which comes from being better at processing negative emotion.
  • How resisting negative emotions make them worse.
  • Differences between allowing, resisting, and reacting to emotions.
  • Emotional intelligence as a skill involving allowing emotions to occur.
  • Using writing to develop the skill of allowing emotions.
  • What emotional avoidance leads to: buffering, stagnation, and addiction.
  • Generating good emotional fuel to drive the right actions.
  • How most people feel indulgent emotions that cause stagnation without knowing it.
  • The way to create whatever emotion you want: by thinking the thought which creates it.
  • Three ways an emotion arrives: unconsciously, due to beta habits, or due to Alpha ones.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

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  • Sign up for Unleash Your Alpha, your guide to shifting to the Alpha mindset.

Full Episode Transcript:

 

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:09.6] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Alpha Male Coach podcast. The only podcast that teaches men the cognitive mastery and alpha mindset that it takes to become an influential and irresistible man of confidence. Here is your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.

[EPISODE]

[0:00:32.5] KA: What’s up my brothers, welcome back to the Alpha Male Coach podcast. I am your host Kevin Aillaud and we have a great topic today. I’m going to get in to it but first, I want to tell you guys, I am back in Orange County.

I have been traveling, I have been – you guys know I’m the international man of mystery, right? I’ve been to over 45 countries and I’ve been to all 50 states. I love traveling. I love seeing new things, I love meeting new people, experiencing new cultures, new flavors, right? The food, the cuisine, I love being in different climates and different types of jungles and deserts and tundra and everywhere. I love being in the mountains, I love being on the beach. I just love being in different places.

I love visiting and meeting new people and making new friends around the world. I’ve been traveling back and forth between Arizona and California recently because the Grand Canyon is probably one of my favorite places on earth and I just bought some land up there so I’m going back and forth doing that.

Sometimes I do the recording up there but now guys, I’m back in California, I sometimes do the podcast up there but now I’m back in California and I’m home and it is a beautiful February day in California. Being February here guys – let me just real quickly – go leave me a review, go leave me a rating. Guys, just do this because here’s the thing, I love putting these podcasts out and the more ratings you guys provide, the higher I get in iTunes and the more people can listen so the more audience I get and the more ratings we get is kind of like – it’s an exponential thing.

Now, when I started asking for these ratings from you guys, I was under a hundred. The Alpha Male Coach podcast had less than a hundred ratings. Now, we have over 150. You guys are doing it and I love you and I thank you and keep on keeping on. If you’ve already left a rating and review, I appreciate you, I love you. If you haven’t yet, just head over there and do that. I’ll let you know when we get to 200, the goal is 500 and we’re almost there, we just broke 150.

[0:02:40.0] KA: Today, we’re going to talk about emotional intelligence. I’ve done some podcasts recently that have been a little – I don’t want to say abstract but they’ve been very in depth on the alpha and characteristics, traits. Sort of, what the alpha is to give you more of a description, these describing characteristics of alpha is to give you more of a description, you know, these describing characteristics of alpha and maybe even some defining characteristics because the defining characteristic of the alpha state is mind management, right?

Cognitive mastery, emotional ownership. But today we’re going to get back into emotions because really, of all the things that we’re not taught in school, emotional intelligence is the most tragic missing piece in our education and you guys have probably heard, if this is your first podcast episode then welcome to the podcast.

If it’s not, you’ve probably heard me say this. I’ve often made an analogy and compared cognitive mastery with knowing how to read where I’ve said like you can get through life without knowing how to read, right? It makes life much more difficult, it certainly makes it more challenging but you can do it.

Just like you can get through life without managing your mind and guys, a lot of people are living life without managing their mind. They’re living in that illiterate state of mind management. But when it comes to emotional intelligence, I mean, you can survive certainly, you can get through life but you are going to suffer and you’re going to suffer unnecessarily because emotions are the experience of life. We gauge life, we create life on a scale of positive, negative, on a scale of good, bad, better, worse based on emotions, based on how we feel.

[0:04:22.8] KA: Every single thing we do in our lives is because of how we think it will make us feel. Every single thing we don’t do in our lives is because of how we think it will make us feel. I want you guys to think about that. I want you to really understand this because it’s not so much to understand it intellectually but it’s to know this existentially.

Your actions, every move you make is coming from how you think it’s going to make you feel, it’s coming from how you feel and how you want to feel. Every decision we make and I’m going to just say this again, every dream we achieve, every dream we let die, every goal we accomplish, every goal we quit, every relationship we nurture and every relationship we ruin is based on how we want to feel and this is the truth, guys, this is the universal truth. This is true for all humans.

Whether you’re consciously aware of it or not, feelings are directive. We naturally avoid our negative emotion because of how it feels and we naturally move towards any positive emotion because of how it feels. We’re basically human zombies searching for feelings in the night, right? With no understanding of how they work.

We’re just out there – that’s why I use the word zombie. We’re kind of about there in this comatose, looking for the next dopamine hit, right? Trying to void the next low so we can get the next high. We’re essentially emotional junkies. This is why we’re a species of over pleasure, right?

[0:06:04.8] KA: Because that’s what we’re always after, we’re always after that next high, we’re always after that next pleasure. We over indulge. We over indulge in food, we over indulge in drink, we over indulge in drugs, we over indulge in sex, we over indulge in technology, we over indulge in work, brothers.

We get into work and it becomes a dopamine hit for us. We overindulge in social media. We become pleasure and dopamine junkies, chasing our next pleasure high. I want you to know something guys, it’s not just about chasing this pleasure. Because it’s also the reason why we are limited when it comes to our potential.

Because it has nothing to do with our available opportunity, we all have the same opportunity, right? We all have – we’re all here in this world, right? We’re all bound by the same physical laws of space and time. We all have the same experience. But, the difference is that everything we do with our desire is from our desire to avoid any emotional discomfort. There’s nothing to do with our circumstances. It has to do with our emotion.

Here’s what I want you guys to know, a feeling is simply a vibration in the cells of your body, caused by a thought in your mind. I don’t want you to confuse any feeling with an involuntary sensation, okay? I’m going to get back to thoughts in a moment or make it back to emotions and thoughts in a moment but I want to very quickly talk to you guys about sensations because feelings, emotions and feelings are caused by what we think and sensations are involuntary bodily reactions.

[0:07:50.2] KA: Hungry, cold, hot, thirsty, sick, tired, these are physical sensations. If I put my thumb on a hot stove, I don’t need to wait for my brain to think that’s hot in order for me to have fear and remove my thumb, right?  My thumb has, you know, receptors on it where it’s going to send a signal to my brain that says, “This is hot,” right?

That hot sensation isn’t a thought, it’s a reaction. It’s a physical sensation for my brain, same with hungry. I might have a thought I want to go eat but that thought is coming from emotional avoidance. When it’s a sensation, when it’s a hormone coming from my stomach going to my brain telling me I’m hungry, it’s coming from the collapsed stomach or the hormones in my stomach, the leptin and the ghrelin are saying, “We need to fill this up, right? It’s time to eat now.”

We’re going to start going catabolic. We’re going to start using stored energy. We’re going to start using fat as energy, right? We’re going to start using your storage unless you fill this up. There’s a difference. Frustration, angry, lonely, agitated, bored, happy, sad. These are emotions.

These come from your thoughts, they come from your brain. Think about it this way. Emotions start in the brain and travel to the body. Sensations start in the body and travel to the brain. Now, I’ve had students question whether their thoughts come first, right? There are times when my students, people, are convinced that the feeling comes first and I got to tell you, this is never ever the case. I’ve actually talked to other coaches who have this more spiritual outlook where they think that the emotion comes first.

[0:09:30.2] KA: The emotion comes from outside of their body and it triggers a thought in their head, right? In their brain. But this isn’t the case. This is not what science is telling us, science is telling us that we have a thought that releases a chemical emotion. The thought is always first. Even though you might not be aware of what you’re thinking when you start to feel a certain way.

Even if you feel the emotion before you’re aware of the thought, the thought is always there first. The only time a feeling comes first is when it is an involuntary sensation and again, this is extremely rare, right? This is like when you’re shivering because you’re cold, you’re not shivering because you’re thinking, “I’m cold,” you’re shivering because your body is telling your brain that it’s cold. It’s different.

For example, if someone yells at you, right? You might immediately feel startled, right? Scared even. It might feel involuntary because of the voice being loud, right? You think this is an involuntary reaction from a loud sound. You know, you might even feel like your body’s reacting before you know it. That startle flinch.

But I promise you. Here’s the thing guys. I promise you, when it comes to mind management, cognitive mastery, and emotional ownership, there is a thought causing the reaction. There’s always a thought creating the emotion. It’s not the circumstance. It’s not what’s being said or the way it’s being said, right? It’s not the words or the volume or the yelling.

[0:10:55.0] KA: Let me put it this way. If you knew that the person yelling was an actor, right? And they were yelling as a part of their role, then they would be yelling and doing the exact same thing and you would not be upset at all, right? Because, you’re thinking differently about it and that’s the power of thought.

Now, let’s get back into emotions because we are supposed to have negative emotion. This is a part of emotional intelligence. We did this in the Spartan academy in November, emotional balance. In February, in this month, we’re doing emotional intelligence so it’s so important to again, bring up that a negative emotion is a part of the human experience.

We have to feel negative emotion. We want to feel negative emotion. We have to feel negative emotion because we’re humans right? Because we’re animals. But we want to feel negative emotion because we’re conscious beings. Because it’s important for us to feel negative emotion. Why doesn’t anyone tell us this? Why is it? Why is it not only an emotional intelligence is not taught to us but it’s also not taught to us that negative emotion is important for our humanity, for our experience.

Negative emotion makes positive emotion possible, right? We can’t have happiness without experiencing sadness. Because without sadness, happiness would be neutral, right? We would just be happy all the time. We would not know what sadness is. We’d be happy all the time and then happy would be the new neutral. We wouldn’t know what happiness is.

[0:12:24.5] KA: Hate makes love exist. With only positive emotion, we don’t even know we are having positive emotion because it’s all neutral. What makes abundance feel so amazing is because we know what scarcity feels like. When we have something that we want, it feels great because we know what it feels like to want it and not have it.

Negative emotion lets us know what we don’t want and when we know what we don’t want, then we’re more easily can figure out what it is we do want. Our experience as humans includes 50% negative emotion. That’s right brother. Half the time, you’re going to feel some kind of negative emotion. Here’s the thing. This is normal. This is totally normal.

Because, emotions aren’t positive or negative. I’m only using positive and negative in terms that you can understand, in terms that you can understand and terms that we can understand, in terms that we could talk about as humans. Emotions are data. Emotions are vibrations. They’re chemical reactions. You wouldn’t say that pouring salt into water and watching it turn into salt water is a positive or a negative chemical reaction, right?

You would just say it’s a chemical reaction. You’ll just say that’s what happens, that’s math. What’s the same thing? Emotions are the same thing. They’re not positive or negative, they’re just chemical reactions. They’re chemicals that are released from the brain and react with the cells of our body, that cause a vibration that gives us that feeling.

[0:13:57.0] KA: They just feel positive. They just feel negative but they’re just chemical reactions, they’re completely neutral. Our experience as humans has to include 50% negative emotion and 50% positive emotion because it’s really all just a wash. It’s really all just neutral. The only we only identify it as negative emotion 50% of the time in order to contrast the positive emotion that we feel the other 50% of the time.

Here’s the thing. We got to get better at processing negative emotion because the better we get at processing that emotion, the more freedom we’re going to have. The more freedom we’re going to have and the more suffering we are going to transcend. So many of us make negative emotion so much worse than it has to be.

Negative emotion is harmless. Like I just said, it’s neutral but when I say harmless, it’s not going to hurt you, it’s not going to kill you. It’s just yourselves vibrating in a way that doesn’t feel great. It’s like a GPS alert telling you of what’s going on in your brain. But the emotion itself, the feeling itself, is harmless.

So many of my students come to me, wanting to feel better because of how much negative emotion hurts, right? Fear, sadness, rejection, jealousy, anger, frustration, resentment, guilt, shame, all of that emotional hurt but really, what I want you to consider is why it hurts, right? Why does it hurt? It’s not because it’s intolerable physically, right?

[0:15:33.8] KA: You can handle negative emotion. You’ve handled negative emotion your whole life. It comes and it goes and it comes and it goes. You’re always able to deal with it. Even the worst emotion in the world is not that awful physically, right? It’s all cellular vibration. It’s all physiological changes in the cells.

You know, the worst it’s going to happen is you’re going to break out in sweat, right? The worst it’s going to happen is you might have some shaking in your nervous system, right? You might have some tremors. What is going to happen is you’re going to elevate your respiration, your heart rate or maybe even your body temperature. These are the physiological changes that happen in emotion. One of the things I do with my students is I do a thought experiment and I tell them to imagine that there’s a way that I could inject them with an emotion for 60 seconds.

You might even heard me say this. Imagine you walk into a bar, right? You’ve got hundreds of taps but instead of these taps, instead of alcohol or beer being in these taps, you have the emotions. You can taste any emotion. When you take a shot of emotion, whatever it is, you feel it for 60 seconds. As the bartender, you know, the person behind the bar say, “What do you want to feel?” I would warn you, like you say, “I want to feel humiliation.”

“I want to feel humiliation for 60 seconds.” I would warn you, I would tell you that humiliation is going to be vibrating in your body. You’re going to feel this inside of you. You can handle it, no problem. It’s not that big a deal. You’re going to feel flushed in your face, you’re going to feel your heart rate increase. You’re going to feel some sweat build up in your pores. These are the physiological sensations that you’re going to feel with humiliation.

[0:17:08.3] KA: Check this out brother, you can handle that. 60 seconds, you can handle it. It’s not the end of the world. But we create suffering. We create suffering with when we don’t have our emotional intelligence, when we haven’t learned the skill of emotional ownership. When we resist emotions, we make them worse.

When we react to emotions, we make them worse. Think about reacting to emotion and compounding it, by freaking out, right? When you push against the emotion and dramatize it, you create suffering. Emotions are a human requirement. Like we have to feel emotions, period.

It’s part of being human, right? We can’t be human and not be sentient, right? Not have emotion. But suffering brother is always optional, we don’t have to suffer, when I was living in Thailand, I had a teacher teach me that when we fear and resist negative emotion, we suffer. When we have compassion and allow our emotion, we grow and we thrive. So negative emotion is a part of the human experience, right? We got to feel it, we got to have it. When you allow it, you own it. You have authority over it but when you resist it, that’s when you start to suffer. So how do you allow an emotion, right? This is what we do in the Spartan Academy for the development of cognitive mastery.

We’d learn these skills, we learn emotional intelligence, emotional ownership and how to allow an emotion is a skill that you have to learn and you have to practice because it will elevate your life. Again it is learning how to read. Understand guys it is not the same as reacting and that is something that I hear a lot in society now. I hear a lot in society saying that allowing emotion is reacting. It is like bringing you to the surface and displaying it but that is not what allowing is.

And it is also not the same as resisting. It is also not the same as pretending it’s not there, okay? All the stoicism and pretending that an emotion is not there is the same as resisting it, okay? So that is not going to work either. Let’s say you are feeling angry, let’s use anger as an example. When you allow the feeling of anger without resisting, without reacting, without avoiding it, you are going to notice it. You are going to start to notice it and you are going to observe it with compassion.

The easiest way to do this is to describe the emotion in detail and I have said this before but I like to write it down guys like, “What am I feeling? What am I feeling? How can I separate the subjectiveness of the emotion? What hurts?” The negativity, the uncomfortableness, all that subjectivity from the objectivity. Where is it in my body? What is neutral about this? Where is it in my body? How do I know that I am feeling this emotion? How do I know that I am feeling anger versus something else? Versus irritation or frustration.

[0:20:00.6] What is specific about this? And just feel it. Become the observer, become the watcher, become the objective identifier, the objective owner and instead of trying to get rid of it, instead of trying to push it away from you or run away from it with resistance or avoidance, I recommend and I suggest that you intensify it. That you open up yourself to it that you breathe it in, you bring it into your body, you open your heart to it.

You sort of welcome it into your life. You move towards it and by doing this brother what you’re doing cognitively is you are allowing yourself. You are giving yourself permission and the capacity to handle the emotion, to deal with what’s going on. It’s just a vibration and often times you are going to feel you’re body wanting to tighten up against it, right? With that vibration, the more you allow it, that’s okay because then you can just release it when you tighten up against it.

I let the emotion be heavy or vibrate or agitate, whatever it is. If it is agitation then it is agitation. It’s the way it is. Whatever the emotion needs to do in my body I just allow it to do that because even if it is uncomfortable that discomfort is subjective. I am choosing to think of it at uncomfortable. It’s really just a vibration. I keep saying that’s just this chemical reaction brother, right? So just allow the chemical reaction, the salt going in the water.

Allow all the salt to dissolve because if you’re sitting there trying to pull the salt out of the water all you’re getting is hands full of water. The salt is in there. The salt is now reacting to the water, you are not going to get it out. So resisting and avoiding it is not going to work. Just let it happen. Let the chemical reaction work to its conclusion and as you are observing and describing the emotion, at least when I do, I start to feel myself lighten up because I can accept it without judgment.

[0:22:14.0] I can look at it without telling myself it’s uncomfortable. I can look at it in a neutral space, in that space of objective neutrality and once you get really good at this it can completely change your relationship with yourself and all the people you come in contact with because you won’t be reactive, right? You won’t be reacting to your emotion, you will be the compassionate observer of that emotion. Now I want to talk about emotional avoidance because emotional avoidance is something we mentioned before.

I mentioned it before when it comes to buffering right but emotional avoidance is also dream stealing, okay? Listen brothers, when you avoid emotions you cut yourself off from yourself. This is the opposite of growth, this is the opposite of evolving. This will cause you to stagnate and it will drive you to buffer and consistent buffering leads to addiction. You will recognize that you are avoiding emotion because you are afraid you will feel out of control right?

You will find yourself procrastinating and using external things to distract you from what is going on internally but here is what I want to offer you. I want to offer you this. What are you unwilling to feel? Ask yourself, what are you unwilling to feel? Can you answer that question? Do you know the emotions that you are most likely to avoid? Think about it right now, pause the podcast, stop the podcast, whatever you got to do. What is the emotion or emotions that you are most likely to avoid?

Is it grief, is it fear, is it sadness, is it guilt, is it shame? Be aware of how you manipulate yourself brother in order not to feel any kind of discomfort and this requires you to pay very close attention to your body and to consistently ask yourself, what am I feeling right now? Look, if you could set your iPhone, if you could set your G-shock, whatever it is, whatever you have an alarm on, set your alarm to go off every half hour, every hour and when it goes off stop what you’re doing.

[0:24:31.6] Ask yourself, what am I feeling right now? Now the reason why this is such a powerful tool to use and a skill you want to practice because emotions are fuel for action. Go back to the model. Thoughts create feelings, feelings drive actions. So emotions drive every action we take and I want you to think about it like a car. Good fuel makes the car run well, no fuel stops the car and it’s the same with human beings and where do we get our fuel from?

If emotion is fuel for action, where does the fuel come from? Most people think it comes haphazardly right? Most people think we wait and we see what comes along. We wait for inspiration, we wait for motivation, we wait for excitement to come upon us before we get to work but with our cars we don’t do that, right? With our cars we go out and we get fuel, right? We are even willing to go out and pay for it. We make sure it is high quality and we have plenty of it.

We don’t run our cars to the last fume, to the last drop. Now we need to take the same responsibility for our emotional fuel, the emotional fuel that powers our lives. This is the work that we are doing in the academy this month. We are learning how to generate emotion as we need it to take full responsibility for all the emotions that we are presented with. So with emotional intelligence there are things that come with the skillset. You will learn to embrace discomfort.

That’s right, you will learn to embrace discomfort as the currency for growth that’s how you grow, that’s how you develop is through discomfort, is through adversity. We will decide what we want to feel and then feel it on purpose. That is a skill. That is part of emotional intelligence. Most of the time guys, we are choosing an emotion that doesn’t serve us and we don’t even know it. This is called indulgent emotion. We have talked a lot about this. We did this in November in the Spartans.

[0:26:31.1] But the most common indulgent emotions are confusion, overwhelm, exhaustion, worry, boredom. Think about it how often are you telling yourself, “I don’t know?” How often are you telling yourself, “I don’t have enough time?” How often are you worried? How often are you bored? These are all indulgent emotions and as far as I have been able to tell, none of these emotions have any upside. They’re just simply – all they do is prevent us from moving forward.

I mean in terms of fuel, if we go back to the analogy of the car it is like putting Coca-Cola in the gas tank of your car. It feels like you put something in the vehicle, in the tank, but you haven’t filled it up with anything useful, right? The car is not going to run on that and neither are you. You are not going to run on indulgent emotions. “I don’t know,” as cognition creating confusion as feeling is not going to put any action. It is not going to drive any massive action.

Confusion, overwhelm, all of these just perpetuate inaction and it is very important that you make an effort to eliminate these emotions from your life because they’re just bad habits and they keep the brain busy but not productive. All right guys, I am going to close this podcast up with just a little bit of application. I want to teach you how to pick and practice an emotion because this is what we are doing in the Spartan academy.

I am going to finish with that because when enrolling in the Spartan academy I want to invite you to enroll in the academy and really take your mind management to a level where you are going to be able to create all the results you want in your life but how to pick and practice an emotion. I want you to imagine that all feelings are available to you at all times, okay? I want you to get used to them as tools to create whatever it is that you want in your life.

[0:28:17.8] And one of the best skills you can develop is this one, it is feeling a feeling, creating an emotion on purpose. How do you learn how to feel happy? How do you learn how to feel excited? How do you learn how to feel disciplined and guys, how do you learn how to feel confident? I spent a large portion of my life coaching career in the confidence game.

Now I am doing the cognitive mastery game but confidence was so much a part of my coaching practice that creating emotions deliberately is something that is kind of my wheelhouse, right? That’s what I did, that is what I taught a lot of students how to do is to create indomitable self-confidence and when you learn how to feel emotions as a skill then you can use them as tools to create whatever you want in your life. That’s the model. That is the universal truth. The way we learn to feel is by calling on the thoughts we believe that create these emotions.

And guys, it’s just like being an actor. You could even say that when I was a confidence coach, I was kind of like an acting coach, right? Because I was teaching you how to believe beyond your capacities. I was teaching my students how to believe in themselves before they believed in themselves so they could cultivate that emotion, create it, act, get the results, use those results to reinforce their cognition and that is how you step into the role.

We can literally feel our way towards our goals and guys that’s the only way we get our goals. We don’t get our goals with scarcity. We achieve our goals through abundance. We need to feel certain, we need to feel confident, we need to feel committed when we are planning. We need to feel disciplined, energized and competent when we are taking action and I want you to think of it as currency that you can draw upon in order to get whatever you need.

[0:30:09.6] If you know what you have to do, you’ve got a list of tasks that you are prepared to execute then it is the emotion, it is the skill of creating emotion that you want to learn in order to execute those tasks effectively and efficiently. You have these emotions available to you so use them right? So here is how to pick and practice an emotion. Number one, what is this emotion feel like? When you feel it, what does it feel like?

What is the thought that you need to think in order to feel that way and how can you commit to feeling that way today? How will you act when you feel this way and how can you get back on track if you notice that you are not using or generating this emotion? Start with just one and practice it all day long. Take excitement, feel excited okay? Feel excited, look for things to be excited about. Think exciting thoughts, act excited, create exciting things. Stay committed to that emotion all day long.

Cultivate excitement, learn it, feel it, own it. When you make a commitment to the emotion, you do not waver. The same way you make a commitment to anything else. “Today I am going to practice excitement.” You don’t let your mind go to other thoughts and other feelings. My favorite emotions to create goals are discipline, certainty, committed, interest, strong, these are all powerful things for me. These feelings are the ones I want to get better at feeling on purpose.

They are the ones that I’ve practiced and I practice like they are my part in the movie. How do I think? How do I act? What do I look like? What do I say? Whenever I feel doubt or worry sneak in I immediately shift and start practicing one of the above emotions. All right, check this out guys, emotions happen one of three ways, all right? They either happen without your awareness. So number one is they just show up without your awareness, without your cognitive awareness.

[0:32:15.5] You don’t know what the thought that’s causing it or the reason why you are feeling this way and this is where most people are. Most people are in that space and they end up blaming their circumstance because they don’t know the thought that created the emotion. They don’t know why they’re feeling this way so they just blame it on whatever’s happening, whatever the event is that’s happening around them.

The second way is when the emotion presents and you know the thought but the thought is not deliberate. You didn’t choose it consciously from your alpha state, it came from your beta condition. So when it comes from the beta condition, you might be resisting the emotion. You might be trying to avoid the emotion and you might elevate your alpha state and then allow the emotion. If you have an emotion that you didn’t intentionally choose that’s when you want to learn the process of allowing from your alpha state.

And then finally, we have emotions that present because of a deliberate thought. Creating an emotion, this could be indulgent in causing an uncomfortable thought but it is more likely going to be a deliberate thought creating a wanted emotion, right? That’s the skill, that is a skill that of an emotional intelligence, ownership and awareness that we’re practicing in the Spartan Academy for the development of cognitive mastery.

[0:33:26.3] KA: This is where I am going to finish up guys. That’s what I got for you today, the skills of emotion, embracing discomfort, eliminating avoidance behaviors, not needing to escape, courage towards any emotion, understanding that emotions are harmless. Allowing is not reacting and feeling is not displaying and at the same time, creating emotions and needed emotions, right? Creating the wanted and needed emotions through deliberate thought.

Through a momentum, the momentum of action, right? Taking action and having that momentum. Looking for the results that reinforce those thoughts. Practicing, rehearsing, believing and committing. Guys, that’s what I got for you today. As always, I invite you to go to thealphamalecoach.com and check out the Spartan Agoge Program. It is actually the Spartan Academy now. We’re now a school. The Spartan Academy for the development of cognitive mastery.

Check it out, it’s there thealphamalecoach.com. Look at the menu at the top. Work with Kevin. You will see a couple of programs there, click on the Elevated Alpha Society and read about the Academy for the development of cognitive mastery. February is going to be awesome, right? So much happening when it comes to emotional intelligence. I love it. I look forward to working with all you guys out there.

If you have any questions or if you just have a problem, there is an issue you are struggling with, remember all problems or thoughts, so you can go to thealphamalecoach.com and click on the button for a 45 minute consultation with me. That will take you to a booking. You could book a call with me. That’s free. We can get on a call and we can talk for 45 minutes and you can see the power of cognitive coaching and I will tell you all about the Elevated Alpha Society.

So until next week my brothers, develop your cognitive mastery, practice your emotional intelligence and elevate your alpha.

[END OF EPISODE]

[0:35:25.8] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Alpha Male Coach Podcast. If you enjoyed what you’ve heard and want even more, sign up for Unleash Your Alpha, your guide to shifting to the alpha mindset, at the alphamalecoach.com/unleash.

[END]

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