Module nine cultivating the high performance emotions. As you become more mindful of your patterns of thinking and feeling and as you become more grateful and positively oriented, you may know that when you approach a task with the right attitude, you tend to do better at that task. Although swingy emotions such as anger and anxiety can motivate us to improve our circumstances, being able to incorporate emotions characterized both by high arousal and a wider focus will improve our performance in both our professional and personal lives. The emotion cognition behavior triangle. All emotions have three components that work together and you can think of them as a triangle. At the top of the triangle is cognition.
The way you self talk when angry is different from the way you self talk when enthusiastic or when disappointed. At the bottom left corner is the arousal level of emotion. Both high performance emotions and swinging emotions are high arousal emotions, whereas blue Emotions damping arousal. The arousal level allows emotions to act as cues to signal behavior. At the right corner is the behavior or reaction to an emotion. Mood management involves using cognition, your thoughts and assessment of a situation to develop better strategies for reacting to your emotions.
Emotions also have a quality of being contagious. For example, when someone smiles at you, you feel an urge to smile back when you feel underappreciated. This is a cue that you may not be appreciating yourself. Finding ways to increase your own enthusiasm and confidence makes you appreciate yourself more and this emotional state gets communicated to others. cultivating enthusiasm, enthusiasm is the get up and go emotion. When you find yourself procrastinating, you are lacking enthusiasm.
Military leaders and coaches have athletic teams understand that when their groups are collectively more enthusiastic, they will perform better. Thus those famous wartime or halftime speeches really do play an impact enroll. Here are some suggestions you can take to increase your own level of enthusiasm. If you have been practicing the activities in this course so far mindfulness meditation, keeping a gratitude journal, you are actually well on your way towards increasing your feelings of enthusiasm. Celebrate every success, even the small ones. Listen to upbeat music that makes you happy.
Engage in regular physical exercise. surround your workspace with things that inspire and motivate you, at least once a day enjoy a good laugh. In order to do this, you need to collect jokes and try to find the humor in situations whenever you can. Sometimes a favorite television shows a good opportunity to enjoy a deep belly laugh. before you go to bed each night write down on an index card three statements that will put you in a good mood and place it on the nightstand or table so that you look at it when you wake up. This way you start out each day on a positive note.
Cultivating confidence, being confident is a delicate balance that many people have difficulty keeping. On the one hand, overconfidence can lead to arrogance that causes individuals to view themselves as better than or more important than other people. On the other hand, a lack of confidence causes self doubt that will hinder creativity and can lead to blue emotions such as dejection and depression. Confidence is an arousal emotion, where you believe in yourself and your abilities and you can take steps to build confidence in yourself. steps to creating confidence. Trust yourself, believe that you will be able to learn, grow and accomplish your goals.
Leave your comfort zone, taking risks and trying new things will show you that you are capable of more than you realize, except praise. Be comfortable with well deserved praise but do not demand it. Refusing praise is not the same thing as humility. Be humble. being humble sounds out of place on a list of ways to improve your confidence. We often mistake the concept of humility for humiliation but they are separate.
Being humble means we honestly recognize our limitations as well as our positive attributes. being humble means you can understand where you need to improve and you are willing to learn. cultivating tenacity. tenacity is the sense that you are going to see something through no matter what. When we find ourselves confronted with larger difficult tasks, we often feel overwhelmed. This feeling of being overwhelmed can often lead to low arousal blue emotions such as dejection and depression.
And it is precisely at such times when we need to cultivate the high arousal emotion of tenacity. So how do we do it? Here are some suggestions. begin with the end in mind, before you begin a task, understand what it is you were doing, why you were doing it, and what will it look like when you have successfully completed your task? Break a big job down into smaller and simpler jobs. Set goals and be sure to tell someone you trust about your goals.
This puts you on the hook. identify people who have achieved what you were trying to achieve and cultivate a relationship. ship with them. How did they accomplish what you're trying to accomplish? Develop a timeline for your goals and strive to adhere to it. Remove distractions and use these as rewards for after you have accomplished your goals.
Most importantly, don't let perfection become the enemy of progress. When we fail to reach a goal, it is natural to give up, but this is the most important time to keep going. Even if you didn't meet an initial goal, you probably are better off than when you started and this needs to be celebrated. Keep in mind that improving your enthusiasm and confidence levels also serves to improve your tenacity so that all the suggestions in previous sections apply equally here as well.