Be A Bottle Of Water
I recently came across a great concept from @awareness_of_success on instagram and it resonates with what I often tell clients:
"Be a bottle of water, not a bottle of soda. The bottle is you. What’s inside is your emotional reactions. The outside world and people are gonna attack you and rattle/shake you from time to time. If you shake a bottle of soda, when you finally open up, you are gonna explode. But if you shake a water bottle, once you open it up it's the same calm water as it was before it got shaken up. Don’t let other people and this world disrupt your peace."
There are two things happening to us all the time, stimulation from the outside world (outside of our bodies) and reactions from our inside world (inside our bodies and brains). Most of us equate good things happening to us from the outside with happy emotions. For example, if we find a $100 on the sidewalk, we become happy and excited. A love interest asks us to go on a date, we beam and light up. We hit green lights all the way home, our insides feel happy (especially in contrast to hitting all red lights).
Ah The Blame Game
We “blame” the nice thing/event/stimulus with “making” us happy and bringing us joy.
Similarly, when bad feelings and emotions arise from outside stimuli that we do not appreciate, we blame the stimulus. Let’s say you get pulled over for speeding. Your mood may very likely turn sour and your evening could potentially be ruined. You blame the bad feelings you feel on the cop or ticket, or kick yourself for speeding/running that red light. Another example is having an unexpectedly terse conversation with a friend or coworker. We can be having a perfectly peaceful day and feel happy and then someone talks about something or jabs us verbally and we feel our emotions turn negative and unhappy. In that case we blame the other person for “putting us in a bad mood” or for “making us mad.”
The reality of all these situations, both positive and negative, is that none of them are “making” us feel anything. The outside world will always stimulate us and the inside world will react to that stimulus. How you react and how stimuli make you feel are in your control. This concept is very hard to accept at first. We live in a society where blaming others for things is more common than accepting reality and knowing ourselves. People with high emotional intelligence, which can be learned and increased by the way, tend to be better at identifying their emotions and managing their reactions to life.
Importance of Using Your Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is simply the ability to identify and understand one’s own emotions. Like other intelligences it can be grown and cultivated. That sounds simple doesn’t it? Yet, how often are your feelings “icky” or “off” and you can’t quite put a name to the emotion? Or how many times do you feel your mood shift (toward or away from being happy) and you are not even sure what caused it? Turns out our emotions are not always clear cut or simplistic. Someone who works on their emotional intelligence will sit with that emotion and feel it. They will label it or try to identify exactly what they are feeling, which in turn helps them to then identify what stimulated that emotion.
There are times when moods shift and it is simply tied to hunger or thirst without a person realizing it. Other emotions can be confusing and are tied to deeper fears or past experiences, sometimes traumas, and can evoke powerful reactions in us, both physically and mentally.
Identifying what we feel and why we feel it can turn the soda pop in our bottles into simple and neutral water. Understanding why we experience certain emotions from certain stimuli can help us to become aware of how we work and also allows us to change the script and change our reactions.
As uncomfortable as it seems, we are truly in charge of our emotions and feelings. I have had the experience of being pulled over for a traffic violation and then had it ruin my day because I let those emotions paint my story. I have also had the experience of being pulled over, realizing my part in being pulled over, recognizing how getting a ticket is a small blip on the radar of my life, and laughing about the experience while pulling away. In that instance, the cop was no saint but I had decided that it was just an experience and that it did not warrant strong negative emotions or the chance to eat up the rest of my day with bad feelings.
What are you choosing?
For some people, every day is torture and emotionally painful. They dread their work weeks and trudge through life wishing for happiness that seems just around the bend. Others experience peace and contentment daily, despite having very serious trials and tribulations daily. The difference is the way each person chooses to react to what is happening.
Have you ever watched people at the airport? Some of them are definitely full of soda and not water. Some people are ready to explode at any inconvenience. They expect their air travel to be horrific and they expect to be victimized by schedule changes, security delays, babies sitting next to them, or a misinterpreted glance by a flight attendant. These people head to the airport expecting to battle their way home. In contrast, some airport goers seem relaxed and cheerful. They handle changes to their schedule with ease and little stress. When something doesn’t go their way or as planned, they simply recalibrate and move on. These types of people are determined to have good travels and refuse to let outside stimuli get in the way of their peace. Both mindsets are a choice.
Commuting is also a great example. I love to drive and am definitely a daily commuter, often 7 days a week. If I wake up and let myself be moody, I will have a bad commute and will only notice the drivers that I assume are trying to cut me off and are personally hoping to ruin my life with their driving skills. In contrast, there are days (luckily more often than not) where I am peaceful and happy about driving. When traffic pops up or someone drives aggressively, I recognize the stimulus and then choose to react neutrally or positively. If a car is driving excessively slow, I tell myself it is probably a new or elderly driver who is not comfortable driving the way I do, and that is okay!
Whatever the stimulus is and whoever it is coming from, remember we are in charge of our reactions. Are there times when getting angry or frustrated is appropriate? Hell yes!
We will feel more settled if we can recognize those times and also recognize when our angry or frustrated responses are warranted. Feeling in control of our emotions and reactions can make a world of difference in our day-to-day lives. We can soon find the art of non-reaction is also great. We do not have to react to everything that stimulates us or attempts to stimulate us. Sometimes not reacting is the healthiest option. Feeling in control of our inside world will help make the fact that we can’t control the outside world less daunting.
Awareness is Key!
As with anything, practice makes perfect. Building our emotional intelligence takes time. Understanding ourselves and our reactions also takes time and practice. The more we get to know how we work, the better we will be at seeing what is happening in our lives with our emotions. As humans we will automatically want to blame the outside world for our inside emotions. This is normal and takes training to control. It takes awareness to understand our internal workings.
