• Home
  • Building Emotional Muscle

Building Emotional Muscle

Have you ever heard about emotional muscles? They exist.  What most of us have been used too is the unconscious reflexive emotional muscles; emotion and feeling set points that have been pre-set by our upbringing environments, past experiences and interpretations, and our own beliefs and habitual patterns of thought.  Yes, we ARE emotional beings and so much of who we are and what we do brings up emotions and feelings – its called being human.  The interesting aspect of this is that how we feel at any given point is only part of who we are.

Feelings can be deceiving, let me explain.  How many times have you pushed yourself to do something that you did not feel like doing but knew that is was the best decision only to realize it was the best thing you could have done? How many times have you acted on your feelings only to realize you could have done something better?  How many times have you done something that felt great at first only to realize it was not in alignment with your best self or who you wanted to be? The ability of the mind to overcome a feeling when there is enough emotional muscle is powerful. If we choose to use conscious thought to decide what is best we are more often than not going to choose right.

We can build more of the emotional muscle, just like any other muscle, by exercising it.  The more we are conscious of our decisions and their long-term consequences and make the decision to take action based on what we know is best instead of how we feel, the stronger we build that muscle and the easier it becomes to make the best decision at a later date.

Now, this is the twist, success is the ability to exercise our emotional muscle to consistently do what needs to be done regardless of how we might feel at any given moment.  Naturally, staying comfortable feels better but to achieve high levels of success we have to decide, against our feelings, to do what may be uncomfortable.

The sacrifice of working on that emotional muscle now gives us the ability to stay disciplined and do what needs to be done long-term. Let’s get that emotional muscle stronger!

Categories: