Scott H Young

Imagine you are just walking onto the stage of a large auditorium. The spotlight is shining bright on you, so you have trouble making out faces in the crowd which must easily be in the thousands. It is now your job to capture the attention of these people, and based on the initial reaction to your presence, it is going to be an uphill battle. Now walk up to the microphone.

Unless you’ve had considerable public speaking experience the situation you just visualized would probably terrify you. At the very least, you would probably feel an intense level of emotion either of stress, nervousness or fear. Even if you don’t consider the incredible discomfort that this situation would cause you, how do you think your emotional state would affect your performance? Chances are it would be less than optimal.

Now what would happen if you were able to change your emotional states like switches connected to a lightbulb. Immediately you could dissolve fear and replace enthusiasm. You could dismiss stress and frustration and center yourself. Imagine if you had perfect emotional mastery.

Emotions are fundamental to our experience of life. Although the above example is a little extreme, you can quickly understand how much an impact emotions have on not only your success but your quality of life. Clearly understanding emotions and gaining mastery over them is critical to your life.

This is the first installment in a six part series dedicated to the secrets of emotional mastery. I have spent the last highly growth oriented years of my life improving my ability to control my emotions. Through great volumes of research, creative brainstorming and painstaking experimentation I have been able to achieve an incredibly high level of emotional mastery. This series is dedicated to giving you the best of what I have learned.

Emotional Mastery (Series)

Introduction
Body Signals
Mental Patterns
Energy and Emotions
Persistent States
Putting it Into Practice

The first article will serve as an introduction to emotions and the concept of emotional mastery and the benefits of pursuing it. The next article, Body Signals, will focus on how you can use your body to make quick changes to your emotional state internally. Mental Patterns, will focus on how you can divert the flow of your own self-talk and combined with the skills learned in body Signals you will have the fundamentals of emotional control.

Energy and Emotions will focus on the concept of emotional energy as well as how emotions can be classified by their inherent energy levels. Understanding this will allow you to make easier shifts from negative to positive states. Persistent States is all about how to overcome a persistent negative state and how to continue a persistent positive one, perhaps the most important factor in quality of life. The final article, Putting it Into Practice, will outline how you can take all this information and start building your own emotional mastery.

What are Emotions?

In order to gain mastery over anything you must understand exactly what you are trying to master. Emotions are such a tricky issue because while we all immediately recognize what an emotion is, verbalizing and defining the experience can be difficult. Like trying to describe the color red without referencing other colors or red objects, each emotion is a fundamental experiential unit that is immediately recognized but very difficult to describe.

For the practical purposes of this article, I am going to take a step and define emotion. Emotions are simply categories of thoughts and thinking patterns that lead to certain behaviors and states of mind. In other words, emotions are a way of classifying types of thinking that tend to yield similar results.

So when you are experiencing the emotion of anger you experience , you tend to act more aggressively, you get louder and you grit your teeth. When experiencing the emotion of anger, or patterns of thought we can classify under anger, you also tend to travel towards certain thoughts. Namely, when you are feeling angry you tend to think more violently, you also tend to separate yourself from the object of your anger (me versus them mentality) and your thoughts become more and more anger oriented.

Emotions are like currents in the ocean. We can define a specific current by the general direction the water is flowing and what effects that flow has on the ocean and nearby land. But there is no physical barrier separating specific currents, so water that lies on the edge may not neatly fit into a specific pattern. Similarly, local winds and disturbances mean that the water never flows exactly the same way. Naming currents, like emotions, are to simplify a complex process down to similar patterns.

Emotions are rarely completely distinct but rather a complex variety of thought patterns which can be classified by the general behaviors and mental states they cause. Emotions also change your experience of reality and while this aspect of emotions is difficult to verbalize, this experience of reality is essentially the pattern and flow of thoughts you are having.

My definition of emotion is an experiential definition. That means I am defining anger as the experience of anger. Psychology takes the opposite approach by defining emotions by their biological and physiological effects. Since we are trying to improve our own emotional control and not conduct experiments with electrodes and heart monitors, I am going to stick with my definition for the purpose of our discussion.

Can Emotions Be Controlled?

This isn’t the place or time to debate the issue of free-will versus determinism, but the simple answer to the question is yes, emotions can be controlled. Just as you can change what you are thinking about you can change your emotional state. Unfortunately while minor shifts in thought are relatively easy, making a huge shift in emotional state can be incredibly difficult. Changing thoughts is like creating a ripple in the ocean and changing emotions is like shifting the current.

Despite the difficulty in changing your emotional state, there are many techniques and tools that can allow you to do just that. With sufficient practice in these tools you will be able to quickly adjust your state and behavior. Like many things in life, emotional control can be easy to learn but take a lifetime to master. This series even includes a final article which will go into depth discussing the ways you can start practicing and improving your emotional skills.

Why Study Emotional Mastery?

The benefits of emotional control are varied and critical, but I will highlight just a small portion of the benefits you can receive from practicing the skills I will identify:

Better Relationships - Relationships are controlled primarily from emotions. Better control over your emotions can make you more fun, exciting and funny to be around. Even more importantly, emotional control can ensure you don’t make mistakes when you are in a bad state. Whether you are trying to impress your boss, client or spouse, emotional mastery is crucial.

More Logic - The more emotional control you have the better you can operate rationally. Instead of making ludicrous decisions based on a feeling, you can make the most effective decision possible. Emotional control also improves your intuition in helping you separate your emotional state from your subconscious intelligence.

More Happiness - The number one reason to pursue this discipline is that it will make your life better. You will be able to tackle your fears instead of shying away from them. You can manage stress so it challenges you and doesn’t destroy. You can experience fulfillment, gratitude and peace in your life.

Emotional mastery has to be one of the most important skills you can learn in your life. Even better, practicing and honing your skills can be done all the time in your life. You don’t need to devote special times for emotional mastery, but you can practice these skills in real life.

Why is Controlling Emotions So Difficult?

If emotional mastery is such a powerful skill then why weren’t we automatically equipped with it as human beings? Shouldn’t evolution have provided us with the resources to control our emotions automatically so we don’t make the mistakes commonly associated with it? In response to these challenges, we have to look at the three barriers of emotional mastery:

Barrier One: Lost in Emotion

The major reason emotional mastery is so difficult isn’t that changing emotions is hard (it isn’t). The biggest problem is in remembering to change your state. Recognizing that you are in a bad state and you need to change it is the most difficult aspect in controlling your emotions. Generally the emotions of extreme intensity get you caught into a cycle of thought that leaves little room for an escape plan.

When you are incredibly stressed about something, it can often be minutes, hours or days before you consciously realize you are stressed about it. This ability to think about your own thinking is unique to humans but it often doesn’t kick in until the emotion has built considerable intensity. Getting lost in emotion is the primary difficult and it is my goal to help give you the map.

Barrier Two: Misunderstanding Perception

Worse, when you get caught in an emotion, you often don’t want to change your state. When you are feeling angry, the anger may be uncomfortable but a large part of you is resisting changing to a calm and peaceful state. These emotions are fueling themselves and it can be very difficult to alter that flow.

As paradoxical as it may seem, sometimes we just don’t want to feel good. There are many times when we want to revel in our miserable emotions with some sense of justification. I need to feel miserable because my girlfriend left me. I need to feel angry because someone stole my credit cards. I need to feel stressed because my boss is giving unreasonable deadlines. This sense of justification is a huge obstacle to getting the emotions you want.

In order to overcome this barrier you need to understand that at all times your emotions are your responsibility. Anger, pain and stress are often useful emotions in driving action, but remember that you are always the sole responsibility for your emotions, not other people, events or the past. Without this sense of responsibility, you can never obtain full emotional control.

Barrier Three: Emotions Serve a Purpose

Emotions are there for a reason. The reason we have emotions is because nature decided through evolution that the emotions we have are effective. Fear, anger, hate, love, lust and pain are all necessary to get us to take appropriate action. Most of the emotions you will experience are based on millions of years of mother natures design and fine-tuning, they aren’t random.

The problem is that you are outdated technology. You haven’t considerably evolved in the past several thousand years even though your environment has changed dramatically. Your genes are still in the Stone Age even though you live in the Internet Age. So even though your emotions were carefully crafted, much of them still expect you to be watching out for giant snakes and hunting mammoths.

Much of your emotions are still relevant. Feeling angry when you have been wronged motivates you to express that wrongdoing so it can be corrected. Feeling stressed forces you to recover your energy and continue forward. Fear of events that could be dangerous to your health is still incredibly valuable.

Really the key essence of emotional mastery is simply to make some small adjustments to compensate for where mother nature left off. Instead of rewriting your emotional programming, you are just going to get an update. The world has changed a lot in 40,000 years, so your software needs quite the patch.

In my next article I will discuss the importance that your physiology and body has on your emotions. The way you move your body and posture has tremendous impact on your internal feelings. By understanding and using your body properly you can immediately improve your emotional control. I hope you will accompany me on this six part journey into emotional mastery.
Emotional Mastery (Series)

Introduction
Body Signals
Mental Patterns
Energy and Emotions
Persistent States
Putting it Into Practice

In the short duration I have been writing to this blog I have received a lot of feedback. I greatly appreciate this feedback whether it comes as a comment to an entry I’ve made or a personal message sent to me via my contact page. Getting these messages from all of you has been enormously helpful in making this website better and better. But I came to one interesting thought the other day. If feedback has been so helpful to myself, perhaps I should offer some feedback of my own?

In writing to a site that is designed to help you get the most out of life, I realized that I never really put any hints or tips to help get the most out of this website. Whether you recently stumbled upon this website and like what you’ve read, or you have been browsing the archives for months, I would like to give you some insights into my own process for writing posts and some tips so you can get the most out of this site.

My Process

Before I go much further into getting the most out of this website, I think it is important to clarify how I come up with topics to write about and find solutions to problems. I don’t think my process is the same as many other authors in the field of personal development and I think these distinctions make a big difference in how you should use the information even if they look like similar content.

When writing posts I look mainly to one source, my own life. Virtually every single post I have written here has not come from books or analyzing others problems, they have come from my own. So when I write about discouragement, fear or procrastination I am writing about the problems I have faced in these areas and what I do to overcome them. This inside-out perspective is also why I never tackle issues I haven’t personally combated. Divorce, raising kids or winning the stock market are not areas of experience so I don’t touch them no matter how strong my opinions on how to solve these problems are.

Once I have found a problem that I am either facing or have previously solved, I look for as many possible ways to combat the problem. Finding solutions is part creativity, part research and part experimentation. Usually the solutions I come up with are a blend of past information I was given and what has worked for me. Whenever I am trying to solve a problem I try to focus completely on actionable information. I hate reading vague garbage that says the key to solving a problem is “having a better attitude” or “being more creative”. Although I am not perfect I try to find techniques that are precise and applicable to most people.

The final stage in solving a problem is I tend to generalize. So instead of dealing with a very specific case of procrastination, I try to generalize the problem to reach as many people as possible. Although I occasionally handle specifics, I try to abstract specific problems to common, more general ones. In doing this you can often lose critical details that vary in every situation, but hopefully it means the essence of the solution can be applied more broadly.

My posts vary from being techniques I have mastered to relatively new ideas. Although I never post advice that I haven’t tried out, my articles will range from solutions that I have been using for months and years to new techniques that I have recently discovered. Because of the ease of creating a blog post, there isn’t a huge time delay between when I discover something until when I decide to write about it.

The one obvious downside of writing from an inside-out perspective is simply that my solutions are only tested on myself first. What works for me might not work for you. So some of the advice I give will be completely useless to you even if it has helped me immensely. If something doesn’t feel right to you, ignore me. Personalities and individual differences are often very complex so each situation can differ no matter how much I try to make the information applicable to everyone.

Tips for Using This Website

Given my own process and how I feel you should ingest any ideas I throw at you, I will offer some tips for getting the most out of this website. Of course you are free to use the site however you would like. These are simply tips that I believe would help most people get more out of the site.

Use Articles as Starting Points, Not Guides

I would say that the majority of the posts I write are of the how-to stream or look at an idea from a viewpoint of practical application. Although I make a lot of posts that are intended to spark ideas and new frames of thinking, most of the posts I write are intended to give you new tools and methods to overcome real problems.

In this spirit of how-to advice, I can often appear to look like I am writing a comprehensive guide on how to solve a problem. Unfortunately, most personal development problems are rarely simple enough to fit neatly into an article or two (or even a book or seminar for that matter). Instead you should use each post as a starting point for your own methods, never as a complete guide.

It is my hope that with each post you are able to take away some new ideas that can spark your own creative insights to solve problems. Some of what I write will resonate with you and some won’t. Some of my advice will work great and others may not work for you at all. It is up to you to continue exploring and figure out what will work for you.

Check Out Key Articles

There are various concepts I frequently refer to in this website, and unfortunately if you missed the main articles when I introduced them, you may be completely confused. Some of these concepts are fairly common, but others I my own inventions as a way to describe some idea. If you feel a little lost when I’m writing, it would be good to check the Popular Posts section of the sidebar to see what your missing.

Here are some topics I frequently refer to:

Vertical and Lateral Growth - The difference in these two types of growth is difficult to summarize in each post, so I’d suggest reading the articles I’ve written specifically about this topic. The articles: Introduction, Part II, Part III.

Velocity Based Paradigm - If you aren’t sure what I am referring to when I mention this concept, read my essay Balancing Today and Tomorrow on the subject. Although this doesn’t receive as much attention as some of my posts, this concept is probably in my top three list of the most fundamentally powerful and useful ideas I’ve ever found.

Growth/Personal Development/Personal Growth - As much as I hate to say it, I use these terms way too much and I’m worried they are going to lose meaning. What exactly is growth or personal development? The answer is very simple: whatever helps you get more out of your life. What that is specifically is often hard to pinpoint and it varies for each person, but that is the definition I am using whenever I use those terms.

Use the Archives

My content is generally pretty time independent. If you haven’t read all my articles, I suggest going to the archives and picking out some ones to read when you have time. Although I try to drag back links from old posts and insert them into my new articles, it is often inconvenient to switch which article you are reading. With over a hundred posts there is a lot of content to go through.

Give Feedback

This is YOUR website not mine. Without readers this would just be another online diary collecting cobwebs. Although I derive great benefits from writing this blog, it’s primary use is as a way for me to reach and help others. So I want you to take advantage of your blog and have your say in what gets written here.

Give More Feedback - This is still a medium sized website, so I can handle a lot more feedback before I become overloaded. I generally receive 3-5 blog comments each day and an e-mail or two. Unfortunately this isn’t enough opinion to really gauge how most people feel about the site. So if you have been lurking here for awhile I invite you to speak up.

Suggest Topics - Most of the feedback I get tends to be appreciative comments on either something specific I have written or my blog in general. I love getting these comments, but I really appreciate it when readers bring up a topic or problem they are facing. When I am choosing what to write, I think about what issues will be the most relevant to others. By getting specific feedback I can be a lot better at finding what everyone needs.

Give Criticism - Although I don’t appreciate flames or blind criticism from those who haven’t devoted the time to read what I am saying, I do need you to keep me on my toes. If I’ve written something you disagree with, speak up. If I wrote something that didn’t work for you, tell me. There are posts I have written in the past where I don’t have nearly the conviction of ideas did when I provided them. If I can disagree with myself, then I’m sure you can voice some yourself. I’m not calling on you to insult or complain, but to ensure that the quality of this website can continue to improve.

If you aren’t sure how to contact me, you can simply go to the contact page and leave a message in the form or with the e-mail/snail mail address provided. Otherwise just leave a comment on one of my posts. Just remember to leave your proper contact information so I can get back to you!

On a final note, I get a lot of feedback lauding me as an expert on something from productivity to habit changing to something else. I am here to clear this all up right now. I am not an expert, but just an extremely enthusiastic and growth-oriented person. This has certainly given me some experiences and insights, but I am still very much in the process of growing.

If I accidentally leave the impression that I have got life all figured out, then you are sorely mistaken. Each day I wake up to look around at how profoundly ignorant I am and how much growth I have to make. There are many people I greatly admire for being light years ahead of me in various areas of growth, and there isn’t a single area of my life that I am not feverishly trying to get more out of.

I write to this website not as some expert who has figured everything out but as a friend who is still struggling to understand this thing we call life. At the age of eighteen, I have only experienced a blink in the universe and everything I add to here is just a feeble attempt to describe it. Hopefully you will continue to join me in that attempt. Thanks for reading.