Build Your Resilience
About Lesson

Emotions are directly related to your resilience when adversity arises. When problems occur in life, it is easy to feel like a victim and feel like everything bad always happens to you.

When unexpected tragedies or difficult events happens, it is easy to break down and feel like you are falling apart. However, there are ways to build up your emotional control in order to build up your resilience and feel confident taking onlife’s greatest challenges.

Since resilience is the way that you handle various situations and how you overcome setbacks, staying in control of your emotions is one of the most important ways to build it up.

There are many strategies that will be discussed below that allow you to learn how to be more mentally and emotionally stable and look at adversity as an opportunity to grow stronger and develop your mind.

What Is Emotional Control

Emotional control is defined as the ability to respond to experiences with socially tolerable and acceptable responses. It is also the way that you can realize and respond to feelings within in order to avoid reactive outbursts and be in control of the way you handle and respond too conflict.

An example of emotional control is the way that we handle our children. When they are screaming or crying about something that may seem silly to us, we instinctively take a step back and realize that yelling or reacting in negative ways will only make the situation worse. Instead, we react in an understanding and tolerable way that allows our children to calm down and look up to us.

It is easy to think about situations like the ways we handle our children with obvious emotional regulation, but these reactions may not be as instinctive in new or unpredictable situations that we are not used to.

For example, when conflict happens at work or an unexpected tragedy occurs, our mind may be sent into a state of shock and we will not know how to react. This is where building up resilience in order to hone in on emotional control comes into play.

Why Emotional Control Is Important

Emotional control is crucial to building up your resilience, which will help you in nearly every aspect of your life. From the amount of money, you spend, to your mood around people and the strengths of your relationships, to the way you deal with challenges, emotional control has a direct impact on your quality of life.

The Connection To Adversity And Resilience

When adversity, setbacks and crisis hit in life, the resilient can manage the subsequent emotions such as frustration, anger, pain, fear, and stress. This allows for the ability to remain focused, turn the negatives into positives and not be distracted by such emotions but instead remain driven, and stay focused on how to overcome and bounce back. Emotions do not bring the resilient down.

This is not to say that you won’t feel such emotions, but when you have control you will not allow them to take over your mind, dictate your actions or prevent you from moving forward with the tasks at hand. In fact, the really resilient embrace the stress, anger and other feelings associated with adversity because they know they will flip this negative to a positive by using those feelings to drive them to overcome.

During small situations throughout the day you can practice emotional regulation and you will eventually notice that you are less stressed and exhausted from experiencing these emotions.

For example, if you notice that something small that your significant other does tends to bother you every morning, you would be surprised to realize how much emotional conflict in causes within. Whether you react or not, this small problem can be causing you large amounts of stress that will be very exhausting over time.

When you learn to build up emotional regulation, you will feel more resilient when more serious situations occur that can impact you professionally or personally. People observe emotional intelligence and put a great amount of respect upon it, especially towards leaders and positions of higher power.

When you do not let little things get to you and you learn how to react properly to different situations, you will be able to take control of your emotions rather than letting them control you.

Tips For Improving Emotional Control

Labeling Emotions

When you do not acknowledge how you feel, you will likely try to push it to the back of your mind or forget about it. This will not prevent you from experiencing these emotions but will likely change the way you view a person or cause you high amounts of stress.

When you are able to address the situation and the way it made you feel right away, these negative emotions will be released in your control, rather than coming out at unexpected times that can cause negative impacts to your life. Labeling how you feel takes bravery and resilience but will ultimately make you emotionally stronger and more stable.

Social Support

People who have a strong sense of emotional control understand the importance of surrounding themselves with positive, uplifting, and trustworthy people. Your relationships should lift your mood and make you more confident and should be with people who you can open up to about your feelings.

When we go through difficult experiences, our instincts can sometimes be to bottle things up because we do not want to put our emotions on others, but it is important to understand that talking about problems can help us greatly.

Talking to trustworthy people about the way that situations make you feel can help you build resilience because it can allow you to find solutions and advice that can allow you to overcome and move forward from obstacles.

It can also make you feel like you are not alone and know that there are people there to support you. Discussing your issues rather than keeping them bottled up until you blow up will make you emotionally stronger and more willing to take on risk.

Developing Humor

Having a sense of humor in both your personal and professional life is crucial when things don’t go as planned. Although it is important to be serious at times, being able to laugh things off is very important when regulating your emotions. When we get wrapped up in our minds, we tend to replay past experiences and look for the worst possible scenarios in potential situations.

We assume that everyone is judging us or that we might say something stupid that would lose the respect others have for us. However, this is often because we are taking life too seriously and need to step back and find ways to free the mind.

Being able to laugh allows you to alter your mindset and have a more positive perspective, which is crucial when it comes to emotional resilience. It allows you to destress and let go of harmful emotions that may be making the situation even worse than it already is.

Finding Spirituality

Connecting with a higher power and finding your own sense of spirituality can have very positive impacts on emotional regulation and an overall sense of resilience. When you trust that everything is happening for a reason and that a higher power is looking over you and protecting you, you will be more likely to be resilient in times of conflict and less stressed all the time.

Through techniques like meditation, prayer, and spiritual readings, you can learn more and become more intelligent. This wisdom will make you more confident to take on risk and more resilient when obstacles arise.

It will also allow for more time for reflection on different situations that allows you to develop your mind and be more in control of your mind.

Reflecting On Thoughts

Reflecting on experiences and the thoughts and emotions that go along with them is crucial when letting go of the past and any trauma that your mind is holding onto. If your mind subconsciously holds on to negative past experiences, you will

likely be more fearful and hesitant in times of risk and challenge. If you have experienced trauma, you will be more irritable and emotional unstable which can present itself in different ways during times of conflict.

Taking time for yourself to sit with your thoughts and reflect on your emotions can allow you to let go of the past and look for ways to improve your situations in the future.

This will make you want to take risk and accept challenges because you will have a different perspective on conflict. You will also be more resilient in overcoming challenges because you will be more in control of your feelings and will understand why certain emotions arise.

Mood Boosters

Another way to be more emotionally in control and resilient is to observe different things that you enjoy and that boost your mood. Whether it be music, your favorite foods, reading, or other hobbies, we all have different ways to improve our moods.

When you are able to take a step back from what is bothering you, identify why it is making you feel certain emotions, and replace the negative spiral with a mood booster, you are able to fully be in control of your mind.

It is very easy to get wrapped up in outside factors or have tunnel vision to something negative right in front of us but taking a step back and doing something to distract the mind is often all we need to transform the mindset.

Identifying what puts you in a good mood and incorporating it into your daily routine is a great way to stabilize your emotions and improve your wellbeing. Taking control of your mind rather than letting outside factors control it is one of the best ways to become more mentally and emotionally resilient.

Therapy

Seeking help from a professional can be extremely important for your wellbeing and relationships with others if you find that you struggle with emotional control.

The emotions we face on a daily basis can often be a result of past experiences, trauma, or fears that are deep within us. There are many techniques that therapists and other mental health experts use to helps us uncover and come to terms with these things in order to let go of them.

Professional help can have profound results for one’s mental and emotional healthand ultimately overall success. When you have someone to speak to about possible buried emotions that come out during important times, you can learn to let go of them and stay in control of your emotions.

This will allow others to gain a sense of respect and trust for you, and you will become more resilient when challenging situations arise.

Conclusion

Coming to terms with your emotions and reflecting upon them is one of the most important ways to stay in control of them. When you understand why you react in certain ways and are able to transform the mind, you build up an emotional resilience necessary for feeling confident in tough situations and keeping your emotional and mental health stable during challenging times.

Highly efficient leaders in business and trustworthy and respected teammates and friends know the importance of coming to terms with and being aware of your emotions. When you learn that you are in control of them, you will likely take more risks and have a more open and flexible mindset.

This is one of the most overlooked but important ways to become the best and most resilient version of yourself. Looking past your emotions and being more solution-oriented and analytical can take a lot of time, practice, and effort, but will benefit you in both your personal and professional life.