The ABCs of Emotional Mastery: Manage Your Moods and Create What Matters Most
By Bruce Elkin
()
About this ebook
A Self-Coaching Manual To Help You Manage Your Moods and Create What Matters Most
Do you sometimes feel:
Down or depressed?
Stressed, uptight and anxious?
Overwhelmed by life and work?
Too tired to take care of what matters to you?
Even helpless or hopeless: that it’s all just too hard?
This is how many of my clients tell me they feel when they can't create what truly matters to them.
Often, they blame circumstances, other people, external events or other aspects of reality for their negative feelings.
But, using the skills and practices in The ABCs of Emotional Mastery, they learn that reality is not their enemy. And that you can fairly quickly improve how you feel and act by recognizing and changing how you think.
This handbook can help you learn to take control of your own thinking, manage your moods and emotions and increase your resilience, creativity and overall sense of well being.
It can help you bounce back from adversity, relax under pressure and realize that you create much of your own negative feelings and moods.
That's not bad news. It’s good news, because, by changing your thinking and the stories you tell yourself, you change your feelings and moods from negative to neutral — and even to positive.
You make it easier to cope with day-to-day challenges, upsets and setbacks — and to create the kind and quality of life, work and relationships you truly want.
This highly-praised ebook is packed with interesting stories, insights, and exercises on how to create your best life - in spite of whatever life throws at you.
Bruce Elkin
Bruce Elkin is a Personal Life Coach, Emotional Mastery Coach and Success Coach with over 25 years experience, and successful clients on 6.5 continents. He works with competent individuals and professionals who are temporarily stuck, stalled, or drifting. His firm, structured coaching approach helps them get clear about what they truly care about–and create lives and work that show it! He is author of Simplicity and Success: Creating the Life You Long For, and the e-Books Emotional Mastery, and Creating Sustainable Success. And, now, on Smashwords.com THRIVE! Creating What Matters - In Challenging Times & Beyond! @ http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/90569 His most recent ebook is The ABCs of Emotional Mastery, a practical guidebook for changing your mood and behaviour by changing your thoughts and stories. It is available here at Smashword, as is a free sample. Scroll down to access it.
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The ABCs of Emotional Mastery - Bruce Elkin
The ABC’s of Emotional Mastery
Bruce Elkin
Copyright 2013 Bruce Elkin
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.
www.BruceElkin.com
License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Disclaimer
This publication is designed to be accurate to the best of the author’s knowledge. It is not designed to provide psychological advice, or to substitute for professional counsel in that area. No guarantee of any specific outcome is provided for utilizing the ideas in this e-book. Your results will depend on your circumstances, application, effort, and ability.
If you feel seriously depressed—or have any thoughts about suicide or otherwise harming yourself—tell someone: your doctor, a friend, your parents, a minister, priest, rabbi, coach, teacher—anyone.
If you don’t know who to call, most local telephone directories include the number for a crisis line
on the first page, under emergency numbers. You will not have to give them your name, if you don’t want to. So call.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Is This All There Is To Life?
Part One: Why?
Chapter 1
Emotional Mastery
Chapter 2
The Challenge of Adversity
Chapter 3
The Problem(s) With Problem-Solving
Part Two: What?
Chapter 4
Explanatory Style
Chapter 5
The ABC’s Part 1:
How Your Beliefs Can Cause Misery—Or Joy
Chapter 6
The ABC’s Part 2:
Change Your Story; Change Your Life
Part Three: How?
Chapter 7
The Power of Passion Driven Practice and Perseverance
Chapter 8
The Gift In Adversity
Appendix
Forms and Template For Practicing The ABC’s
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
About the Author
Endnotes
INTRODUCTION
IS THIS ALL THERE IS TO LIFE?
"Tell me, what will you do with your one wild and precious life?"
— Mary Oliver, Poet
Do you ever feel stuck? Stalled? Overwhelmed? Not sure what to do next? Unsure what you want to get done, or why? Does your body get the blues?
Perhaps life and work seem fragmented, disconnected. Or maybe you’re wandering in transition, not clear about your purpose or direction.
Do you feel stressed, anxious, or depressed? Are you working too hard for too little? Perhaps you are doing fine— but not at what you would really love to do?
Sadly, many clients tell me their lives feel like a never-ending stream of problems and adversity. Negative about the present, pessimistic about the future, they’re so focused on problems, they don’t have time to think about what matters or what they really want in life.
How about you? Do you ever feel that this is all there is to life? Or work?
If you do—and it frightens or depresses you more—you are not alone.
Most of us, wrote Henry David Thoreau (in 1854), live lives of quiet desperation.
An Epidemic Of Depression
Now, more than ever, Thoreau’s claim rings true. In these complex, rapidly-changing times, a growing sense of helplessness, even hopelessness pervades many lives.
In 2001, Nicci Gerrard wrote, More … people die of depression than of AIDS, heart disease, pneumonia, cancer and strokes put together. Fifteen percent of people who are depressed eventually kill themselves.
[1]
Today, the US National Institute of Mental Health says, 20.9 million American adults, or about 9.5 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older … have a mood disorder.
[2] As well, 16 to 20 percent of teens suffer … from depression.[3]
By 2020, depression could be the second most common health problem in the world.[4]
We are in an epidemic of depression,
says Positive Psychologist Martin Seligman.[5]
There also appears to be an epidemic of stress and anxiety.
The US National Institute of Mental Health reports that 18 percent of adults will experience anxiety in any given year. About 29 percent will experience it in their lifetime.[6]
Physician/psychologist Joan Borysenko says, 75 to 90 percent of visits to the family doctor are for conditions caused or made worse by stress.
[7]
That’s the bad news. There is also good news.
If you develop new skills and practices, you can change how you feel and act.
Half Your Happiness Is Up To You
Genes incline some toward optimism. Others tend toward pessimism. Positive Psychologists argue that genetics accounts for only about 50 percent of either. What you do with the rest is up to you.
There is a lot you can do with your fifty percent. Many, like me, learn to deal with pessimism, anxiety, depression and emotional distress. If you work at it, you can, too.
Even if you are more pessimist than optimist, mastering the generic emotional mastery and creating skills outlined here can help you manage your moods and build the resilience needed to face change and adversity—and succeed.
Mastering these skills can help you see that life is less about solving problems and more about creating the kind of life, work and relationships you most deeply want.
Generic Skills Are Key
When most people hear the word generic,
they think of no-name products. Or cheap pharmaceuticals.
With regard to skills, though, generic
means higher-order; applicable to a wide range of challenges. Generic comes from the Latin genus.
It shares that root with generate.
In changing times, generic skills empower you to generate and manage specific skills—writing, accounting, building, making music, rock climbing, and gardening.
Examples of generic skills: self-motivation, courage, effective communication, patience, purpose, persistence, deliberative practice, creating and emotional mastery.
Emotional mastery is the ability to manage your thoughts and emotions and control the actions and results that flow from them.
The ABC’s (described later) is key to emotional mastery. It helps you see how thoughts precede emotions. And how emotions effect actions and results.
Creating is the capacity to bring into being deeply-desired results. Creating skills enable you to create what you want, with whatever you have to start with.
Deep, deliberate practice makes it easier to develop and apply generic and specific skills. It too, can be learned and mastered.
Combined, these skills empower you to manage your moods and create results that matter. Creating makes you feel good, and leads to authentic confidence. Such confidence enhances emotional mastery, which makes it easier to create results.
Mastering these skills enables you to make the most of the 50% of happiness you control. I know. I’ve been through most of the negative stuff described above and come out the other side reasonably creative, successful and happy. I’m far from perfect and continue to practice my skills. I am able to rise to most life challenges successfully.
If you practice, you, too, can change your stories, your moods and your results.
Where We’re Going In This Ebook
Part One: Why?
In Part One, we’ll examine the basics of emotional mastery. We’ll see why they’re needed, and how they relate to adversity, change and creating.
In Chapter 1, we’ll start by looking at the definition and a description of Emotional