The Power to Choose Your Feelings

<p>I’m going to let you in on a golden nugget of truth that maybe you’ve never heard before: feelings are <i>optional</i>. </p><p>Yup, you read that right. </p><p>The ability to feel a full spectrum of contrasted, complex emotions are an inherent and integral part of the human experience – it’s what makes our species who (and what) we are.</p><p>But we do not have to be at the whim of some emotional rollercoaster. Feelings don’t happen <i>to </i>us. We get to choose how to feel. </p><h3>Try to wrap your head around this.</h3><p>The most fundamental truth of my work revolves around this teaching: Our thoughts create our feelings, which influence our actions and the results we create in our lives. </p><p>Today, we’re digging into why our emotions are not actually caused by external factors, but by our own thinking – and how to work this to our advantage.</p><p>So here’s the thing: when we stop feeling bad <strong>about </strong>feeling bad, we feel better.</p><p>This does <strong>not </strong>mean that you should try to choose to feel <strong>great </strong>all the time. There is a huge difference when you decide that feeling sad is what you <strong>want </strong>to feel, versus believing that an emotion is <strong>not </strong>within your <strong>control</strong>.</p><p>If you feel like your anxiety, frustration, sadness, grief, or pain is caused by the external world (which you’re unable to control), you will be tempted to <strong>buffer </strong>– to <strong>escape </strong>what you’re feeling.</p><p>You will be tempted to avoid your emotion because you think there is nothing you can do about it.</p><h3>But that’s not true. </h3><p>Because the world doesn’t cause you to feel what you feel, your thoughts do – and only <strong>you </strong>are in control of your thinking. </p><p>By and large, our inability to <strong>manage </strong>our emotions is the root cause of our suffering – so we need to learn how to do that better. </p><p>But it’s a process. </p><p>Step one is developing an <strong>awareness </strong>of o