How to stop being EMO

If I asked you to picture a person who is emotionally tough, you would
probably imagine a person who was cold, hard, calloused – the traditional image of a person who is either ‘hard’ or ‘cold’.
I am here to tell you that you are wrong in this assumption!
Emotional toughness is about you controlling your emotions – not allowing your emotions to control you. Emotional toughness allows you to be strong, resilient and flexible, able to weather storms and grab opportunities.
However, before you can understand and apply this concept, it is important for you to understand exactly what emotions are. In a nutshell, they are simply the mind/body talk that exists on a daily basis. Signals travel from the unconscious mind to the conscious mind and are then either acted upon or not – depending on how we perceive the message we are being told.
Emotions are either empowering (positive) or disempowering (negative). Negative emotions should be seen for what they are – the minds messages to you that there is an unmet need. It is critical that you uncover this need and meet it at once or as soon as possible. I can’t stress how important this is – you could be the toughest person in the world but you will fall short of your goals if you have a basic unmet need e.g. food, water, sleep. To meet these needs you need to be aware of them in the first place.
Awareness – that is the first step toward emotional strength and toughness. After all, you must be sensitive to your feelings in order to command and channel them rather than react blindly on a whim. If you can develop this awareness and sensitivity, you will find focusing your emotions and using them to help you achieve your goals rather being a victim and finding yourself pushed around blindly into bad choices and situations.
Emotions are the key to a productive, healthy life - if you can control them then you gain a lot of control over your life. I know it sounds a bit simplistic and easy but there is a lot of weight behind that statement. I want you to think of a time when you felt out of control in life – things really weren’t going your way etc. I am willing to bet that examination of the reasons and decisions that got you into this situation are the result of emotions taking control of you. I would also bet that in situations where you felt in control, there was a lot of control over the effect and power of emotions over your own actions.
So how do you gain control over your emotions?
I’m glad you asked! The process is really simple. As with most processes though, you need to practice its use all the time. Build it into a skilled part of your everyday life. That’s when you see results.
Ok, on to the process. Basically, I want you to –
a) listen to and analyze all emotions. Don’t just focus on the good or the bad. Don’t interest yourself with only the useful and discard the not so useful. Make the habit of doing this with all emotions.
b) Recognize that the emotion is a messenger. This is the big step. By doing this you are taking control of the actions resulting from that emotion. If you decide what you will do as a result of the message you get, you stop yourself from being pushed one way and then the other. You take control and subsequently stop being the victim.
c) Translate the emotion. This will tell you all you need to know about the actions you take – you can decide rationally what is needed and what isn’t.
Emotional toughness is seen in all people who are healthy, balanced and successful. I don’t want you to think of success in the conventional ‘made a million’ terms. Instead, the way I think of success is someone doing what they enjoy and supporting a lifestyle they want. Doesn’t take a million at all. However, I digress!
The habit of emotional toughness is displayed by people who know what they want, know their feelings and are decisive and respond quickly and correctly to them. They are aware of the messages the body sends them and they meet their needs as soon as possible.
Unhealthy people, on the other hand, don’t know what the body is trying to tell them. Often they ignore the valuable messages being given to them. Often, they will respond to the immediate emotion being expressed – no thought or translation is even attempted. The result is that these people will often mask the emotional or physical need with the first repressor they can find – food, drink, drugs, anger – the list could go on and on.
So, you now understand about using your emotions in a healthy way as opposed to an unhealthy way. To recap – and simplify – emotions can be either empowering (joy, confidence, fun etc), disempowering (fear, loss of confidence, anger, frustration etc) or recovering (calmness, relaxed, thoughtful etc). obviously, in order to achieve our goals, we want to negate the disempowering emotions as much as we can by meeting all our needs and access our empowering emotions when we need to in order to achieve our tasks/goals/dreams. In between, we want to experience recovery emotions so that we don’t tire or burn out.
What would you say if I told you that it is possible to train yourself to experience these empowering emotions at will? Imagine you are feeling down, poorly or unfocussed – and you could tap into the emotions that make you feel good. What could you achieve with this? Well, it is possible to do this. It requires practice and determination but it is a skill you can learn. I’ll explain.
Imagine I held a check for £1 million. I told you that all you needed to do to get this was to cry and then laugh. How would you do it? Probably, you would screw your face up, hunch your shoulders and think of things that made you so sad you wanted to cry. You would then access these emotions when they began to surface and work on mimicking what you wanted to achieve. Very shortly, you would be crying like a baby. When it came time to laugh, you would switch to happy thoughts and actions. You would smile and think of the funniest thing you ever experienced. You would again mimic the actions of the emotion. Soon, you would be laughing your socks off.
How was it possible to achieve these two states of emotional disparity so quickly? Basically, all you did was to do as actors have done since they walked the boards of the stage – you acted how you wanted to feel, accessed the emotions from memory – and very soon, that was how you felt and acted. It is a proven fact that there is a link between emotions and physiology.
In a nutshell, how you act will determine how you feel. Act on the outside how you want to feel on the inside. Keep your head up, shoulders back. Smile. Be confident and in control. If you don’t feel like that on the inside, well then you soon will. It is often said that confidence is the application of confidence. And in no other field is this demonstrated more clearly than in the area of emotional toughness.
Act good on the outside and access your empowering emotions. Accept, translate and act on your negative emotions and be aware of how you feel. That’s the essence of emotional toughness.

-The Keys to Emotional Toughness
by Stuart McAleese

***I know that this post is kinda weird but I'm acting way abnormal lately. My friends have noticed it too that I have been overly sensitive, superlative emo, cry baby, etc.
I know I'm a very transparent person but the events recently have been a bit alarming.
There was this incident that I walked out from a booze session because of my ever loving friend BARNEY, who never fails to bully me. I just felt like he crossed the line, ewan basta abnormal nman sha and I think he's very much aware of that. I also cried yesterday just because I got upset of an office thingy. LA Alunday, Kim Chiu and I were thinking that napaglihihan ako ni LA c0z she was superlative makulet saken, to the point that shes using my avatar with my name all over it, et0 pa she has been drinking sodas now and uses straws, eh cn0 lang nman ba gumagawa non db? Everytime she gets iced tea and stuff she always has this straw na den. She was the one who also noticed na I'm overly EMO ngaun, yesterday pa nasigawan ako "At kelan kapa natakot sa tao?!?" eh kase ayoko lumabas yesterday sa 6th fl0or c0z there were gazilion people and my eyes are super swollen from the 30 minute crayola patola... LA was like "Ano bang problema mo bat mo iniiyakan y0n?!? Eh wla lang nman y0n ah... Naku napaka emo mo ngaun hala ano kaba!!!Napaglihihan talaga kita"
*Sigh* ang hrap nman ng ganto... I'm not ashamed of myself, actualy I'm proud that I'm protective of my friends and people I care about but sometimes it gets out of hand na, which is not a g0od thingy. Alot of people love and are passionate to me because of that trait but more often than not it gets me in trouble. I won't enumerate thingies na c0z this entry will be super2 long. Problem saken, mashado ako maalaga, mashado ako mag care, mashado den magmahal, problema ng friends ko mas pinoproblema ko pa kase don mismo sa taong may problema. Ung gan0n level, oh db? Not normal huh?! Ung managers sa office, they often tell me that I'm a very influencial person, and people believe the things that I say even without verifying stuff, ung ganong level, I tell them that's because I have a genuine heart with genuine intentions. Kaya lang parang they're insinuating that if I tell people that I dislike this person yada yada yada eh they'll also feel that way. Na if I whine about something like injustice, unjust treatment eh people will believe me. Cguro (I havent figured this out yet) hndi pa tlga ako nagma mature. Sabe ni LA we have the best personality kase nga super similar ung character namen but I feel like I've been acting SO GENUINE AND REAL that its no longer healthy. Kase nga since I'm very much honest with what I feel lahat nakikita nila, lahat ng nararamdaman ko, lahat ng naiicip ko, lahat ng ngyayari sa buhay ko ika nga open b0ok life ko sa lahat na hndi na sha okay!
Sabe nila and which I think nman is true eh, a true sign of maturity is baing able to control your emotions and not letting your emotions control you.
For the past six years, I admit I have been listening solely to my emotions...I used to be this logical chic but eversince love conquered moi, I have been stubborn and 99% of the time emotions are controlling me. It's not that I'm passing the buck or whatever but I just wanna like reiterate I wasnt like this... I have been hiding in the dark these past few years, I was always scared and lax about everything. I have very minimal discline... Well I think this is a good initial phase, acknowledgement db? At least I'm brave en0ugh to admit to myself that theres problem on how I have been living a life. After I've talked to my manager yesterday I realized that I should grow up. Start acting my age. 25 years yet napaka reckless ko, napaka lax ko. I do know nman how to be serious, the only problem is at times I'm not. Ung non serious side ko is way dominant which actualy overshadows ung serious and full potential me. Hndi nman ako mayabang db pero ngaun pa nga lang na I'm not serious eh I've been accomplishing and contributing alot eh di what more kung serious ako... Super Boink na un hehehe
Tama nga nman db? How can I take care of other people if I dont take g0od care of myself.
Its just a matter of structure and priorities and EMOTIONS.
Kaya from now on I will start taking things seriously, I will take care of myself better and I'll be starting to discpline myself.
I know that this is never going to be easy, as a matter 0f fact this is going to be hard, imagine the drastic adjustment? But just like I always say, kaya ko toh ako pa *wink*
This is one of the quotes which really hit me, it was from my professor in accounting back in college "Will of the mind is more powerful than the will of the flesh"
It's all in the mind baby...