EMOTIONAL CONTROL
WHEN YOU ARE SITTING AROUND FEELING DOWN.
Reason/science over intuition/feeling
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- Do a google search for some random beauty. Pick a noun, then search beautiful noun.
- Music. Especially the ones that move you emotionally.
- Movies/videos, What would Rocky do? Pick a heroic favorite and watch it.
- Interviews: Mark Devine, Willink, etc,
- Exercise. Do a kata. Warm up, and then try to set a new personal record for pushups, or setups.
- Seeing with a child’s eyes. Go outside and take ten pictures from a child’s viewpoint. Low, in the bushes, close-up. Lie on your back and take pictures of clouds. Create a child’s wonder for yourself.
- Make a plan Stan! Journal what has brought you to where you are now, how you got here, and how you plan to get out.
- Google your problem, cancer, bankruptcy fear of. See if you can find a chat group of those who have suffered the same as you. You have cancer? You’re not the only one. There are many others and what they have to share may help quite a bit.
- Make an affirmation. As soon as you wake up, say your affirmation, visualize it. The same just before you go to sleep. Check out the lecture by Mark Devine in the email.
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I know that you will have a cold lump in your gut while you do this. That is why it is critical to practice with small set backs, so that when you get hit with a big one, you are trained and ready.
IMMEDIATE SITUATION: YOU ARE IN THE ARENA AND THE BELL HAS RUNG.
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- Incompatible response: smile. Helps you, throws your opponent off. This is a valuable technique/habit even for those training at the highest level. Practice this on a consistent basis. Traffic, crap at work or at home, note the emotion, than observe how a smile changes your physiological state. Caution, don’t do this so often you wear it out, but often enough so that it is there in life and death conflicts.
- Mind/breathing in the hara. Another high-level technique. This is for fighting at the master’s level. First note that when you are excited you enhale into your chest, raising your shoulders like some frighten animal inflating himself to pun on a display. Instead focus on an area behind and slightly lower than your belly button. Practice this whenever you are startled, when your car breaks loose, there is a sudden loud noise, any kind of rapid change that would normally “scare” you.
- “I like this! I can do this!” Kind of the opposite of apprehension.
- With perfect alignment, slowly lower yourself into a ready to strike attitude and breath into the coming attack. For example, as your tennis opponent gets wound up for his bullet serve, slowly relax down into motion and your breath goes toward the ball.
- Focus on process rather than result. It truly is not weather you or win or lose, but how you fight that counts. This puts you in a higher mind/body state. If “winning” counts you are subvocalizing, calculating this and that. If “playing” counts, you are in the here&now mind state, and can do the impossible.
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