I’m reading a book called ‘The mental toughness handbook’ by Damon Zahariades and summarizing my findings on the way.

This is my 2nd post on the book – check the first post if you’re new.

After we started understanding the threats to be mentally tough, we move to dissect our emotions and how they affect our mental well-being. Our emotions are critical to our identity and they affect directly or indirectly many decisions in our life. Emotions can either break us or make us. For us to be on the ‘make us’ side, here are four things to have in mind.

• The value of self-awareness

Emotions can be so powerful that many would assume turning them off is the right thing to do. It is on the contrary if you want to be mentally stronger. You need to embrace these emotions by understanding them and understanding our reactions to them. What happens when we are angry? Do we punch someone in the face? or do we run and shout at the skies? What happens when we are happy? do we take more work than when we aren’t? we need to start asking ourselves more questions when we acknowledge a feeling and try to understand it since this is key to mastering our reaction to emotions during adversity.

• The role of empathy

Empathy can be oversimplified as just being nice while it is much more than that. It is the ability to examine a situation happening to someone else and try to put oneself into the other person’s shoes before reacting to anything. This allows us to be empathetic to them and help us have a unique perspective on life events. The author describes the value of this elegantly by the below quote:

“And the more empathy we feel toward others, the less likely we are to make uninformed assumptions about their circumstances“

• Why emotional control is critical

Negative emotions can push the breaks on our plans and prevent us from moving forward with our intentions, relationships, and projects in life. Also, positive emotions can lead us to take action without thinking about a situation properly. So to keep it simple, we need to understand our emotions and our reactions to them so we don’t let our good intentions down.

• How to master your emotions
  • The author provides a set of ideas from his own life as below:
    • Reflect on your feelings
    • Critique your negative emotions once they surface. are these reasonable?
    • Meditate
    • Confront your inner critique once they speak
    • understand what you can’t control and make peace with that
    • Try to sleep well, eat well, and exercise

Exercise time: Make a list of negative emotions you experience when things go wrong, write a note on how it affects you, and write how you’ll respond to that. Keep it handy and start mastering your emotions.