Learn how to Create Good Emotion - Make it a study
Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness, is probably one of the most important people in the world. Why? Because he has spread, and is continuing to spread a message that I believe is going to take us into the next couple hundred years with a lot less pain than we've experienced as a whole in the past couple hundred years. He is the pioneer of positive psychology, the study and movement of creating positive human functioning, of helping people to make their normal lives better and more fulfilling and to "find and nurture genius and talent," and not to only treat mental illnesses, something psychology has done very well in throughout the last hundred years. I'm about emotion. Because I believe that emotion drives human behavior, but on a large scale, it drives the world. I'm also about helping individuals to actually learn to be happy, successful, creative, talented and the like. I'm interested in helping other people master their own brain, and develop genius. I'm passionate about helping other human beings reach fulfillment, achievement and a better more accurate understanding of themselves and the world, which is why this website is on the web right now.
One of the things Martin talks about, is the 3 pillars of Positive Psychology, one of which is the study of Positive Emotion. Have you ever made good emotion a study? If you're like most people, the answer is NO! Why the heck not? Well, we don't live in a society, or in a world for that matter, that's really about it. We certainly live in a world that has mastered negative emotion, and can talk about it all day, in fact, most people are subject matter experts in it. Why? Many reasons ranging from our past as human beings, we needed to have built in survival mechanisms in our brains to get by. We needed to focus on contrast, because it kept us alive. We had to be on guard, reactive and animal like, it helped us thrive but because of our hard work then, and reactive tendencies, we now have the chance to live better lives. Haven't we continued to do that? Live better lives? As a whole, the answer is yes. Now, I know that for most people, giving up old paradigms and ways of looking at the world is tough, I'm experiencing it with my own mother but somehow I know, that the majority of people will "cross over" so to speak, to a place where good emotion rules most of the time and where our inherent benevolence can thrive. Want to know why I believe that? The economic crisis will force us to grow, it has every other time and will do the same this time. We've always been in ruts, especially in America, but don't we always find a way out of it? And when we do, don't we always move forward? Of course we do, because that's what will ensure the continuity of our species.
So what I'm saying here today is that we literally HAVE TO, in order to be effective and to survive the next 500 years, turn to Martin Seligman's, and many other people in the world's ideas. That said, let's talk about good emotion. In the video, we talk about the fact that learning how to create good emotion isn't something we all have trained ourselves to do. In fact, the majority of us NEVER LEARNED how. We've learned the exact opposite. This is why when people tell me it's impossible for them to be happy, I help them to be more accurate in saying they just haven't learned how. Cultivating a skill to deploy good emotion, to create it in your body and to use it on a consistent basis, takes training of the mind. This is why I'm so big on conditioning because hey, let's face it, how the heck did you learn to walk? You built connections between neurons in your head, you repeated it several times and you achieved a quick mastery in it, and it became unconscious and automatic (also known as conditioning). Positive Emotion can be achieved by doing the following things:
- Taking Ten minutes, two times a day to say to yourself, out loud, all of the things you are absolutely grateful for in your life.
Create a purpose. It doesn't have to be for your entire life, maybe just for right now. We work best, most effective and have the most amount of good emotion when we are working towards something.
-
Alter your State. We're just now getting into (science) the powerful effects of mindfulness and meditation. You can literally learn to put yourself in an Alpha Brain State, start getting in touch with that thing we call consciousness and truly discover who you really are beyond your own conditioning. Inevitably, positive emotion comes from this. Why? Because it derives from inside.
Realize that you already have the positive emotion in you, it may just be covered by the complexity of your life, and the way you were programmed! What happens when some event takes place in your life that gives you good emotion? You send the little neurotransmitter, and you create the emotions of pleasure. This happens in your brain. If you didn't know how to do it, how would that happen? If it wasn't in you already, how can it be produced in your body? It wouldn't, and it can't, you produce it, it's inherent, it's your natural state and you were born with it. The challenge is that most of us believe that this is not true, so we never really grab a hold of it. That's what this article is about, LEARN good emotion!
Read about it. I've read so many books so far, and continue to do so about developing great and powerful emotion, intellectual skills, control over your own brain, rewiring your neural networks, and getting back to that place where happiness and good emotion is totally unlimited, you can too. Go to the place that changed my life, called the Book Store. Good Reads: Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness, Unlimited Power (NLP) Get the life you want, Think and Grow Rich, Neuro Linguistic Programming for Dummies, Choice Theory, How to Win Friends and Influence People, the list can go on forever!
Learning to take control of subjective experience and developing the skill to direct your own internal processes is the single most important skill you can master in your lifetime. If you work at it everyday, your life will start to transform in front of you. It won't happen in a week, but you'll notice the instant change at certain points in your head. This is total fuel, total power, and total positive emotion and that is the juice of life, it's what we're made of. Thanks for reading but hey, that' s just my beliefs, my opinions and what's happening in my brain, what's happening in yours? Comment below!!