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How to Master Your Emotions & Never Get Annoyed or Bothered by Anyone · Change Your Life with Dr. Amen Kaur

• 0:00
  If you've done a number of courses, read a lot of books, and you've done that therapy work, and you're still sitting here thinking, why can't I move forward and act on what it is that I know I need
• 0:13
  to do?
• 0:14
  This is for you, because I do not think you have a knowledge problem.
• 0:19
  And you probably already know that, too.
• 0:21
  You probably have a good indication of the direction that you need to move in, but something is stopping you from doing it.
• 0:28
  By the end of this episode, I want you to understand what that something actually is.
• 0:35
  And I'll give you five lessons that you can start to use today.
• 0:39
  I'm Dr.
• 0:40
  Amon Kaur, and here is the thing I've noticed when I've been leading teams.
• 0:45
  I've spent 20 years in leadership and became a partner of a FTSE 250 company.
• 0:52
  I could look at a spreadsheet of numbers, just KPIs, and I would tell you which person on that team was struggling before anyone had said a single word to me.
• 1:02
  Most leaders would go in and talk strategy and look at what was going on.
• 1:07
  And they would be talking more training, more calls, more meetings.
• 1:12
  And here is your action plan.
• 1:15
  I would go in and ask them, how are you?
• 1:20
  And the numbers would start to move, because the numbers were never the problem.
• 1:25
  The numbers were the output of something nobody was asking about.
• 1:30
  And I want to give you five lessons in three parts.
• 1:34
  Part one is why you actually are stuck.
• 1:37
  Part two is what's really going on underneath.
• 1:40
  And part three is what you can do about it.
• 1:44
  And I want to flag lesson four now, because almost nobody talks about it.
• 1:48
  And it's the reason you can spend thousands sometimes, on the wrong course or the wrong coach or the wrong program and feel exactly at the same place as you started, apart from the fact that you have more information.
• 2:03
  Okay, let's start.
• 2:04
  When something big goes, there's some sort of loss, a marriage, a role, a title, maybe a business or someone that you loved.
• 2:15
  We can say things like, oh, I've lost my confidence.
• 2:18
  And it's quite normal to feel that way when there's been some sort of lawsuit.
• 2:21
  And I don't think that's what's really happened, though.
• 2:25
  I think you've lost your container.
• 2:29
  Just bear with me.
• 2:30
  I'll explain what that means.
• 2:32
  Think about that person who's always been the strong one, someone that's competent, someone that everybody calls, someone that holds the family together, holds a team together, holds all of it together.
• 2:44
  It's an identity, it's the container that holds all of you.
• 2:50
  And then when that marriage ends or that role goes, suddenly you can't seem to make decisions.
• 2:57
  You feel like, who am I?
• 2:58
  I don't even know who I am anymore.
• 3:01
  You're still the same person.
• 3:03
  You still have the same brain.
• 3:04
  You still have the same body, same skills.
• 3:07
  No one's taken those skills and talents away from you.
• 3:11
  You still have the same qualifications.
• 3:13
  You've still got that same history that you built up.
• 3:17
  Yet you can be on your knees thinking, I don't know who I am anymore.
• 3:23
  And I wish I just knew.
• 3:25
  That was definitely me at one point.
• 3:27
  And I'm not describing this from the outside.
• 3:29
  It's like a lived experience.
• 3:31
  And here's what I want you to see.
• 3:34
  That identity, that container was doing a job for you.
• 3:39
  It wasn't just a label.
• 3:41
  It was actually regulating who you are.
• 3:45
  It told you where you sat, what you were worth, and what happened next, and how to feel about yourself.
• 3:56
  It was holding your emotions in place.
• 3:59
  It's like an anchor.
• 4:02
  So when things got difficult, your emotions had an anchor point.
• 4:08
  This is who I am.
• 4:09
  Reason why we feel like we've lost our confidence is because we've lost that anchor, which is why everyone treats it like a confidence problem.
• 4:18
  It's not about what you have or what you don't have.
• 4:21
  It's not that you don't have that house anymore.
• 4:24
  It's much more than that, is whether you can hold what you feel now when you're having a bad day without that structure doing it for you.
• 4:34
  For instance, if you're having a difficult day, it's easier to deal with when you have a status or a role to say, no, I am good.
• 4:45
  I am competent.
• 4:46
  But when that goes, that very same hard day hits harder because.
• 4:52
  Because now you haven't got that anchor, that horrible feeling.
• 4:55
  And you feel even worse because now you're thinking about what you've already lost as well.
• 5:00
  So one question we can answer right now, with compassion, with love, and you can write this down, or you can think about it with me right now.
• 5:10
  Not what did I lose?
• 5:12
  But what did that role or what did that thing that I lost make me feel?
• 5:20
  Did it make you feel safe, needed, respected, certain, useful?
• 5:26
  But name the feeling, not the thing, because it's never about that relationship status, but it might be a feeling that you're actually grieving.
• 5:39
  And that's the one thing you can rebuild.
• 5:43
  You can rebuild that feeling within yourself, regardless of if that role's gone or if that relationship is gone or if that house is gone.
• 5:54
  You creating that feeling within yourself, that anchor can be recreated.
• 6:01
  So let's look at lesson two.
• 6:03
  What are emotions?
• 6:04
  And what can we learn about emotions?
• 6:07
  And let's get straight, we all have emotions.
• 6:11
  Good, bad, indifferent, everything.
• 6:14
  An emotion you don't deal with does not stay the same size, it compounds.
• 6:22
  So for instance, if you're hungry and you don't deal with it, you don't act on that feeling of hunger, you'll get more and more hungry until you can't stop thinking about food.
• 6:35
  I will be honest about my own.
• 6:37
  After my marriage ended, there was this stretch where anything that went wrong in my life, I would find a way somehow in my mind to think, yeah, it must.
• 6:48
  It's his fault, my ex husband's fault, the boiler, the traffic.
• 6:54
  It's his fault.
• 6:55
  Anything even unrelated somehow, it's not because I am an unreasonable person.
• 7:01
  I'm gonna be honest, he did cause a lot of problems for me.
• 7:05
  But it was because I had years of contained emotions that I hadn't let go of that I had to attach something to.
• 7:15
  I once saw a beautiful piece of artwork that was made by a man who was in prison.
• 7:22
  And it was in this beautiful hotel in London.
• 7:25
  He'd built a prison out of sticks and he'd labeled the prison itself emotions.
• 7:34
  And it really stayed with me for years.
• 7:36
  And I still remember this because it was the most accurate picture of what emotions can do when they're not actually released.
• 7:46
  They build up.
• 7:47
  And what happens is they imprison us.
• 7:51
  They build up like a pressure cooker.
• 7:54
  And time goes by and.
• 7:56
  And you're not choosing what you do, your actions, and you're thinking them through anymore.
• 8:02
  It becomes something that you react on.
• 8:05
  Suddenly do something and it's out of your control and you wish that you hadn't done it.
• 8:11
  Hence the emotion is what puts us in that prison where we've done something which we regret.
• 8:19
  So for instance, if you feel sad today, that can become hopeless in six months.
• 8:26
  If you feel annoyed today because something has happened, maybe gonna become rage in a year.
• 8:34
  It's not that you're dramatic or you're getting worse as a person.
• 8:40
  It's that everything compounds.
• 8:42
  It's a part of nature.
• 8:44
  And emotions compound also.
• 8:46
  It's just the same as compounding money.
• 8:50
  Small, boring, invisible.
• 8:51
  And then suddenly something very large.
• 8:54
  Because we keep thinking about it, we keep feeling it, and it just builds up.
• 8:59
  You've had that someone's done something, and then you keep talking about it, keep talking about it, and before you know it, you can't stop talking about it, it becomes an addiction, and you can't stop thinking about it and
• 9:11
  you feel enraged.
• 9:14
  So the danger is almost never the emotion.
• 9:17
  The danger is the delay.
• 9:20
  That's why that piece of artwork done by the man in prison was so insightful that the longer you wait, the worse the situation can get.
• 9:32
  60 seconds a day.
• 9:34
  Two questions.
• 9:36
  How am I feeling?
• 9:37
  What am I feeling?
• 9:39
  What just happened before I started to feel it?
• 9:41
  If you find yourself getting annoyed, getting irritated, you're not trying to fix anything.
• 9:47
  You're just refusing to let it compound quietly.
• 9:51
  You're taking control.
• 9:54
  Okay, let's go on to part two, what's actually going on?
• 9:57
  And this is where we start with lesson three.
• 10:00
  Most of us were raised to treat emotion as a weakness.
• 10:05
  I know I was something we learned to suppress, hide, get over, be strong about emotion.
• 10:15
  It is the most accurate information you're going to have about what is actually happening in your life and also what it is that you can do moving forward.
• 10:27
  Let's go back to those KPIs, because KPIs are key performance indicators.
• 10:32
  It's a set of targets that people were given to hit every month or every week, every day.
• 10:39
  And when I sat down with someone whose numbers maybe had gone flat and asked, how are you?
• 10:46
  How are you really doing?
• 10:48
  What came out was almost never about the job.
• 10:51
  And I was that safe person as well.
• 10:53
  I kept everything confidential, no matter what anybody told me.
• 10:58
  It was either maybe a parent who was ill or a relationship falling apart, or they lost their confidence, or there was something going on with friendships or a quiet feeling that they were being managed out and nobody would
• 11:12
  say it.
• 11:13
  And once it had been said out to another human being that they were struggling, their numbers started to shift.
• 11:20
  It was the same person that had the same targets, the same market.
• 11:26
  The only thing that changed was that the feeling had been named.
• 11:31
  There's really good research on why naming emotions works.
• 11:36
  A study out of UCLA by Matthew Lieberman and colleagues put people in a scanner and found that putting a feeling into words reduced activity in the amygdala, the brain's threat response.
• 11:52
  So just putting a feeling into words allows you to feel safer.
• 11:58
  And it actually increased the activity in the region of the front of the brain associated with control, so you feel more in control of yourself.
• 12:09
  Naming is not just a nice therapeutic gesture.
• 12:13
  Oh, yes, I'm feeling sad today.
• 12:16
  It changes what your nervous system is doing in real time.
• 12:21
  Have you ever felt this?
• 12:22
  I'll give you an example.
• 12:23
  My daughter says sometimes, like mum, I Didn't do anything.
• 12:28
  Why are you angry at me?
• 12:30
  And I'm just ranting at that point about something I'm angry about to her, but I'm not angry at her.
• 12:38
  Why are you angry at me?
• 12:40
  And then I have to stop.
• 12:42
  It's like, whoa, you.
• 12:45
  Because now I have to explain, hey, babe, I'm not angry at you.
• 12:49
  I'm frustrated because of this thing over here.
• 12:52
  And as soon as I've said that, I'm calming myself down.
• 12:57
  Nothing about the situation's changed.
• 12:59
  I've just labeled it.
• 13:01
  So what you can do right now is say out loud in one sentence, I'm feeling this.
• 13:06
  Because out loud, not in your head, because the head will turn it into a story about what's wrong with you.
• 13:14
  You'll feel shame and guilt, and you'll be more feelings, and you'll get into a rage and rant.
• 13:19
  But actually, what we want is just one sentence of like, I'm feeling this because of this.
• 13:27
  That's the whole practice.
• 13:29
  Okay, let's look at lesson number four.
• 13:31
  Every emotion needs a different solution.
• 13:34
  This is something that nobody actually tells us.
• 13:37
  Stress is not the same as overwhelm.
• 13:40
  Overwhelm is not anxiety.
• 13:42
  Anxiety is not pressure.
• 13:44
  But when we're talking, we can use them interchangeably.
• 13:48
  And they're completely different problems that need completely different solutions.
• 13:52
  Have you ever bought that course or hired the coach or booked the retreat and finished it and felt exactly the same?
• 14:00
  Or spent thousands on a holiday?
• 14:04
  I hear this constantly, and people conclude that they are the problem.
• 14:08
  That I've done this and I've come back and nothing's worked for me.
• 14:13
  I've tried to start a business, for instance, and I haven't been able to do it.
• 14:18
  Hasn't worked for me.
• 14:20
  The weirdest thing is they think, oh, it's worked for everybody else.
• 14:23
  Okay, it's not possible for me.
• 14:26
  You were never the problem.
• 14:27
  You bought the wrong solution because you had the wrong diagnosis.
• 14:33
  Look at the difference here.
• 14:35
  Let's explore this.
• 14:36
  Stress is when we feel like we've got too many demands and not enough resources.
• 14:41
  It's more of an operational problem.
• 14:44
  You can go to the gym and say, okay, I'm going to do a really amazing workout, and I'll feel better.
• 14:51
  And you will feel better for about an hour, and then you'll come back to exactly the same amount of work, and then you will feel triggered and the stress will hit you again.
• 15:02
  And the most important thing we need to do is say, yes, of course you should go to the gym.
• 15:06
  It's Great.
• 15:06
  It's good for your body.
• 15:08
  But.
• 15:08
  But we also need to deal with this feeling of stress.
• 15:13
  You need to accept that, okay, this is my load and it's a lot.
• 15:18
  I don't think I can do this all by myself.
• 15:21
  I have to distribute it.
• 15:23
  So I have to find a solution to reduce the amount of workload I have.
• 15:28
  Nothing else is going to fix it for you.
• 15:32
  So we have to admit then the solution would be something that allows you to increase your resources or reduce the demand that is on you right now.
• 15:44
  That's the solution.
• 15:45
  So if you're going to buy something, it has to fit that solution.
• 15:50
  If you're feeling overwhelmed, it's emotional flooding.
• 15:54
  You are saturated to a point you can't act at all.
• 15:59
  So you could go to the gym, you can feel better, but you'll come back and you'll find that you still can't take action on what is causing the overwhelm.
• 16:10
  In that scenario, there's no point in getting a strategy or a solution where you're increasing your resources and reducing your demands.
• 16:20
  Because here you need to regulate your emotions so that you can then make a decision and then act on that decision.
• 16:29
  Because if you then start to make a decision while you're still flooded with these emotions of overwhelm means that you're not going to be able to act and follow through.
• 16:40
  It's not anything to do with you.
• 16:42
  It's to do with the problem, the emotion that you're feeling.
• 16:48
  Say if you're feeling anxiety.
• 16:50
  Anxiety is uncertainties.
• 16:52
  You might need more information or the ability to sit in not knowing if it's going to work out and still be able to take the action.
• 17:03
  That's why you can still take all the deep breaths and all the walks and come back to ruminating and feeling the anxiety of uncertainty.
• 17:12
  So we need to get to the core of what that real problem is.
• 17:17
  So you do not need another strategy.
• 17:20
  You need a diagnosis.
• 17:23
  And the more precise you can tell these apart, the better you can do.
• 17:28
  You need to know, okay, this is where my real problem is, and then find the right solution for that.
• 17:35
  There's a whole body of research on this, and it's called emotion differentiation or emotion granularity.
• 17:42
  People who can distinguish finely between the negative feelings regulate more effectively and cope better than people who just feel bad and can't identify what's really going on.
• 17:54
  Because once you know what you're feeling, you can then create the right solution for it and take the action and create the success that you want or achieve.
• 18:04
  The Goals that you want.
• 18:05
  And I really want to be straight with you because I see this with my clients, which is that the more precise we can get, the more it makes a difference.
• 18:16
  It's never about the effort they need to put in.
• 18:19
  It's more about understanding themselves.
• 18:22
  Sometimes what looks like stress when you actually write it down is comparison.
• 18:27
  It is watching everybody else and then we're thinking, oh, I'm less than, because they're already doing this and they're so much further ahead and they've got this or they've still got that job.
• 18:37
  And the truth is, no matter what system you get, you cannot out organize yourself out of that whole feeling of comparison.
• 18:47
  If I can be really honest with myself here, I can then see, okay, I need to get into a place of.
• 18:54
  I don't want to compare myself to anyone.
• 18:56
  I want to get into a space of where I can create what it is that I want.
• 19:01
  Because there's no comparison.
• 19:03
  So what can you do?
• 19:04
  Right now there's three questions, and in this order.
• 19:08
  Is there genuinely too much to do?
• 19:11
  Am I too flooded to do any of it, or do I not know what is coming?
• 19:17
  And it might be.
• 19:18
  There's a mixture of both.
• 19:20
  Whichever one yells yes, and if they all yell yes, then you know, okay, I need something that's going to cover all of these yeses or two of these yeses or one of this yes.
• 19:33
  Okay, now let's look at part three.
• 19:35
  What do we do about it?
• 19:36
  Lesson five.
• 19:38
  I call this space and self regulate.
• 19:42
  I call it SAS instead of sos, but it's really important.
• 19:46
  Every time you feel in trouble, think of sas.
• 19:50
  And this is the one I use with every client.
• 19:53
  And it's two steps, space and self regulate.
• 19:57
  You cannot make a good decision, have a good conversation, or take that brave action from when our system is flooded.
• 20:06
  First you have to make space, then you have to regulate.
• 20:09
  Then and only then can you decide.
• 20:13
  The most obvious version is if you get an email and you feel it in your chest and it goes tight and you're worried and you feel sick to the stomach, what you want to do is not react.
• 20:28
  Get up, get a glass of water, walk around the block, come back and read it again and you will start to feel calmer.
• 20:37
  Look at.
• 20:38
  Okay, how is that making me feel?
• 20:41
  And why am I feeling this feeling?
• 20:43
  What is it asking me to act on?
• 20:45
  What?
• 20:46
  What do I want?
• 20:47
  How do I want to change my life moving forward?
• 20:50
  Also, let me give you a version that helps you when you can't leave.
• 20:53
  We've all been in that meeting or that house or that environment where you feel like you don't feel part of it or there's someone really difficult.
• 21:03
  In those type of scenarios, we sometimes have to create the space internally.
• 21:10
  And one way of doing that is to put a frame around it.
• 21:14
  Almost imagine there's like a frame around this situation.
• 21:17
  Say if you're around someone that's quite toxic.
• 21:20
  Rather than absorb what they're saying into your body, you want to be watching them as if you're watching a film, a movie, as if it's happening in front of you and you're not standing inside of it.
• 21:34
  Because if someone is controlling you in a room through emotions, and some people do okay, some people control others through how they're making you feel and they're making you feel dysregulated emotionally and that gets you off of kilter
• 21:52
  and it impacts your whole judgment.
• 21:54
  Everything in those scenarios we might have to imagine like we're watching a movie, they're trying to get at you, they're trying to be mean to you and instead just see a frame around them and think, okay, I'm watching
• 22:08
  you, I'm observing you, but you're not impacting my emotions.
• 22:13
  That's how you can sometimes create distance.
• 22:16
  It's not avoidance.
• 22:18
  It's the only thing that keeps your judgment intact, where you're still able to to have some sort of control over your emotions.
• 22:26
  Regulation is not about calming down so that you are easier to be around.
• 22:32
  This is what most of us are taught and it's why we resist it to some degree.
• 22:38
  Regulating is about how you get your choice back when you're flooded.
• 22:44
  You're not choosing how you react, you're not in control.
• 22:49
  And afterwards you can tell yourself, oh, I should have done this and I should have done that.
• 22:54
  Why did I react that way?
• 22:55
  And you can critique yourself till the cows come home and feel really bad and tell yourself off.
• 23:02
  And this is the thing that we really need to get into our own mind.
• 23:06
  When we're reacting in ways that might self sabotage or we feel like I betrayed myself or I've let myself down in some way, we need to really understand is that no emotional state is permanent.
• 23:20
  There's going to be rainy days and there's going to be sunny days and maybe today is a rainy day for a legitimate reason.
• 23:27
  Someone's done something.
• 23:28
  The thing here is, no matter what anybody's done, it's true they did that.
• 23:32
  And that's how you feel.
• 23:34
  The way you feel is the way you feel there's nothing wrong with that.
• 23:38
  Stop telling yourself that.
• 23:40
  You shouldn't feel that way, you should feel that way.
• 23:43
  It's completely understandable you feel that way.
• 23:45
  We want to bring love, understanding, compassion towards ourself because it's such an amazing healer.
• 23:52
  It's like we're not being judgmental towards ourselves, we're listening to ourself, we're being compassionate towards ourselves, we're being loving towards ourself.
• 24:02
  The more you understand that emotions are not dangerous, you don't need to be afraid of them, they're not scary.
• 24:10
  Emotions are joy, love, happiness, peace, feeling confident, feeling brave, being courageous and bold.
• 24:19
  But what we do need when we feel those uncomfortable feelings is space to be able to self regulate.
• 24:28
  And when we're in those situations, we can ask one question.
• 24:32
  What is this teaching me?
• 24:34
  What am I going to do differently next time?
• 24:36
  What do I not want to do?
• 24:39
  And please make it something that you are choosing to do differently next time, not something that somebody else has to do differently.
• 24:47
  Because if we're relying on somebody else to do things differently, even when we know it's wrong what they're doing, it's unjust, it's awful what they're doing.
• 24:58
  If we're relying on somebody else to change their actions so that we don't feel bad within ourselves, then there's no guarantee that they will or won't change.
• 25:11
  And then it's going to be difficult for you if they don't change.
• 25:17
  That means they run your emotions.
• 25:20
  But if you make a decision on what you're changing in your life so that you don't feel like this again, you have control of how you feel, you have that emotional intelligence then, and you are using that information
• 25:35
  to make the right decisions for yourself.
• 25:38
  So that's five.
• 25:40
  You didn't lose your confidence, you've lost your container, you lost that identity.
• 25:46
  And when we have emotions because of some sort of loss, they compound.
• 25:51
  Especially when there's a delay when we haven't let go of those emotions or not understanding what our emotions are telling us that we need to do.
• 26:01
  Because emotions are data and every emotion needs a different solution.
• 26:05
  And what we need to know what that solution is, is we need that space to self regulate before you decide anything.
• 26:13
  And if you are listening to this and thinking, fine, but what is mine?
• 26:17
  What emotion is it?
• 26:18
  I have built a short quiz that tells you exactly which pattern is running through things for you right now.
• 26:25
  You can do that first.
• 26:26
  It only takes a couple of minutes.
• 26:28
  The links in the show notes, there's an audio that you can listen to based on the results of that quiz.
• 26:35
  And if you want to go deeper still and really understand your situation, if you know I've had enough, I want to change my life.
• 26:45
  I want more than this, I want more than my life right now, then maybe you want to go deeper and then we can talk that through of what it is that you would need specifically.
• 26:55
  So if today is a rainy day for you, please hear this.
• 26:59
  You have got this far carrying so much.
• 27:03
  This is not a weakness.
• 27:05
  It's evidence that you have the ability and you have all the information you need through your emotions to know what is your next right step for you so you can create the life that you want.
• 27:21
  And I'll leave this with you.
• 27:23
  Just take a moment today to recognize how far you've come, how incredible you are and that you're still listening, you still haven't given up on yourself and just appreciate yourself for where you are right now and send yourself
• 27:41
  so much love and acceptance, having the courage to get as far as you have got.
• 27:46
  Because love, compassion, understanding is the most important thing you can give yourself.
• 27:53
  Be that loving friend to yourself.
• 27:55
  Always have that presence.
• 27:57
  Ask how am I give yourself that chance to create the life that you dream of.
• 28:04
  I'm sending you so much love.
• 28:06
  Till next time.