Developing Emotional Stability

This article is longer than most I send your way, but I feel the timing is right to send it out. It’s the time of year. We’re actively wrapping up 2015 and developing our goals and plans for 2016. Let’s commit to having 2016 be a year of balance. Keep training in order to excel in business. Keep developing communication skills for personal relationships. Decide what’s really important to you. Then invest time and energy into that.

Early in my career, I learned the importance of balance. Unfortunately, like most people, I learned it the hard way—by being out of balance.

There are many ways to be out of balance in life. You can be out of balance physically, which happens to way too many people in our society. It’s so sad to see those who focus their lives on achieving financial success, yet let their physical bodies deteriorate along the way. They end up spending all their hard-earned income on medical remedies.

You can be out of balance financially, which leads to a whole series of other imbalances in life. You can be out of balance spiritually. Being out of balance with your personal relationships can have a negative impact on everything else in your life. Each of these areas can take their toll on you if you let yourself stay out of balance for too long.

The area of balance I’m most concerned with today is emotional stability.  If you are not emotionally stable, if you are not increasing your self-esteem and self-image, you will get yourself in trouble.  Having emotional stability, or emotional riches means that you are able to cope with life’s crises and keep a balance between business and family priorities which will allow you to be happy most of the time.

Most of the time? By nature, the game of life involves having ups and downs, good times and bad times. Og Mandino has said, “If you are a human being and alive, you are either going into, in or coming out of crisis most of the time.” The challenge of maintaining balance is not with the crisis. It’s with your attitude toward the crisis and the choices you make regarding how you’ll handle it.

A career in business brings its own set of challenges and crises. There are situations we find ourselves in with bosses, peers, subordinates, and clients that can make us crazy as we try to keep the business running smoothly. Putting ourselves out there for people to get to know us, our talents and skills set us up for a certain amount of judging, some rejection and, unfortunately, too little praise. We have to handle a lot of rejection in order to get close to the rewards in our careers. For that reason alone we have to be emotionally strong. We have to learn to expect those challenges that cause us stress and prepare ourselves to handle them in stride.  It can be done. All it takes is a bit of preparation and mental training.

The first step is to recognize the challenges that we’ll encounter repeatedly in our careers, then seek the simplest solutions for them and master those solutions. The fun part about all this is that we’re not in this crisis situation alone. There are millions of Americans who are experiencing very similar situations to those we face. We can learn from each other or we can learn together. Either way, none of us is reinventing the wheel. One of the keys to being an achiever is to surround yourself with people who are achievers themselves.

Using an analogy, I would like to compare business people to automobiles. Like automobiles, we need fuel in order to run. We run on two types of gasoline. The first one is energy, the second, emotion.  In order for us to become successful, we must have a lot of energy and present a lot of emotion. People don’t say yes to our requests or to our products logically. They say yes for emotional reasons, which are their reactions to the benefits they’ll receive from being involved with or taking ownership of whatever we are presenting. Therefore, we must transmit lots of positive emotions.

When we begin each day, we usually have our tanks filled with energy and emotion. The goal is to learn how to keep them filled all day long so that when we go home at night we are not only feeling good, but we are emotionally ready to prepare for the next day.

When I was a construction worker, the first month on the job I would come home physically and emotionally exhausted.  After I became more physically fit for the job, I was not so drained at the end of my workday. The same thing applies to our business careers. We must become mentally fit. We must learn how to fill up with energy and emotion and not let people, circumstances and things drain our energy and emotions from us.

I want to introduce to you some common stressors that drain our energy and emotions.

Fear:  Fear involves doing things that make you emotionally uncomfortable. For the average person, that may mean talking to strangers, saying hello to someone who may reject you, or approaching someone you are not comfortable around.  The thought of that creates a tremendous amount of fear in some people.

Here’s the first thing we have to realize about fear:  The word FEAR stands for False Evidence About Reality. There are people with so much fear about talking to strangers that they won’t even try it. And, there are people who won’t even attempt sales because they already have such an overwhelming fear of it. Others won’t push themselves into positions of management for fear of not being able to get others to follow their lead. Realizing that fear is “False Evidence About Reality” can help them overcome this.  Live by the words, “Do what you fear most, then you control the fear.”

In my life, I have found the things I was afraid of most became my greatest strengths. My first manager in real estate told me that the key to success in real estate was in listing properties. He proceeded to tell me the way to get listings was to knock on doors. Knock on doors! I couldn’t do that! Then I realized that in order to overcome my fear of knocking of doors, I had to do exactly that.

Rejection: Rejection is part of the business. Rejection is part of being an entrepreneur. Remember this: No one has ever rejected you personally. They have rejected your proposal, the opportunity you are presenting, or maybe the skills you have to offer, but they are not rejecting you as a human being. Have you ever been rejected?  We all have. Rejection is part of life.  It shouldn’t be taken personally.  It’s part of building character and building a business.

Disappointment: When you are in business for yourself, or in sales and marketing, you are in the disappointment business.  Why?  Because people don’t always do what they say they are going to do. People will let you down. The key is to realize that you have chosen a field where disappointment happens. Rather than sit home at night being disappointed, learn how to let it go.

Guilt:  Many people are immobilized by guilt. If you decide to become an achiever and join the 5% of our population who are achievers–you’ll have to put in more time and effort, you’ll have to spend more time away from your family, perhaps work later and skip more meals and personal activities.  That’s all part of being an achiever.  If you are truly committed to being an achiever, don’t be guilty about it. Giving in to guilt is what creates non-achievers.

Non-achievers will discourage achievers and make them feel guilty about the time they are spending in order to accomplish their goals.  One of the keys to being an achiever is to surround yourself with people who are achievers themselves.  There is no reason to feel guilty about wanting to be successful.  There is more reason to feel guilty for not wanting to succeed—to your full potential.

Procrastination:  Procrastination is living yesterday, avoiding today and thus ruining tomorrow.  If you have procrastination in your life, here are some ideas to avoid it:  It takes 21 days to effect a change.  If you want to stop a bad habit or develop a new discipline, you must commit 21 consecutive days to change it.  By committing 21 days, you’ll gain strength and confidence and be able to eliminate procrastination from your life.

Live by these three words:  Do it now.  If there are things you procrastinate, but you need to do them in order to achieve your goals, you need to make those three words your motto.  Some people hate paperwork, some people hate details.  Whatever your weakness is, tackle it first thing in the morning.  Do it now. If you hate returning phone calls, make a game of it. Don’t let yourself go to lunch until you’ve returned at least three calls. Eventually, your hunger for food will overcome your fear of making the calls and you’ll just do it.

Understanding and preparing for these common stressors that impact your emotional stability will put you on the road to success. When you feel in control and able to handle the smaller, daily stressors, you’ll increase your self-image. When you feel better about yourself, you’ll strive to achieve balance in all areas of your life.

Wishing you greatness in all areas of life.