Finding Your Emotional Balance

Our Emotional Fitness has a significant bearing on the rest of our health. If you have any doubts about that, simply look at how you are affected when you become anxious, or overly angry, or very joyous, or feel a lot of stress. Do you experience mental or physical reactions to those emotional responses? The very idea, for example, of standing up and giving a speech in public can send some people running straight to the washroom. Being in love or getting a great job offer gives others greater energy than they would ever have imagined. Studies show that stress in the workplace has a huge financial impact on business through sickness, absenteeism and lapses in performance.

That being so, it is surprising how little attention we give to our emotional health. While the work done by Dr. Daniel Goleman and others on Emotional Intelligence has clearly shown the connection between our emotional selves and our level of ability to perform well, there are very few tools to help us to become more emotionally fit. One of those scarce tools is the Lifescale.

The Lifescale is a series of ten questions, five of which measure our level of satisfaction, or positive emotional energy. The other five questions indicate our level of frustration, or negative emotional energy. While there are other measurement devices for personal insights, this one is different from almost all of them. The Lifescale scores that you give are not interpreted in a standard way or by an outside person or computer. Only you can understand the meaning of the scores and therefore the emotional balance you have in your life. The questions and the scores you give are openers to a greater self understanding and the ability to take the necessary and desired actions to improve your emotional fitness.

Try out the first question here. First, simply give a score from 0-20 that indicates how you feel at this point in your life.

How much PLEASURE do I get from life? n

Now think about what that score means to you. Where do you get that pleasure from? Summarize your thoughts and write them down. You might also want to think about what would give you greater pleasure (assuming you didn’t score 20). Write that down too. The more time you take on this, the more you will get from it. The best way is to talk it through with someone else. A coach trained in Emotional Fitness will help you to get the best value from the Lifescale.

Here is your second question.

How much PAIN do I feel I have? n

Notice that the first question was about a satisfaction and that this one is a frustration. You can already see a balance between the positive and negative emotional energies you have. If you have more pleasure than pain, then you have a more healthy balance than if it is the other way around. Go through the same exercise as the first time, asking yourself what your score means and making a written summary. You can do that with all the questions on the Lifescale™.

1. How much PLEASURE do I get from life?
2. How much PAIN do I feel I have?
3. How much PURPOSE do I have in my life?
4. How much do PROBLEMS weigh me down?
5. How much do I feel I’m in the right PLACE?
6. How much PREJUDICE do I feel against me?
7. How much POWER do I feel I have?
8. How much POVERTY do I feel I have?
9. How much PEACE of mind do I feel?
10. How much PRESSURE do I feel is on me?n _______________
TOTALS SCORES n

Add the two columns and you will find your Emotional Fitness balance. Look at the summaries you have written for the five satisfaction areas (the left-hand columns) and make a summary of the essence of what you have said. Do the same for the frustration areas. What do you want to change?

We tend to know less about our emotions than about anything else of ourselves. That may be why we shy away from knowing about them or from talking about them. Put simply, our emotional self is really the core of who we are. What, where, or who is that core? We need go no further than rediscover ourselves as children. When you feel your emotions, you are reliving yourself as a child. The boss who becomes overly angry and frustrated at the error of an employee is just acting out again his own childhood powerlessness. The employee who feels shame because of the error is back again in her feelings as a child who couldn’t get things right.

The athlete who stands on the podium laughing and crying is displaying the joy felt by the child in her moment of success. When I stand in front of an audience and see the faces turned toward me in anticipation, I feel like the eight-year-old reciting a poem at his birthday party.

When we recognize the connection, we are ready to make the changes we need to become more emotionally fit. We can celebrate the joy of the child and allow it out more. We can understand, listen to and help to heal the hurt child from our new perspective as an adult. What makes it difficult is that as adults we tend to live in the world of cognition. Connecting the mental understanding we have now with the emotional experience of our childhood, helped by the Lifescale, we can get beyond the habits that no longer serve us.

Kate’s Lifescale showed how out of balance she was. She had a positive (satisfaction) total score of 35 (out of a possible 100) and a negative score of 68. She felt that her work, her family life and her friendships were all going badly. What she had not been able to see was that, while 35 didn’t seem a high score, she did in fact have some satisfactions. By concentrating on those, she began to feel better. When she looked at the higher frustration areas, she found that almost all were connected to her low self-image, which in turn related to her childhood experiences. She understood that she was still letting her childhood frustrations rule her life as a woman. This helped change her perception. Her Lifescale score is almost completely reversed now, at 65 for satisfactions and 36 for frustrations. Kate’s life is reflected in that change and she displays a happier, more fulfilled and balanced self.

The key to finding your emotional balance is in your own hands. The Lifescale is a tool to help us to listen to that core person within. Treat it with respect, just as you would treat your own child with the care and attention it deserves, and it will reveal more of the real you than you may have seen before. n