Thoughts and Feelings and Emotional Intelligence

1. You cannot control every thought you have but you can control the flow of your thoughts.

The most important thing to understand is the difference between initial and reactive or response or thoughts. An initial thought is one that either just pops into your mind for no apparent reason.

It is impossible to control every initial thought, although as we will see, managing your state can influence the frequency of unwarranted initial thoughts. Reactive or response of thoughts can and should be controlled and managed in an effective and constructive way, it's called emotional intelligence. And that is the subject of today's article.

2. Feelings usually trail behind thoughts.

A series of thoughts usually leads to a certain state of feeling. At times as happens quite quickly wanted others the delay may be longer. This is important to understand if one is to gain mastery over oneself.

3. The direction of flow of your thoughts will usually determine the direction of your feelings.

Most of the time a single thought does not determine the state of your feelings. Your state is usually the result of a sequence of thoughts. If that sequence is negative, your feelings will deteriorate. But if the sequence of thought is positive, your feelings will improve.

If you can't control an initial thought but you can control the reactive and responsive thoughts, then managing our state of feeling rests on us managing the direction of the flow of our thoughts

4. Feelings put power behind your thoughts when your thoughts and feelings are synchronised.

Thoughts and feelings work together to create upward and downward spirals; a few happy thoughts and you start to feel better, feeling better empowers you to think more happy thoughts which in turn make you feel even better. That's a positive upward spiral. But it works just as effectively the other way around; a few unhappy thoughts and you start feeling worse, feeling worse make you think more unhappy thoughts which in turn make you feel even worse. That's a negative downward spiral.

5. The rate of change in both upward and downward spirals will accelerate the longer and more intensely they are synchronised.

Unless checked in some way, upward and downward spirals will continue to cycle faster and faster. When a positive cycle accelerates it can lead to euphoria which, although enjoyable, can lead to certain negative results such as poor decision-making and burnout. Thankfully our own natural cycles and common sense usually moderates tendency.

However for most of us, it is the unchecked downward spiral that usually causes the most problems as downward spirals are most destructive of our own well-being and relationships. Learning how to manage negative cycles is an important part of emotional intelligence.

6. Feelings disempower thoughts when they are not synchronised.

If your thoughts and feelings are flowing in one direction, changing the direction of your thoughts is a lot more difficult than when your feelings are synchronised with the direction you want your thoughts to go. Your state of feeling disempowers your initial training of thought; in other words you have to work harder to change direction then you do to keep going in the same direction. That works in most things in life.

7. There are more thoughts than feelings.

To demonstrate the point let us say that there are 10 thoughts for every feeling. This is good news because by monitoring a few feelings were able to keep tabs on many thoughts. Whatever we are feeling at a particular moment is, for example, the result of the past 10 thoughts.

So, in a very simple sense, we can look back and see what direction our thoughts are moving in. That one feeling has alerted us to train of thought that is leading in a particular direction.

8. There are natural cycles and rhythms in life.

These natural cycles and rhythms do influence our ability to control our thoughts and feelings; it is important to understand that they influence but do not control our ability. There are also unnatural states that are caused by such things as chemical imbalances and injuries, these also have an impact on our ability to control a thoughts and feelings.

Understanding and compassion, for both ourselves and others, is important; things are not always what they seem.

Our goal therefore is to manage the thoughts (and resultant feelings) that we can and should control, as well as moderating the effects of natural and unnatural cycles and rhythms.

9. The key to self-mastery is self-awareness.

Self-awareness is the key to self-mastery, to managing our thoughts by monitoring our feelings. Our feelings are a feedback system, they tell us how well we are managing our thoughts.

Understanding what you want to feel is the starting point. Decide what state you want to live in and then monitor your feelings in relation to that state. If you want to be happy self-awareness will alert you to any state that isn't in harmony with happiness. Having been alerted to do this unwanted state you'll be able to check back through your past thoughts and identify where this unwanted state arose.

This could take a fraction of a second or may need some careful contemplation but either way self-awareness gives you the opportunity to create and manage the state you want.

10. Have fun, be happy.

This is the core of emotional intelligence.