You can sit in the driver’s seat of your emotions and thoughts. You can refuse to allow people and circumstances to affect how you feel and allow them to control your life.
- Do you allow people and circumstances control your life, moods, and state of mind?
- How do you feel, if your boss criticizes your work, or tells you something you don’t like?
- How do you react, when a driver enters recklessly, and without signaling, into your lane, in front of your car?
- In these situations and in similar ones, do you, keep thinking about the incident?
- Do you get angry, unhappy or frustrated?
This happens to almost everybody, almost everyday. Just think, how many minutes, and often hours, do you spend every day, dwelling on what this person said and that person did.
If you take these incidents too personally, you become unfocused and inefficient at work, at home, at everywhere else.
If we let people and circumstances affect our moods and state of mind, we allow them to control our life. This happens at home, school, college, work, at the mall, on the street, and everywhere else.
We don’t always have control over circumstances and situations. This is how life is.
We don’t have control over people words, and we don’t have control over people’s behavior, but we can teach ourselves to react differently.
We don’t have control over everything that happens to us, but we can learn to act and react, emotionally and mentally, in a different way. We can learn to choose our reactions and behavior. We can learn to remain detached and unaffected.
How to Stop Allowing External Factors Control Your Life
- How can we avoid negative reactions, anger, and dwelling on hurts?
- How can we stop taking too personally what someone said?
- How can we stop behaving like a puppet on a string, letting people and circumstances pull our strings?
Continue reading to find out.
There are several things you can do, when you are in one of the above-mentioned situations, which can help you loosen the effect of people and circumstances on you.
The following tips are first-aid steps:
- Breathe deeply a few times, before reacting.
- Try to replace your thoughts with positive thoughts.
- Relax your body when it is tense.
These, and many similar tips are helpful, but sometimes, when in such a situation, you might not remember what to do, or the feelings, anger and reactions are too strong, not allowing you to do something about them.
There is an effective method, but it requires some learning. This is emotional detachment. Developing a certain degree of emotional detachment can make great changes in everyone’s life.
When you can express emotional detachment in the above-mentioned situations, in a natural way, with no effort, it becomes second nature, and you won’t have to worry about having you strings pulled. You will gain a sort of inner strength and calmness, unaffected by outside sources.
Emotional detachment protects you from being upset by external conditions or situations. It does not necessarily change your circumstances, but it allows you to act and react calmly and with common sense, without emotional agitation, which often clouds the judgment and wastes unnecessary emotional and physical energy.
Here are a few useful tips for emotional detachment:
- Practice letting go.
- Substitute your negative thoughts, fears, and worries, with happy and positive thoughts.
- Learn to observe your thoughts and feelings. In time, this will enable you to detach from unwanted thoughts, feelings and reactions.
- Learn to loosen your attachment to unpleasant memories and the past.
- Avoid people that depress you, let you down, or unjustly criticize you.
Developing emotional detachment is the topic of the book Emotional Detachment For a Better Life. It teaches you to free yourself from the emotional control of people and circumstances. It is a simple, and easy to follow eBook, with practical information about emotional detachment.
