To master your emotions is to decide how YOU WANT to be feeling now as opposed to how you ARE feeling now! Imagine how difficult that is. As a matter of fact, for most people, it is beyond reach. While it is most certainly not beyond reach (unfeasible), it can easily be if it is thought to be (if you think it is, then it is). That of course explains why most people are unhappy at work or constantly have the “can’t do” feeling or simply have a pre-decided idea of how much potential they have and what they can or can’t achieve. But how do we get to this point? How do we allow ourselves to stifle our own potential? Why do we put a cap on our ability to achieve our most desired goals and dreams? Well, the answer is very simple:
It’s because we allow external factors and events to dictate how we feel.
If your parents call you, when you’re a kid, “a failure”, you’re most likely going to stop paying attention to what the teacher is saying in class because, according to your parents, even if you DO try to understand what the teacher’s saying, you just won’t be able to, so you stop trying altogether. Consequently, you start to get abysmal grades, which serve to prove what you parents condemned you with. Now, hereafter, you become a victim of a self-destructive pattern, which goes like this:
Something happens to you, it triggers an emotion that it can feed itself on so that it can happen again!
Then you’ve got yourself a vicious cycle which you can’t escape and sometimes you simply don’t WANT to escape. As vicious as the cycle is, it’s logical, stable, predictable and safe. Any attempt to break the cycle can seem like a jump into the dreadful world of the unknown.
Now what does this have to do with learning English? It has everything to do with learning English. I have taught English to adults for more than 8 years now and I can tell you that the reason that 80% of English learners fail to achieve the level they want in English is…
Allowing external factors and events to dictate their emotions.
When we learn a second language, we can feel bored, tired and irritated. You feel all these different emotions because of external factors. You feel bored because the materials are not relevant and the teacher is not entertaining. Tired because you have to work 9 or 10 hours a day to pay the bills, take a girl out on a date, buy a car etc. Irritated because the method you are using to learn English is not working. Finally you feel impatient because no one is giving you the chance to practice so that you can improve quickly and so forth and so forth.
When you learn to master your emotions, the first thing you do is start to ask yourself “why am I feeling bored?”, “why am I feeling tired?” and “why am I feeling irritated and impatient?”. The second thing you do is tackle what triggers these emotions. If it’s the materials you are using, find new ones. Is it the teacher? Ditch him/her. Is it your work that is making you tired? Reduce your hours and find yourself another job. Is it the method? Try another one. The third thing you do is the most important step. You visualize your success. By visualizing success, you focus. When you focus, you gain plenty of immunity against external factors and much more motivation to carry on with whatever you are trying to accomplish.
Very few English language learners can achieve a native level of spoken English simply because most of them believe or are made to believe they can’t. The majority of English teachers and scholars truly believe that it is impossible to sound like a native speaker after the age of 13. Just like that kid who believes he is a failure because his parents told him so, now you believe you can’t sound like a native because THEY said so, EVERYBODY ELSE said so. Fortunately, there are so many second language learners who have proved that THEY and EVERYBODY ELSE can be wrong.
It all comes down to how well you can master your emotions. It is an enormously important skill that can change your life in ways that you could’ve never ever imagined.
Ask yourself! Are you the master of your emotions? Can you get yourself to feel as you want to feel? Do you have the power to do so? Do you have some tactics which you’d like to share with everyone else? Share if you care! 🙂
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