Not to display anger or other emotions. To be free of passion and yet full of love. —Marcus Aurelius. How often do you take what other people say and do personally? How often do you feel like you have to “fix” someone else’s mood? Today I want to talk about emotional responsibility, and how it can lead a stronger sense of self and keep you from getting pulled into other peoples emotional mayhem.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. —Rumi Have you ever thought about how often we have judgments in our language? Are you even aware of how often we communicate our opinions and feelings about others? What if we could remove judgments from our language? Today I want to talk about ways that we can make our language more clear, and increase our ability to communicate non-judgementally with others.
“It is possible to curb your arrogance, to overcome pleasure and pain, to rise above your ambition, and to not be angry with stupid and ungrateful people — yes, even to care for them.” — Marcus Aurelius How do you win an argument? All of us have to deal with conflict in our lives. To think otherwise is completely unrealistic. But when we have an argument, what is our goal? What do we hope to achieve? To change the other person’s mind? To prove that we are right?
“It is our own opinions that disturb us. Take away these opinions and resolve to dismiss your judgment about an act as if it were something grievous, and your anger is gone.” — Marcus Aurelius Practicing stoicism is not about repressing emotions. It is not about pretending you feel nothing. It’s about understanding how your mind works, so that you can use it to benefit you and those around you. It’s about finding balance and equanimity. It’s recognizing that you have control over what you think, feel, and do. If you are swayed by every little thing other people say, or frustrated by outside events, you will be at the whims of your emotions.
“If it is not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it.” — Marcus Aurelius One of the hazards of being alive is the fact that we’re never going to please everyone. We’re going to have people that will not like what we do. People are going to criticize whatever it is we’re doing. And in the 21st century, this is nowhere more apparent than in social media. This weeks episode is about how to be your best online.
Dealing with strong emotions in life is something that all of us have to do. But in order for us to actually deal with these different emotions that we have, we need to be sure what we’re actually feeling. We need to expand our emotional vocabulary to give us the words to be able to really identify what it is that we’re feeling and then respond appropriately.
“You must know that it is no easy thing for a principle to become a man’s own, unless each day he maintain it and hear it maintained, as well as work it out in life.” – Epictetus Show Notes: How often do we hear something, think that we understand it, but yet it still takes us quite a while to make it a part of our daily life? Change is not easy. Studies show that it takes 3-6 weeks for a habit to become ingrained, depending on the complexity of the habit. It also depends on if you are...
“Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.” ― Seneca Show Notes • Today’s topic is one that is a bit personal to me. It’s something that I struggle with at times. • I’ll get upset about something, and because I let anger get the best of me, I make the situation far worse than the event that I got angry about in the first place. • And getting angry also causes me to ruin my inner peace. We make myself unhappy by not dealing with anger in a constructive way. I...
“Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.” ― Epictetus Show Notes: • Stoics believed strongly that we are all in control of our own emotions • One of the strongest emotions we have to deal with is anger • From an evolutionary standpoint it seems to makes sense. We feel threatened and we respond in a way that we think will deal with the threat. • But the thing is, fear is usually the response to a physical threat. Anger is usually response from...
“How much better to heal than seek revenge from injury. Vengeance wastes a lot of time and exposes you to many more injuries than the first that sparked it. Anger always outlasts hurt. Best to take the opposite course. Would anyone think it normal to return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog?” — Seneca Transcript I was talking with a friend the other day about how to deal with anger. He asked me specifically about how to deal with anger in life, so I felt it only appropriate to talk about anger today. Anger...
