Sam Dailey (Own Your Feelings)
Sam is a certified Growth Mode Coach and Finance and Technology expert who helps professionals find balance and joy in their careers. Drawing on his extensive background leading wo...
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How can we hold ourselves accountable for our emotions?
So the next time that you feel yourself either blaming others for your negative emotions or giving credit to others, either people or things for your positive emotions, you can ask yourself a simple question to try to remind yourself of this principle. What role am I playing in this emotion that I'm pretending not to notice? And you'll always come up with an answer to this question, a way that you actually are the owner of your emotion rather than being the victim of your emotions.
Are we responsible for other people's emotions?
This principle that emotions belong to the feelers doesn't only apply to our own emotions, it applies to other people's emotions as well. We often try to fix other people's emotions or we judge them for their emotions. But this principle can help remind us that other people's emotions are not our responsibility to fix. A motto you can use for remembering this is that you cannot make anyone else feel anything. Now, you can still hurt people and help people. So this does not free you from an obligation to be kind and compassionate, but it does for you from an obligation to fix other people's emotions or change other people because you cannot. It's their job to work on their own emotions.
What is emotional responsibility and how can we visualize it?
This principle of emotional awareness that emotions belong to the feeler is all about recognising that our emotions happen inside of us. They happen to us, and they happen because of us and us alone. A motto for helping you remember this principle is that only I make me mad. You can also use a visual to help you remember this. You can imagine a traffic jam in two cars next to each other in separate lanes. In one car, the driver's frustrated, honking on his horn, he's angry, and the car next to him, the person's relaxed. They're listening to music. They have their window down and their arm out the window. It's the same external circumstances, but two very different sets of emotions. Because our emotions aren't dictated by our external circumstances, they're dictated by how we internally are relating to our external circumstances.