Imagine living a life in which you hold the power over your fears, self-doubt, and stress. Everybody seeks that power, but only a few people can unleash it like Buddhist monks, for example. Buddhist monks can control their emotions effectively using an effective mind training practice called Lojong.
Many life coaches emphasize on training the mind to enable you to handle your stress and other emotions better. They follow a few mantras in life to overcome their personal hurdles that you can practice as well. These mantras can empower you to take control of your emotions. Excited much? Here is a list of a few of those mantras.
1. Embrace Your Fears
Your fear can have a debilitating effect on you. But what you do in the face of your fear can define whether you own the power over your fear or your fear owns it over you. Western society would tell you to suppress your fears until you implode. But Buddhist monks believe in handling their fears differently. They believe in giving their fears a firm handshake and embracing them.
Instead of running away, if you can embrace and acknowledge your fears, you can render them powerless. Sometimes, you would want to hand over the baton of a big project to your colleague out of fear, but that is exactly when you should step up and face your fears. Remember, you can either run from it or you can embrace it and go forward with the opportunity to achieve something big.
Your fear gives rise to more fears. But remember, it is just as scared of you. So, embrace and deal with it. Ignoring your emotions cannot help you to overcome them. Paying attention to them will allow you to understand them better.
2. Fix Your Mental Distortions
Social commentators and writers often write about how women face more issues with their self-confidence than men, whether it is related to their bodies or work. This has been revealed through many surveys as well.1 2 This doubt can manifest in many ways. Women are more critical about their skills and they often presume the worse about their performance than it actually is. This is completely opposite for men as they presume it to be better.
This problem is complex and society plays a huge role in it. Here is what you can do to get over your self-doubt:
- Take a break: When your doubt overwhelms you into fear, then just get out. Take a break and try to get out of that mental space altogether. Ask your negative voice to take a hike.
- Connect yourself back to reality: Your fear can take you away from reality and make a hill out of a mole. So, look around you, take some deep breaths and feel connected to the reality.
- Focus on the positive: Challenge your negative voice with everything positive that you have. Your strengths are more in number than your ‘weaknesses’. So, bring your focus back to how ‘kickass’ you are.
- Learn to be kind to yourself: You should be critical of yourself but you should also learn to be appreciative. Nurture your self-confidence. And self-doubt? Kill it with kindness.
3. Change The Way You Perceive Your Stress
Stress can activate a lot of pathways in your body to prepare you for fight and flight situations. Say, you are being chased by a mob, your body tends to react to that accordingly. But this largely depends on your perception. Your body is capable of producing the same effect even if you are stuck in traffic, but only when you think of it as a big stress factor. It is because your amygdala (the brain’s integrative center for emotions, emotional behavior, and motivation) can’t differentiate between a mob and traffic. Thankfully, you can!
Perception matters a lot. So, every time you are late for a meeting and you are stressed, remind your body that you are not in any mortal danger. When you can find that perspective in yourself, you will start reacting to stress differently.
4. Look At Your Progress To Conjure Up Your Strength
Horizon effect is a term used by scientists but it is a strategy that athletes use to finish their race when they feel like giving up. They focus on how far they have come instead of seeing how far they would have to go to finish the race. This strategy can be effective for making a change in life as well. It takes time and perseverance to make a change happen in life. Sometimes, the time required to make a change can vary and things might look bleak. In such cases, you can use this strategy to push yourself forward if you feel like giving up. Look at your progress and find more strength to go further on your road to success.
5. Practice Patience To Empower Yourself
A big change never happens overnight. So, you must work towards developing patience because without that, you won’t be able to see through a change. Here are a few tips to develop patience:
- Slow yourself down: If you have a habit of rushing through things, then patience is not your strong suit. You need to slow yourself down first and practice better decision making. Focus on calming yourself down before you do something. Don’t rush into anything.
- Practice thinking before doing/talking: Thinking before you talk or do something will allow you to foresee the results that your actions can bring about. If you can master this art, you can avoid a lot of rash decisions and unfavorable results.
- Practice saying no to temptations: The third drink that you are craving for might just be too much. And just because you want to doesn’t mean you need to. Know the difference. Going for what you want might give you instant gratification but it generally comes with excess calories, a dent in your wallet or even regret. So, practice saying no to your temptations.
Patience is the most important quality that can help you to overcome the big hurdles and make big changes in life.
You can live an empowered life if you can learn to uncomplicate your issues. Hopefully, these strategies will help you to just that.
References
