From Thomas Hattersley – Executive Life Coach
For any elite executive, an essential part of business or life coaching, is being able to deal with the emotional content of your experiences. Day after day, you may be driven by external factors and situations not of your own making. How you deal with it is entirely up to you.
Such is executive life, of course, and no coach can stop the world turning, but the problems come in how you perceive external circumstances and to what extent you internalise them. You can’t do a thing about the world. Acknowledging that is the first step. The next step is to make the distinction between objective facts and subjective experiences.
It is in your power to change your subjective experience.
Make executive life better
We think our brains are logical – almost mechanistic – thinking machines. They are the board room and high-performance management of our lives that process data and help us make executive decisions. They are nothing of the sort, especially not on a bad day.
Our brains are pattern-seeking, short-cut taking and meaning-making machines. Our reality is what our brain tells itself. It takes sensory data and augments it on-the-fly ascribing meaning as it goes. It takes thousands of short-cuts every moment to construct a world based on rules it instinctively knows and others it has learned. Sometimes it gets things wrong or becomes confused. Simple optical illusions can fox us. Visual patterns can deceive us into recognising and perceiving shapes that aren’t really there.
And that’s just our visual faculties. The mind sometimes seems to play tricks on us because our perception and cognition are deeply subjective.
Accentuate the executive
So, it makes sense that the way in which you experience the world can also be warped by your subjective emotions. If those emotions are negative – if you feel out of control and at the mercy of events – your mind will look for patterns that emphasise this and discard evidence to the contrary. It’s another short-cut, an efficiency run by the sentient biological porridge between your ears, but you can change it.
Learning to achieve mastery of your emotions uses the same mental mechanisms that your brain sometimes employs when it’s busy accentuating the negative. Only this time you concentrate on positive reinforcement. An executive life coach can show you how.
I can help you achieve mastery of your emotions. I have a deep understanding of the mind and how it works. I can help you get unstuck and unlock your full potential. Through my personalised coaching programmes, you get clarity and focus on where you want to be. Find out more about emotional mastery and all the other ways I can help by speaking with me on the phone. It’s a very personal choice, so we should check if we are suited to one another first.