Here is something that is simple to understand, but far from easy to do. That is not to let outside circumstances and people control your emotions. This is more difficult the closer the people are to you. The more they mean to you, the more emotional reaction they can cause you to experience. That is, only if you let them. I am not advocating you become an unfeeling zombie. Far from it. What I am advocating is to not only control, but choose what emotions you feel.

If you are one of the 95% of people who go through life without taking a look inwards, this concept that you have any control of your emotions may seem foreign to you. Here is the truth. What you feel depends on the meaning you assign to someone’s behavior or words. If a stranger walks up and tells you they do not like you, it may bother you but beyond that you will go about your day. If a good friend tells you the same thing, it has a far greater impact. The emotion you choose in response to that will dictate your behavior, which will go a long way to deciding the fate of not only that interaction, but the life of the friendship.

This becomes even more difficult when the person’s behavior is down right disrespectful. Even then, you have the option, as Sun Tzu so plainly put it, to respond intelligently. You may ask what some man named after a star has anything to do with your life. Sun Tzu wrote the amazing book, The Art of War. It not only has timeless advice for military combat, but can be applied to your business and personal life as well.

When you pause and choose how to respond to a situation, you take control of that situation. In the case of our friend telling us they do not like us, we can choose several ways to respond. We can be defensive and inform them that we no longer like them. We may even go on to list their faults and how we feel we are better than them. That is responding from a place of hurt and anger. It will not only do little to solve the original complaint our friend may have, we have now widened the chasm between our hearts. If we are interested in maintaining this friendship, it would serve us far better to respond with a genuine caring and inquisitive question about what made our friend change their mind about our relation. We not only may preserve the friendship, we may also make room for it to grow and become closer. As an added bonus, we may learn something about ourselves.

I am not a fool to think that this is an easy process. I still struggle with it on occasion as well. What we must understand is that when we allow someone to affect us emotionally, we, in effect, become their servant and they become our master. We relinquish control of the situation and the repercussions that will result. A far wiser and more intelligent response would be to consider what outcome you wish for the situation. Another question to ask yourself is the effects of the negative emotions on our mental and physical well-being worth handing over control to our emotions? As I said in the beginning of this post, it is not easy. We need tools and strategies, many of which can be found in the articles on this website, to help us gain control. The price we will pay to do that will be well worth it.