About Your Emotional GPS
Your Emotional GPS is a philosophy that says that it doesn’t matter what you’ve done or failed to do. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about you or what you have or ’should’ have done. The past is the past.
It is the drawing of a line separating now and the future from what has gone. All that matters is where you go from here. It might be that you would rather be in a different starting place, but you are where you are. And that is just the starting place. Not the final destination.
The highest and best use of your time is in identifying where you want to get to. And of all the strategies to get there, the most powerful and effective is to achieve it emotionally. By this I mean that we all live in two worlds. The world of what we are emotionally and what we are physically. We can emotionally achieve a goal very quickly. Sometimes instantaneously. But often achieving a goal physically is impossible to reach overnight.
For example, you can’t lose three stone overnight – at least without surgery – can you?
But you could switch to being so determined and motivated to lose the weight that you ate perfectly, exercised and so on.
You might not be able to eliminate your debt overnight, but you could start on the quickest path to clearing it as from now, couldn’t you?
Being emotionally ready makes all the behaviours and actions easy and seem natural to achieve the goal. However trying to do it the other way around is often counter-productive and often makes for a long, hard slog.
Ask any Alcoholic, Drug Addict, Serial Dieter or compulsive anything how hard it is to physically do or not do something different to what you are emotionally drawn to. Or any Boss, Parent or Teacher how hard it is to get someone to do something different when they haven’t bought in to the change. Look even to your own experiences and consider how hard it’s been to keep a new resolution when it goes against the emotional grain.
A goal is always achieved quicker, when it feels right emotionally and so becomes you. Therefore the behaviours and actions you need to achieve it naturally follow. When a Smoker stops smoking is when something inside them snaps and they no longer feel like a Smoker. Until then they can try everything and spend a fortune and get nowhere.
Despite many thousand years searching there are no rules or codes that work universally that people can stick to. Everyone has a different DNA, different experiences, different cultural upbringing and so on. You are unique. What we all have in common though, is that we are at our happiest, most productive and generally at our best when we are authentic.
What We Do Is A Reflection Of What We Feel
The habits, actions and behaviours that are natural to us reflect our emotional blueprint. When we try to adapt what we are, to fit into rules and ’shoulds’, it is like trying to get a brick building from wooden logs. As a result, we start to feel stressed. Stress doesn’t just tense up our emotional muscles, but also our creative, intellectual and emotional bandwidth. Eventually this will result in you grinding to a halt, until your emotional blueprint adapts.
Of course, you can force yourself into some change with enough discipline, focus and willpower. But it’s very costly in time and resources and you may find that the change doesn’t suit your unique design anyway. Because we are all unique, we all start from different places and aspire to different destinations.
There’s no definitive set of rules that we can effectively live by. This is where the idea of an Emotional GPS comes in. Like a cars Sat Nav, it hones in relentlessly on where you want to get to and adjusts endlessly to wrong turns, obstacles and setbacks.
