I know exactly what got me to where I am today
The last five years have been the best years of my life so far. Honestly, I would not know what else to ask for.
I know exactly what got me here, in terms of happiness in my personal life as well as professional satisfaction and financial wellbeing.
And if I had to start this life from zero, and could, I would give up without blinking every ability, every skill, all the accumulated know-how, on the condition that I could begin life with two skills:
- The ability to control my emotions
- The ability to direct my thoughts
I was born with neither of them. Quite the opposite. I had to develop them until they reached the level they are at now. Where, often, they feel like an unfair advantage that I almost should not have.
Because these two things allowed me, and still allow me, to steer my own life. Not to be carried left and right like a leaf in the wind.
Not to depend on how I happen to wake up in the morning, or on how one person or another decides to influence my day.
You know how it goes. You make a plan, you get to work, then something external happens and the inside starts to boil.
The least productive thoughts start piling on top of each other and you feel them suffocating you. They cling to you and however hard you try to shake them off, they disappear for three seconds and come back. How does the line go?
Your demons may have been ejected from the building, but they’re out in the parking lot, doing push-ups.
Exactly.
Then you feel the least constructive emotions wrapping around you. For some it is anxiety and worry, for others anger, others sink into sadness, disappointment and cynicism. “What is the point? It is all going to hell anyway.”
Well, in moments like those, I have reached the point of trusting my own capacity to get myself out of there. And fast.
Not in weeks, not in days, not in hours. In minutes. I simply KNOW I can get out of there. I am certain of it.
Can you imagine how that feels?
To have those unproductive thoughts, to feel that negative emotion wrapping around you and to start slowly sinking into it. And yet, AT THE SAME TIME, to feel that confidence activating, for the hundredth time, that it is up to you to pull yourself out of those states, and above all to know with certainty that in a few minutes you will feel at least 80 to 90% better.
I will tell you how it feels. It feels like playing life with cheat codes. Like having set the game difficulty to easy mode.
Clearly you are not immune. Everything that can happen to other people can happen to you too. You are not made of stone, you are influenced by other people, by relationships, by the work you do, by health problems, by uncertainty, by life. It is just that you can pull yourself out of those states easily. And you know you can do it, because you have done it hundreds of times before, and it has become predictable that it will work this time as well.
Why the confidence that you can regulate your emotions is worth more than the ability itself
The confidence that you can regulate your own emotional states and thoughts is actually worth more than the ability itself.
Seriously. Being able to pull yourself out of those states and stop the thoughts is valuable. Obviously.
But the confidence that you have learned to do it, and that it is predictable that it will work, helps you because it lets you take on decisions that make other people hesitate and freeze.
Why do they freeze? Because they are afraid of the consequences of their own decisions. And you are not, any more. Because you know you might get it wrong and yes, it might hurt. But you also know how to make the pain stop.
It is like a pain you know, because you have had it before, and you are sure it is not serious and that it passes every time.
So yes, the most powerful abilities I have acquired in forty-odd years of life are being able to regulate my emotional states and my thoughts, on demand, every time I need to.
Emotional regulation lets you do things in life that other people do not even have the courage to try.
Why at senior level it is not hard skills that make the difference, but control under pressure
And this is not only my personal experience. Before starting to write I sat and thought about all the people I have worked with in strategic intervention and change strategy sessions over the last thirteen years. The most successful among them are people who invested time, energy and money in developing their capacity to regulate their emotions and their thoughts.
They went to psychotherapy, they paid for a coach, they did training. They did these things proactively. Not when life had already put them on the floor. Proactively, because they did not want to be put on the floor by life again.
They did not try to do only easy things. On the contrary, they took on positions of responsibility and complicated decisions that generated stress, worry and effort.
BUT while they were doing that, they also invested in their capacity to manage all that extra worry and responsibility. Because they understood quickly that above a certain professional level, it is not hard skills that make the difference.
It is how you perform and how you keep control when you are under pressure.
In other words, they did not look for an easy life. But they trained so that life would feel easier than it actually was. It is like struggling to move a 15 kilo dumbbell at the gym and not being able to believe how heavy it is, and then someone who looks like he has been training his whole life walks past and picks it up with two fingers, like a feather. Objectively that dumbbell still weighed 15 kilos. For him and for you. It is just that you could barely move it and for him it felt like nothing.
That is why, in recent years, so much of what I do professionally goes towards teaching people techniques and protocols for emotional self regulation. Because it is one of the most valuable ways in which I feel I can help them. Whatever it is they want to change in their lives.
And because I know how incredible it feels to have these abilities, after a whole life of not having them.
The three obstacles that stop you regulating your own emotions and thoughts
But if the main factors limiting people’s performance and their capacity to be happy all correlate with the ability to control their emotions and thoughts, then why do people not simply learn a few self regulation techniques and be done with it?
Because it is not as easy as it looks. Here are the main obstacles as I see them.
1. A lack of discipline, and not understanding how self regulation protocols actually work
Say you learn a basic breathing technique. It is not hard. Someone explains it to you, you do it once, and you see that it “sort of helps a bit”. Or more. That is the immediate benefit of a technique done for the first time.
It is nice, but the first time you do it you experience only a small part of the effect that protocol can produce. Because you did not do it perfectly. There are always nuances, and nobody gets them right first time.
Then, like anything done for the first time, it feels strange. Your nervous system still perceives the protocol as unfamiliar. So part of it relaxes thanks to the protocol, and the other part stays cautious, on guard. So the relaxation is not at its full potential.
Then, problem number two is that every such protocol or nervous system regulation technique has two benefits:
- An immediate benefit, the relaxation I mentioned above. It is the one that instantly moves the nervous system out of fight or flight, the sympathetic branch, and into rest, digest and healing, the parasympathetic branch.
- A medium to long term benefit, that of desensitising the amygdala, the area of the brain responsible for triggering the “alarm”, the one that puts the whole system into fight or flight at the smallest sign of danger. The problem is that this second benefit does not activate if you do the technique once or twice. It generally settles in after a few weeks of repeating the protocol daily.
Do not repeat it daily, as a method of emotional hygiene, and you do not get this second effect. Only the first one, the momentary relaxation.
In practice, even when they feel an improvement in their state, many people find it hard to be disciplined enough to practise daily. And on the “good” days in particular, they forget these techniques, precisely because they “felt they did not need them”.
But that is exactly why we call these practices emotional hygiene. They work very much like the hygiene in our daily lives. We do not brush our teeth only when someone tells us it is time. We do it daily, preventively, because we understand that skipping two or three days will create problems. Nobody says “nobody pulled a face at me today, so it is a good day, today I will not wash.” We need to do the same with emotional hygiene.
2. They cannot access these tools exactly when they need them
“I tested it, it worked, but in the moments of crisis I forget to use it. Or I freeze and only remember it after the crisis has passed.”
This happens often, especially in the early stages, when the technique or protocol has not yet become part of your nervous system. Having gone through the steps once or twice gives you the know-how. You have understood the steps, memorised them, you could repeat them on your own.
The problem is that this is not enough. Knowing something and having integrated it are completely different things. Our education system, school, taught us to memorise and lied to us that if we have read something then that is it, it is enough, it will be fine.
And as you have already found out in adult life, that is a deception. How many things have we understood about ourselves, our patterns and the way we live, and still not changed? Many.
In the case of emotional self regulation techniques, the brain needs to get used to the new information, so it stops treating it as unfamiliar.
Then it needs to be taken by the hand, by us, down the same road, many times, until it comes to prefer it. We need to teach it that every time we start down this road we arrive somewhere calmer, more balanced, better for us.
This is what in neuroscience is called rewiring. Hebb’s law: neurons that fire together wire together.
In other words, the reason that even though you have read about or experienced a technique you cannot access it in the moments when you genuinely need it, is that it has not yet become wired. It has not yet become part of your nervous system.
The solution is to repeat it. Until it becomes part of you. Even on the days when it seems you have no reason to do it. Especially on those days.
By the way, do you know what tool can help you integrate such a protocol MUCH faster? Hypnosis.
Hypnosis can to a certain extent replace discipline. Anything done or repeated inside a hypnotic trance is perceived by the nervous system as if it had been repeated hundreds of times in a conscious state. Because when we are deeply relaxed, whatever we plant there goes straight into the subconscious and the effect is amplified.
3. “This does not work for me”
Another problem is that some people have tried exercises like this and concluded that “it does not work for them”. It can happen.
Because we are so different, in my one to one practice I have a set of 24 emotional regulation protocols, gathered and tested over the 13+ years of doing what I do. They are split into different categories. Some have an immediate effect, others take twenty minutes to work. Some are somatic, using the body to regulate the nervous system, others are cognitive, others work very well for visual people who easily make films in their heads, and others, on the contrary, I use with people who find it difficult to imagine things at all (aphantasia). Some are simple, like breathing or meditation techniques, others are complex and take thirty minutes to do.
What I mean is that we are so different that it is normal for each of us to need a slightly different protocol. And if someone tested a protocol that did not work for them, that does not say something about self regulation protocols in general. It says something about the fit between how that person works and the protocol they tested. If it did not work for you, you need a different protocol. One that works for you, predictably, every time.
About the author
Andrei Roșca is a change strategist working one to one with founders, C level executives and senior managers who perform well on the outside while carrying a constant internal load. The work is nervous system regulation under real pressure, not motivation and not mindset. 13+ years of practice, 510+ clients, 8120+ individual sessions, through Whisper, Center for Strategic Change. Sessions are online, in English or in Romanian.
If this described your situation, start here: Coaching for overthinking executives. Or read more about my background and method.