How Successful People Achieve Emotionally Agility & Consistency

Consistency is the gold standard of a good life because it means you’re unstoppable: you will show up

Photo by Adrian Swancar from Unsplash

Human beings speak about 16,000 words a day on average. Just imagine how many unspoken ones run through our minds. The large majority of them are not facts, but judgments entwined with emotions.

All healthy human beings have an inner trajectory of thoughts and feelings that include criticism, doubt, and fear. That’s simply our minds doing what they were designed to do: anticipating and solving problems, and avoiding potential challenges or failures.

Why Be Emotionally Consistent?

The prevailing wisdom says that we should be emotionally consistent — not by denying our emotions, but rather by using our attention, our most important asset, to cultivate this essential capacity for inner consistency.

Consistency is the gold standard of a good life because it means you’re unstoppable: you will show up — regardless of how bad the emotions or situation you are facing. Most people, however, willingly match their behavior to the extreme emotions they feel.

Much of the power inconsistency is psychological. As they say, mind over matter. When life is a rollercoaster, we have to identify things that help us remain rooted and generate positive emotions to keep ourselves afloat.

At the same time, there is a fine line between actively managing your emotions, as well as being an overthinker. Getting hooked onto your thoughts and constantly rationalizing why you feel a certain way can create a lot of internal chatter, unnecessarily sapping up cognitive resources that could be put to better use.

Familiar? This is an incredibly common issue, often perpetuated by self-management strategies. When we get anxious about work, unemployment, jealous of other’s successes, fear rejection, or feel distressed, we use positive affirmations and to-do lists to help calm our nerves and set us back on track.

Yet, we struggle with the same issues year on year, never truly overcoming this phenomenon since childhood. Clearly, these methods we have adopted to minimize…