Saved a big piece for near the end.

Your emotions drive your attitudes and beliefs. Your attitudes and beliefs drive your behavior. Quite simply, if you want to achieve lasting change, you must look deep into you’re your emotional composition.

Emotions and Physical Energy are Connected

Another pretty easy visual. When you are in a higher emotional state (joyous, happy, satisfied), your physical energy is higher. You have the energy to execute your ideas and drive your passion. Conversely, when your emotional composition is lower (anger, frustration, grief), your physical energy is lacking.
This is an important barometer to keep in mind as we continue to take a look at your emotions. Listen to your body’s energy.

Most Common Emotional Frame

Healthy humans have ups and downs in their daily emotional composition. There are times of joy, times of satisfaction, times of overwhelming and periods of dark. All part of a normal day on the planet. Not every moment is butterflies and mugging selfies as Facebook would have us believe.

But within the fluidity of human emotion comes a common resting spot. That is a place where, over time, people’s emotional composition comes to settle. This is the spot that both you and I seek to understand. This becomes the emotional baseline that can then be used for prescriptive actions to improve overall emotional health.

It’s Not What You Think

When asked, most people will respond with a higher level of emotional composition than accurate at the time. This is due to a couple of factors including lack of emotional awareness and the desire to project a better state of emotional health to others and the outside world. In my experience, most people will respond to the query about emotional composition with where they would like to be instead of where they are at.

So, to get to your real emotional composition, some tracking is needed. My encouragement is to look at your most common emotional composition over 30 days. Also note your emotional high and low points for each day as well.

The Reconciliation to the Truth

As you track your own view of emotional composition, ask a friend, significant other or trusted team member to give you the same information daily. Ask her or him where they think you are at and note that as well.

As the above equation is true that emotions drive behaviors, your behaviors are tattletale of your emotional composition. The feedback from a trusted source is based on your behavior they observe. Your tone, your body language, how you approach situations. Even if you overcompensate with trying to be happy. You cannot escape what your behaviors tell others. Frustrated tone come from a frustrated person.

Now with 30 days of your own observations and 30 days of feedback from a valued and trusted source, you can see your most common spot. Hopefully over 30 days of self-examination you were also able to be more self-honest with your typical emotional state as well.

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.