Manage Your Mind: For Emotional Intelligence, Feelings, Moods, and Stress Management

By Anurag P. Lakhlani

Why did my plant die? A child asked his mother in disbelief. I have daily cleaned all the leaves, sprinkled water on them, put the plant in sunlight, given it food, then why did it die? Tears were rolling down his eyes. With love, his mother embraced him and said. Dear, you needed to water the roots, not the leaves.

When it comes to emotional intelligence, feelings, moods, anxiety and stress, are we watering the roots? This book explores practical and common sense approaches to manage the mind.

Quick Action Tools can help you shift your unwanted state of mind in very short time and quickly elicit the desired state of mind.
Readers participation is encouraged for developing ones toolset.
Deep Action Tools can water the roots to develop your broader understanding of self identity and purpose of life.
Ten methods of meditation that can be easily practiced are discussed.
A strategy is developed to manage mind efficiently.
Selected emotions, feelings and moods are explored.
Discussion on stress management is included.

The book provides valuable tools to manage emotions, feelings, moods, and stress by managing ones mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Jun 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781482833317

Book preview

PART I

WHY WE NEED MIND MANAGEMENT

CHAPTER 1

Why Should You Read This Book?

Why did my plant die? a child asked his mother in disbelief. For the five-year-old, this plant in a small pot meant the world. I have cleaned all the leaves daily, sprinkled water on them, put the plant in sunlight, given it food. Then why did it die? Tears were rolling down his eyes.

With love, his mother embraced him and said, Son, you needed to water the roots, not the leaves.

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Emotions, feelings, and moods arise in the mind. Attempts to address them only at the behavioral, philosophical, or intellectual levels will not lead us to deeper success. When the crisis strikes, all superficial learning will evaporate and the core of the character will be exposed to the situation. We need to water the roots. We need to learn to manage our mind—conscious and subconscious. We need to find out what influences the state of mind, the thoughts, the moods, the feelings, and the emotions. We need to build the paradigm, the belief system, the character, self-identity, the understanding of self, and purpose of life to become emotionally intelligent in a deeper sense. If we understand how to manage the mind, we will be better equipped to manage emotions, feelings, moods, and deal with stress.

This book is a practical and common-sense approach to understand and manage the mind for the above purposes.

I like the following story:

I can speak ten languages fluently. Can anyone figure out which one is my mother tongue? a foreign scholar challenged the court of a king.

The king, who always promoted scholarly interactions and challenges, asked his court to figure out the mother tongue of the foreign scholar. All the wise men in the court tried to test his knowledge of the language, his fluency, his vocabulary, his grammar, his accent. The foreign scholar demonstrated his proficiency in all ten languages that a native speaker has. All day long, the wise men tried and failed to figure out the mother tongue.

When all failed, the prime minister stood up and said, Please be our guest for a night. If we fail to identify your mother tongue by tomorrow noon, you win.

The king was also enjoying the battle and was hopeful that his prime minister would solve this puzzle.

In the middle of the night, when the foreign scholar was in deep sleep, the prime minister poured cold water on the scholar and started beating him abruptly. Confused by the situation, out of surprise and panic, the scholar asked in one language, Why are you beating me?

The language you are speaking now is your mother tongue, claimed the prime minister.

The scholar agreed, praised the wisdom of the prime minister, and left the court in the morning.

In crisis, when we are not prepared, the inner reality comes out.

Can we develop a deeper character and proper understanding of mind such that we can face even crises more efficiently? This is what this book aims for.

What is in this book? What will you learn?

• Part 1: Why We Need Mind Management: This part introduces you to the need of the deeper understanding of the mind. It also introduces the tools we will develop in the following parts.

• Part 2: Quick Action Tools: Here, you will explore what can quickly influence the state of mind. You may want to upgrade your tools, which will be helpful for decreasing the intensity of an unwanted state of mind or increasing the intensity of a desired state of mind by quickly managing the state of mind.

• Part 3: Deep Action Tools: This part of the book will water the roots and develop a much deeper understanding of the mind. You will develop a much deeper understanding of self, life, conditioning of the mind, and learn the methods of meditation.

• Part 4: Mastering Emotional Intelligence: Here, we explore what emotional intelligence is. We develop a strategy—a master plan to manage emotions with the help of tools developed in parts 2 and 3. We explore selected groups of emotions one at a time for detailed analysis and discussion.

• Part 5: Managing Feelings and Moods: We explore selected feelings and moods. We understand them. Then, we may apply our tools to manage them efficiently.

• Part 6: Managing Stress: Here, we explore the world of stress. This book discusses some factors that may help reduce stress and manage it efficiently. The tools of parts 2 and 3 can be utilized to manage stress.

• Part 7: Living a Happy Life: This section concludes the learning of the book with anecdotes.

Benjamin Franklin wisely said, Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn. For effective learning from this book, make sure you set some personal goals, read and contemplate on the material regularly, explore and participate in the activities of developing your tools actively.

Are you ready to take a deep dive into the world of managing the mind? Keep on reading.

CHAPTER 2

The Mysterious Mind

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

—Plutarch

How about exploring the following activities?

Activity 1: Close your eyes and observe how you feel. Are you relaxed, calm, or agitated? How are your body muscles? Do you feel any tension in hand, leg, or body muscles? How is your breathing? Is it deep or shallow? Observe all these and remember them.

Activity 2: Now, remember the worst incident of your life for a minute. It can be a job loss, a betrayal in love, social insult, or any other situation. For just one minute, remember the details—rewind the movie: what you saw, heard, and felt at that time. What was your internal state of mind? Just remember.

Activity 3: Now, come out of the situation and take inventory of the body and mind again. Compare with the situation after Activity 1. Are you relaxed and calm or agitated? How about your muscles and breathing? I bet, just by remembering an incident, your state of mind will change. The emotions, feelings, and mood will change. So, may we conclude that one of the factors that can affect our mind quickly is memory recall?

Activity 4: Now, let us use the same mechanism of memory recall to get into a pleasant state. Remember the best incident of your life. It may be a memorable vacation, a memorable event in a relationship, winning a competition, any family gathering, or any other thing. Again, for just one minute, remember the details—rewind the movie to what you saw, heard, and felt at that time. Just remember. I bet, just by remembering this incident, your state of mind will change.

Activity 5: If you are not yet relaxed, do this breathing exercise. Just relax your body and take deep breaths. In deep breathing, your abdomen should move, not the chest. Take deep and longer breaths for a few minutes and take inventory of your body. I believe, by now, you are much more relaxed.

You may ask, what is the point in doing these activities? Well, I just wanted to demonstrate that there are factors that influence the state of mind. I wanted to give you an experience. I believe I have succeeded, at least partially, to convince you that we can change the state of mind by various activities and hence can manage our emotions, feelings, moods, etc.

I would classify the factors affecting mind in two categories, depending on how they can affect the mind.

1. Quick Action Tools: They influence the mind very fast.

2. Deep Action Tools: They influence the mind for the long term.

Here are some more details of both the above categories.

1. Quick Action Tools: The following diagram summarizes the activities that can influence the state of mind very quickly. In subsequent chapters, we will explore each of them individually.

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Figure: Quick Action Tools that can change the state of mind quickly

2. Deep Action Tools: The following diagram summarizes what influences the mind in the long term and has longer perspective. We will explore each of them individually in detail in this book.

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Figure: Deep Action Tools that can nurture and develop the mind over a long time.

Lao Tzu said, A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Let us take one step at a time to understand our mind and manage it effectively.

With help of the mind,

I become happy, feel love,

I remember; I imagine,

Mind makes my life colorful.

When the mind is uncontrolled,

I feel fear, become jealous,

I am worried and anxious,

Mind gives me sorrow.

Mind is a good helper,

Mind is a painful ruler,

Manage your mind,

Or the mind will manage you.

PART II

QUICK ACTION TOOLS

CHAPTER 3

Sensory Inputs

Our senses are the doors to our mind.

Joy as well as jealousy can enter through it.

How do we interact with the world? Well, we use our five senses for the interaction. Anything we know about the world comes to us through one of the senses. These senses have great influence on the state of our mind. Let us explore all the senses and understand how we can utilize them to manage our mind.

1. Vision: When we see a car approaching us with full speed, an emotion of fear elicits in us and we jump away from the car. When we see a beautiful painting, we become delighted. When we don’t see our car keys in its usual place, especially while getting late for work, we become irritated. When we read a romantic letter from our beloved one, love prevails over our mind. When we see an insulting e-mail, it makes us angry. Now, we are very sure that what we see impacts our state of mind and effectively influences the emotions, moods, and feelings. So, can we use this knowledge for our benefit?

When I am angry and upset, I spend some time with nature, especially during sunset. When I see the colorful sky, with the intricacies of the shades of the colors, I become delighted. What is your experience about such a colorful sky? When I see the photo album of my last vacation, a sense of happiness and delight comes to me. Do you keep pictures of your family and friends with you? What do you feel when you look at them?

When I am down and not energetic, I glance through the photos of award ceremonies where I received awards. This gives me courage. This gives me momentum and inspiration to work