A Guidance System

Emotions are your guidance system, not the cause your problems. Emotions are the response to what is happening in your life. They are an indication of what you are experiencing. Like a thermometer tells you the temperature in a room, your emotions tell you about the state of your life. Therefore, emotions are a good thing that can guide you to making your life what you want it to be.

Usually one hears about guidance systems when referring to airplanes or missiles. With airplanes, the guidance system helps make sure you will safely reach your vacation destination. In shooting a missile, the guidance system helps make sure the missile hits its destination doing the desired damage.

With emotions, the guidance system tells you whether what you are experiencing is making you happy or sad, is right or wrong, is good or bad. So if you are angry or depressed or sad, that is not the problem. That is the measure of your problem. 

To make changes, you must dig deeper than your emotions (or maybe you already have) to find the cause of your anger, your depression, your sadness. It is easy to say, "I am depressed" and to leave it there, being depressed. It is as if labeling the emotion is enough. However, when used as a guidance system, your emotions help you to be armed with a better understanding of the current state of affairs of your life and you can begin to deal with the cause, to correct it if you can. 

As you make these changes, you will feel your emotional barometer change. Most situations can be changed, if not by yourself then with the help of a family member, a friend, or a trained professional. In those situations that cannot be changed, your thinking can be. While it may seem difficult to impossible, one does have that choice and that ability. 

I believe that each one of us is creating for ourselves a life that reflects how we think about things, how we see things, whether we are optimistic or pessimistic. We must remember that our emotions are only the measure your life not the cause. 

If your emotions are telling you that you are happy and that your life is good, keep up the good work. If your emotions are telling you that you are sad, unhappy, lonely, frightened, depressed, etc, then think about how to begin the process of change.

On a day to day basis, you can alter your emotions by how you think about things. If the person in line at the grocery store in front of you is giving the checker a hard time and holding up the line, it is not necessarily about you and your anger at having to wait or your disgust with the woman's rudeness.

Maybe the person can barely afford her groceries, maybe her husband is dying of cancer, maybe she just got a call that her child was in trouble again at school. If you can begin to look at the "maybes," chances are you will not be as angry with this stranger who is holding up the line as you were. Often, a person's problems are invisible, so don't take them for granted.

Even with something as severe as the diagnosis of an incurable disease; a person can change their thinking. He can spend all the time left being depressed, down, and sad or he can make the best of the time left, do those things he has been postponing, make sure he tells those who matter that he loves them, look at those parts of his life for which he should be grateful. He can live life as well as he can, while he can.

While some sayings are trite, like ...  you can change if you want to, it is all in how you think about it, if you change your attitude you can change your life  ...  they are true. Try it, you'll be surprised.