Today, I would love to talk to you about your emotions, your primary basic emotions, you know, as part of emotional intelligence your self-awareness meaning being aware of your emotions. How you feel, why you feel that way? And what others feel and why they feel that way? Is your number one skill and knowing how to name your emotions is the first part of that emotional self-awareness because what ends up happening, most of the times is that we mixed emotions we label them incorrectly when you feel sad, you might say, I'm frustrated. When you feel angry. You can say that. Oh my God. I am just so disgusted. So, if you are using these mixed feelings and mixed emotions and incorrect labeling of your emotions, you'll never be able to understand yourself at a deeper level. For that reason, I wanted to talk about this video of emotions that Robert Plutchik created back in the 2001, so that you can become even more aware about your emotions.
If you're ready. Let's go.
So here is the wheel of emotions by Robert Plutchik. As you see, he gathered eight primary emotions all together and he paired them with their polar opposites. For example, as you see anger here, and you see fear on the polar opposite side, you see Joy here, and then you see sadness on the polar opposite,
you see anticipation here, and then you see surprise over here. And also, you see trust here and you see disgust here, these are all opposite pollar's of emotions and that's exactly what we are going to talk about right now.
Number one is the fear if you ask my opinion, teaching Neuro-linguistic programming and certifying coaches since 2011, what I have realized. And what I know is that fear is the biggest emotion that we feel. And it is the most real one because in our brain, let me show you in our brain. There is a very important part that is responsible for our survival. It's called Amygdala. And amygdala’s job. Amygdala’s duty is to protect you from all kinds of dangers, and all kinds of threats and that is about fear.
When you feel the fear. Here's what happens when you feel the fear. You might start with apprehension. It may not be that deep, but if you go a little bit deeper, if you lose control of the fear, you might even go into terror. So, you need to understand that the fear is the reason why you stopped doing, what you want to do, fear is the reason why you don't even start chasing your goals and dreams.
And fear is, the reason why you don't even start relationships, you don't start businesses because it is big. It is your survival, it is biological.
second, is anger, and anger is the polar opposite of fear. So, let's look again. As you see, anger is Right opposite. Right on the opposite, polar of fear. Why? Because when you feel the fear, you diminish, your power, you let go of your personal power. You feel helpless, you feel hopeless, and just like a turtle, you get smaller, whereas on the opposite side. When you have anger, you get bigger even physiologically speaking. Now, you are ready to attack. You are ready to fight with that anger because the anger motivates you to do bigger behaviors. And that's exactly why it is on the opposite side and that's exactly why. When your amygdala is triggered, it is either motivating fight or flight response, fight is the anger, right? You're so angry you’re going to fight with it. Fear is the opposite of it. You're just going to diminish your power and you're going to give up.
The third basic emotion is sadness. Listen, I want to remind you that these are the primary human emotions, which means even at baby, a one-year-old baby feels them. These are not advanced emotions,
such as doubt, or humility, or empathy or optimism. So, this is a very basic emotion. Let's look at sadness and where it is on this wheel. You see sadness is on the opposite, polar of joy. Joy is the opposite of sadness because when you're sad even your physiology is the opposite of Joy, right? So, when you're sad, you're frowning when you're happy and when you're joyful, you're smiling. And also make sure that when you are sad you are not considering yourself helpless or fearful those are extremely different emotions. And you want to be very, very careful. How exactly you feel.
Four is disgust. I am following another path of negative emotions. And I'm going towards the positive ones. Disgust is a really primary emotion for all of us. And as you see disgust is on the opposite polar of trust. Disgust is when you feel anxiety, when you feel doubt, when you feel uncertainty. So, when you feel disgust, you need to ask yourself, what is the root of this emotion, and why do I feel that way? You need to label it correctly so that you can find ways to reverse-engineer it and turn it into the opposite of it, which is
trust. And trust has something to do with faith.
Number five is Anticipation. Anticipating means that, you know you're expecting that's an expectation. So, anticipation as you see is on the opposite polar of surprised, when you're surprised, it's all unknown, it's all uncertainty. When you anticipated, you expected, you have certainty. So that anticipation gives you power. Tony Robbins always says anticipation is power, even in business and relationships. If you can anticipate, what can go wrong and if you can prepare yourself to overcome those challenges and whatever goes wrong so you are not prepared. You're anticipating, it cannot stop you.
Now, moving up to more positive emotions. Now, we're going to talk about surprised, you know, how have you change your physiology, your facial expression from anticipation to surprise, anticipation is more of a flat face right? Like you're anticipating it and surprises like wow you're, you're surprised, and that's surprise is not supposed to be always positive. You can have very negative surprises like problems and challenges in life that you don't anticipate, you don't expect but they show up and that gives you surprised and little babies have that face as well. That's why they're called basic human emotions.
Number 7 is Trust. Now we're talking really green. As you see right here trust was the opposite part of disgust. Trust is one of the deepest part of our core, where we open up and very attached to another human being or to another situation where you feel safe. And there is no danger so that you can turn trust into admiration and acceptance and embracing, when you trust the process, when you have faith in what is going on, in the timing of your life, you will be able to accept and stop arguing with your reality. And that is one of the greatest skills that you can ever have.
And the most positive and the last one is Joy. You know, when you bring the joy, when you are the joy life has a different meaning, it is a positive meaning and when you have joy, you have the ecstasy when you have a ecstasy you have bliss and it comes from serenity, it comes from peace. When you have joy, you can have all these positive emotions and actually override the negative ones.
So why is it important to know? All these basic emotions? Like I said, again, most of the times, unfortunately, we name them incorrectly. And when you name your emotions incorrectly,
there is no way. You will understand your own human behaviors and root causes of them.
