Are you going through your life on auto-pilot?  Are you letting your reactions and responses to life’s circumstances and events be dictated by your previous values, attitudes, and beliefs. Perhaps your responses a result of living in the present?

Most people tend to react as they go through life. Moreover, they react to other people’s conscious, or unconscious desire, or ability to “push” their buttons. Missing situations without operating in the now moments of their lives. In fact, our reactions find their origin in their learned attitudes, beliefs, expectations, prejudices, values or historically directed emotions.  When we react from the history of our past, we take the risk of:

  • reacting too quickly
  • over-reacting
  • under-reacting
  • reacting inappropriately
  • reacting too slowly

Any of these responses to any set of circumstances or people are doomed to cause continued stress, anxiety, and continued, un-resolved personal feelings.

When a person reacts without being totally conscious or thinking out of the now. Surely they’ll often say or do things they’ll regret later.

Being Present

Here are a few strategies to consider. Especially when you find yourself out of emotional control due to another person or an event.

  1. Take a Second Take a quality pause, a brief 2-3 second break where you say to yourself – I do have a choice. I can react the way I normally would have to this stimulus or I can react differently. With the quality pause you can get out of auto-pilot and into the present.
  2. Count to Five Develop the habit of counting to 5, slowly, before you speak or act as a result of a stimulus.
  3. Head’s Up Give someone you are close to the permission to alert you (make you aware) each and every time you react without pausing or taking the time to think through your response.
  4. Emotional Anchors Create personal anchors (a personal reminder) that automatically kicks in every time you find yourself losing emotional control. Consider a thought-stopper, something to help you shift your focus away. Whatever you are thinking about will be gone very quickly.

Living life out of auto-pilot is to live incompletely…to live in the past. To live in the present…the now…only requires that you become conscious every time you are functioning from memory, expectations, or in the future.