The fact that you and I each have so many opportunities to be free agents, and make numerous individual decisions with life-changing outcomes, is a big deal.

As outlined in the book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Steven Covey, a book that is an absolute cornerstone for personal development that I can not recommend enough,  each of us has the ability to choose to be proactive or reactive in any given a situation. 

This is a very powerful choice indeed. However, I wanted to explore this idea of choice over our reactions in regards to interpersonal scenarios. 

Of the emotions felt on a daily basis, how many of those were an emotional reaction outside of your control versus those you could have controlled?  

How far can you control your emotional reactions? Can you even control whether you have a certain emotional reaction to something? 

Phycology today lists a range of 6 to 8 emotions that are inherent to man. This is an important point for two reasons. 1) these are emotions you will experience at some point in your life – that isn’t a choice 2) there are emotions you can and can not control. 

You can’t choose whether they happen or not but you can control your response to them and how you react to them – 6 basic emotions that you can not control.

Now inherently, I don’t believe these core emotions are good nor bad. I believe that even anger is good, it is good to be angry with what is evil. However, hate which is anger turned corrupt is not productive.

Analogously worry is concern gone bad. So we have these inherent emotions and how we perceive and interpret these emotions.

My thought is you can’t control whether you experience these core emotions, but you can control how you choose to think, act and further interpret and dwell on them.