Your Emotional Guidance System

Your Emotional Guidance System (EGS) is an incredible internal measure of seeing whether or not you are on track with what you desire or not. Our emotions let us know what we are thinking, and since our thoughts are the creative spark for everything we experience, paying attention to what we are feeling and adjusting our thinking truly serves us.

There are lots of emotions, but all of them come down to two primary feelings. One feels good. One feels bad. If you are feeling bad, you're off track. If you feel good, you are on course to manifesting your desires and being true to yourself.

If you are feeling bad (ie. depressed, angry, sad, unhappy), life seems hard, difficult, stressful, and a struggle. Feeling bad consistently creates negative results in your life and in your body. You attract to you more things that feel bad, and even create dis-ease in your body if you don't turn it around.

If you are feeling good (ie. happy, love, gratitude, excitement, bliss), then life flows easily and effortlessly. Living is joyful and fun, and your body responds with vibrant health and energy. You attract to you more good and abundance, and life becomes an amazing experience of being, doing, and having all that you desire.

Most of us go back and forth from feeling bad to feeling good, and think that it depends on what is going on around us. We are "victims of circumstance" and don't take full responsibility for how we feel and what we are getting. We say things like "He made me angry", "She pissed me off", or "That movie made me laugh". Even when we feel good and happy, often we give someone or something else besides us the credit for making us feel the way we feel. When we feel bad, we blame others for it. We even "blame" those that make us happy.

We all have the ability to free ourselves of this emotional bondage by taking total responsibility for our lives and everything in it. It isn't the things outside of us that make us feel something, it is our thoughts and beliefs about what is happening that creates our feelings.

I learned a simple model for understanding this at a place called the Option Institute years ago. It's called "Stimulus-Belief-Response", and basically it means that between what we experience and how we respond is a choice, a thought or belief that determines our how we will respond.

According to this model, all stimulus is neutral. In and off itself, nothing means anything. We are the ones who place meaning on something with our thoughts and beliefs. So there is this opportunity in each moment to decide what we want to think and believe about it, which in turn determines our response. Responses are our feelings and behaviors. If we pay attention to what our reaction is to something, it will lead directly back to a thought we had about it.

Now, to bring this full circle, understanding our EGS (Emotional Guidance System) and using it to trace back to what you are thinking and believing is a powerful process of self-awareness and empowerment. Once we start taking responsibility for how we are feeling, we then have the choice to think differently and have the desired response we want.

Everything is a choice. Every feeling you have is a decision you are making inside yourself to think a certain way about something. If you choose to change your mind and think in a new way, you will immediately experience a new feeling and respond to the same stimulus differently.

For example, let's say someone cuts you off in traffic. Most of us would immediately get angry and blame the driver who swerved in front of us for making us angry. The truth is that what he did was just stimulus and actually was a neutral event. It was our thought about what happened that made us angry. We probably judged the guy as an asshole and made up that he was just trying to piss us off. Maybe he didn't see us and actually had no clue he cut you off.

But here's the miracle about this whole process. Let's say he did cut you off on purpose. You still have a choice in how you are going to respond. You could accept him. You could forgive him. You could even bless him for giving you an opportunity to practice patience. The point is that you are the one who decides what it will be!

So are you going to be the one who decides, or are you going to keep playing the victim? You are the creator of your life. You are in control of your emotions. You get to decide how your life will be from this moment on.

Your EGS was designed to serve you in being a more powerful creator of your life. Master the use of your emotions to guide you towards adjusting your thinking so that you have clearer and more powerful thoughts attracting what you desire, and you'll have mastered your life.