How to control your emotions

A Lot of people think that having good communication skills involves only knowing what should be said or what should be done in certain situations, and even though this is correct, still there are lots of problems that arise from not being able to do what you know you should do.
Suppose that you know that you should control your temper in order to communicate more effectively but then you started shouting and you lost control or suppose that you know that you should not become stressed so as not to lose control and then you gave in to stress, the outcome in both cases will be undesirable and will badly affect your ability to communicate effectively.
Just like knowing what to do is vital to effective communication, knowing how to control your emotions is as important as knowing what you should do.
In order to know how to control your emotions you have to first understand what causes an emotional change. The following are the steps that happen before your emotions change from one state to the other:
• An external event happens (being in a dark place)
• Your self talk analyzes the situation (what if a monster appears)
• Your emotions are triggered (am afraid)
• You have the choice of either controlling it or giving in to it ("there are no monsters in here I should not be afraid" or "RUN!!!!")
As you can see there are two moments where you can control your emotions. The first is at the self talk level where you can prevent the emotion before it even triggers and the second is after the emotion is triggered where you can either control it or just give in.
Based on the previous explanation we can summarize the following actions as methods of emotional control:
1) controlling your self talk
2) whenever you have a certain emotion try to control it and don't allow it to grow because giving up to the emotion will only result in loss of control
3) Every time you practice emotional control it will become easier so train yourself everyday
If you succeed in controlling your emotions you will take more rational decisions, you will communicate with people in a more effective way and you will become happier. Lots of people know how to communicate effectively but fail to do it because they lack the ability to control their emotions.
Sometimes it’s crucial to keep controlling your emotions until you listen to the explanation of the situation that you didn't like. After all, if your partner does something that you don't like because of a convincing reason, exploding at him/her without knowing that reason may ruin your relationship. Listening to the reason first before you act may make you accept what they did. In order to do this you need to learn how to control your emotions.