Choice 2
Learn the Key Characteristics of Emotional Discipline

He did it again. Phil Jackson, one of the most successful coaches in the history of basketball, led the LA Lakers to the NBA championship in 2002. In 12 seasons as a head coach of the LA Lakers and Chicago Bulls, he has now led his teams to nine NBA championships. During the 2002 playoffs, the Lakers found themselves significantly down in crucial games as well as behind two games to three in the series against the Sacramento Kings. Meanwhile, most of the time Jackson appeared relatively unruffled and unemotional, and the team seemed to possess a surprising calm confidence, even when things looked most bleak.

While other coaches are frequently observed intensely shouting directions and commands to players, Jackson is usually sitting quietly on the bench watching the flow of the action rather than trying to control it. His style has been described this way, “Mostly he sits with his fingers interlocked over crossed knees, his head tilted back and angled toward the action. If he is slightly agitated he’ll start to bend forward, his mouth opening… but he rarely looses his cool.” Ron Harper, who played guard under him at the Chicago Bulls, has said, “He knows how to talk to guys… he don’t holler and scream… but he’s far from a pushover.”¹⁷

Jackson, who formerly coached the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships in nine seasons while achieving a best in NBA history .738 winning percentage in regular season play, frequently displayed rather unusual coaching strategies during his tenure. For example, in one game, at the time Chicago Bull star Scottie Pippen refused to enter the game with 1.8 seconds left. After the game Jackson closed the locker room door and said to the team, “What happened has hurt us. Now you have to work this out. You’ve got two minutes to get together, to talk softly among yourselves.”37

Jackson is something of an enigma. A self-proclaimed Zen Christian, he is a highly competitive individual and yet works with his players to establish a spirit of self-less team play, including frequent use of the team (not star) oriented strategy known as the triangle offense. Jackson’s distinctive coaching methods have combined a variety of techniques such as meditation, visualization, and a focus on mindfulness, oneness, and attunement.¹⁸

He’s unpredictable. He’s been known to call time-outs when you don’t expect them and not to call them when you do. He doesn’t yell or scream in the tradition of legendary successful coaches in highly competitive sports. When he’s angry at his team he’s more likely to stand up, stuff his hands in his pockets, and just give the players a good hard look. When there is a problem within the team, as the Pippen example suggests, he may well drop the problem in the players’ lap to solve for themselves. And he has the best winning percentage of any NBA coach in history.38

As a coach, Phil Jackson could be described as a model and teacher of Emotional Discipline, which like the intriguing aspects of his coaching style, has a number of rather unique and even paradoxical characteristics. In this chapter some of these key characteristics of emotional discipline will be addressed directly. It is important that you make a choice to learn about these key characteristics. Being aware of them can better prepare you to practice emotional discipline effectively and, perhaps like Phil Jackson, help keep you unruffled in the heat of your emotionally challenging situations in life. Specifically, emotional discipline has several key requirements, paradoxes, and limitations.

The Key Requirements of Emotional Discipline

Emotional discipline does not appear spontaneously out of thin air. For most people it is not something that will occur automatically simply because they decide they want it to be part of their lives. There are some key requirements to establish constructive and meaningful emotional discipline. What are these requirements? Consider the following.

• Commitment and Motivation to Engage in the Process. Developing and practicing emotional discipline requires a sincere desire to engage in the process and a motivation to increase in ability to work with and choose how you feel. Unless you have real motivation and commitment to pursue emotional discipline, your attempts are not likely to succeed.
• An Effective Process to Work With and Enter Into. The backbone of emotional discipline consists of the process that you create and use to work with your feelings. In the previous chapter a multistep process was described in detail. The process was offered as one possible way to begin a practice of emotional discipline. You may, however, prefer a much different version that you believe will better fit your personal needs. Nevertheless, the five fundamental components or steps described in Chapter 1 need to be addressed somehow in your emotional discipline process. These include: cause-body-mind-spirit-choice.39
• Trust in the Process and Persistence in Using It. For emotional discipline to be firmly established you must possess confidence in the process you apply and consequently persist in applying it. If you lack the trust necessary to consistently use the emotional discipline process you have identified, even if you do manage to get yourself to try it out once in a while as an experiment, you will lack the persistent follow-through required to really make it work. Thus, if you are not satisfied with the process you have selected, you need to modify it or replace it until you find one that you can faithfully commit to.
• Effective Emotional Discipline Choices to Choose From. An essential part of emotional discipline is an effective set of alternative choices (strategies to work with and help create your feelings) to apply as you encounter challenges and issues that trigger your feelings at work and in life.
• A Spirit of Flexibility and Adaptability to Refine the Emotional Discipline Process. Finally, you need to bring an experimental and creative mind-set to your practice of emotional discipline. There are many possible processes (such as the one outlined in Chapter 1) you can follow to work with the physical sensations and thoughts that make up your emotions. And you can choose from many potential emotional discipline strategies (such as the 25 choices offered in this book) to help you cope with, respond to, and in general choose your feelings. Flexibility and adaptability are crucial for enabling you to optimally create a process that fits your particular needs and circumstances.40

The Paradoxes of Emotional Discipline

Along with these key requirements, emotional discipline also entails a good dose of paradox. Here are some primary paradoxes of emotional discipline:

• The seeming restrictions and constraints of practicing discipline can provide a significant new level of freedom. Engaging in the emotional discipline process, which on the surface may appear to involve giving up a degree of immediate choice, can actually free you from the bounds of fear and other debilitating feelings that constrain your range of choices and ability to freely live.
• Submission to (entering into) the emotional discipline process adds to your power rather than taking it away. As you learn to master the constructive processing of your feelings and the application of various emotional discipline choices, you empower yourself for more positive experiences and for new degrees of personal effectiveness, particularly in the face of emotion-laden challenges.41
• The sacrifice of immediate pleasure and gratification implied by the notion of making disciplined choices can actually increase the level of joy and pleasure that you derive from your experiences. By increasing your awareness of and learning how to respond to, work with, and create your feelings, you are able to enjoy a new level of power to choose how you feel.
• Discipline, which you might ordinarily associate with rigid adherence and lack of flexibility, in this case, requires openness to adapting and refining the process. That is, emotional discipline, while requiring a commitment to consistent practice, also requires a kind of adaptability and flexibility that allows for continuous refinement and customization of the process to your particular needs and circumstances.
• Undertaking the development of emotional discipline requires a certain amount of discipline. In other words, to increase in emotional discipline you need to bring some discipline to the process at the outset. It may not require a lot, since the structure contained in the 5-step process provides a level of built-in procedural discipline, but it does require some to initiate and follow through.

Some Cautions and Limitations

It is important to make clear that Emotional Discipline is not about suppression of feelings and living a cold stilted life. Being emotionally disciplined is not a simple matter of constraining your emotions through force of will and numbing your reactions to situations that would otherwise affect you. The irony is that emotional discipline can actually free you to more fully experience your whole range of feelings in a thoughtful, reflective, and meaningful way. It can free you from emotional chaos and from the natural tendency to recoil and constrain your feelings out of fear of losing control, and it can introduce a sense of emotional power and joy into your life.

To enjoy these possible healthy and constructive benefits, keep these limitations and cautions in mind as you begin to apply emotional discipline. First, it is not a process for avoiding significant issues in your life that need to be addressed. If you have significant challenges that need your attention emotional discipline should not be used as a way to avoid the important work that needs to take place. This work may be in the form of repairing relationships through difficult but meaningful communication, implementing changes that need to take place in your work and career, making lifestyle adjustments that promote recovery from an illness or an unhealthy life pattern, or taking a good hard look at yourself and doing the work to develop your own life purpose or vision and goals. Emotional discipline is not the application of techniques that provide a short-term elevation of mood in order to avoid the important issues you need to address in your life.43

Second, emotional discipline is not a way to stuff your feelings. Feelings in themselves are neither good nor bad, but they do need to be recognized as an important part of life. Studying your feelings can help you learn more about yourself. Honestly facing your feelings (not dwelling on them but honestly recognizing and acknowledging them) can actually lessen their power over you, whereas suppressing them may cause them to become distorted and increase their power. For example, research has found that suppression of our reactions to emotion not only tends to be less effective for alleviating negative emotional experiences than strategies that acknowledge and work with the emotion (such as reappraising a difficult situation), but it also tends to impair memory.¹⁹

In fact, one specific area of research addresses the idea of emotional labor. More specifically, studies have examined the physical and psychological toll of work situations that require employees to display positive emotions even when they are feeling very poorly.²⁰ For example, many service jobs, such as sales clerks in retail stores or wait staff in restaurants, require employees to respond to customers, even very rude ones, in a cheerful and courteous manner. If an employee is worried about an ill child at home or has just been treated very badly by a manager or customer, the effort required to project false emotions can have a significant detrimental impact on the person. Emotional discipline is not intended as a means for falsely manipulating emotions to project an artificial image to others. On the other hand, emotional discipline can help create a hardiness and capacity to handle potentially provoking situations without the experience of destructive emotional reactions and thus largely remove the need to project false impressions.44

Third, be aware that working with emotions can be self-deceiving at times. By mastering some tools for managing your emotions, you may find that you can feel better for a while, only to discover later that you were involved in self-deception. For example, if you apply mental strategies that only temporarily distract you from facing challenges that need to be faced, over time you may well find the situation actually gets worse. Again, if real problems exist that need your attention and effort, a healthy emotional discipline process requires choosing to constructively face the issues for the longer term and not just making choices that help you create a temporary illusion so that you can feel better in the moment.

Fourth, you also need to be aware that the process of emotional discipline, and the various choices it contains, may at times seem rather simple and perhaps even obvious and trivial. Don’t underestimate its power. Many healthy choices are available to us that can make a tremendous difference in our lives, and they may be as simple as taking an enjoyable walk, eating an extra vegetable each day, taking time to listen to relaxing music, regularly meditating for 10 minutes, or practicing observing heated situations rather than reacting to them. Unfortunately, you (like myself and most everyone else) are probably aware of many simple and seemingly obvious healthy choices but often do not make them. They may simply require just a little extra willpower, a slightly different focus in your thinking, or a new habit that isn’t naturally there. The emotional discipline choices contained in this book are designed to be simple, straightforward, and very capable of being built into your lifestyle. Together they can empower you to gain the power to choose how you feel.45

A limitation of this book is that it does not directly address differences in the challenges that arise based on physiology and life circumstances. For example, women and men may face differing challenges based on hormonal and other physiological differences, social pressures, and work/life demands. People at different life stages, such as early adulthood vs. retirement years, are faced with differing emotional pressures that need to be addressed. And some people may have special conditions such as Asperger’s Syndrome (a form of autism), in which people cannot effectively read emotions in themselves or others, or Seasonal Affective Disorder (a condition caused by winter and a lack of sunlight). But even in these cases a person can choose to partner with others who are particularly in tune with emotions or add therapeutic lighting and plan annual vacation time to sunny climates during winter months. All this is part of the reason that it is important that individuals be aware of their unique life challenges and customize their emotional discipline process and choices to their own specific circumstances.

Another related limitation is that this book does not provide an in-depth discussion of the complex origins of emotion, which, while widely studied, remain largely a mystery in medical and psychological science. Clearly both biological and psychological factors are involved, but the primary forces and how they are combined for each unique individual are very complex. Childhood trauma and genetic influences are just a couple of the many potent elements that help shape emotion. For example, researchers at the National Institute of Health have recently released results of a study that links a specific gene to the activity of the amygdala, a portion of the brain that controls the fear response.²¹ The findings suggest that those persons with a shorter form of this gene are more susceptible to anxiety and a stronger response to fearful stimuli. This book focuses on constructively assessing and working with emotion but not untangling the mysteries of the roots of emotion for a given person, which to be fully understood would likely require psychotherapy and medical study.46

And this raises the final limitation: Emotional discipline is not intended as a substitute for professional help when it is needed. The choices offered in this book are powerfully capable of helping you to feel and be better in your life and work. But they do not replace professional support, treatment, and help from a competent psychiatrist, psychologist, or other counselor when it is required for more serious cases.

Despite these limitations and cautions, the practical strategies contained in this book are designed to help us better cope and work with feeling bad. By getting in touch with difficult feelings, and better handling and managing the effects they have on our lives, we can vastly elevate our entire experience of life and our personal effectiveness. This book also contains many useful prescriptions for increasing the quantity and quality of the moments we feel good. Certainly parts of life are tragic and contain great suffering, such as when a loved one is lost or in the experience of a severe illness (physical or mental) or disease. Significant life changes, due to aging, job loss, relationship breakdowns, or moving to a new home, can sometimes seem so overwhelming that having the power to affect how we feel can seem well beyond our grasp. Nevertheless, for most of us, much more often than we realize, we can and do significantly influence the way we feel as we live and work. That is what this book is all about—using Emotional Discipline to gain The Power To Choose How You Feel.47