Organize Your Emotions, Optimize Your Life

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Organize Your Emotions, Optimize Your Life
Picture of Book Cover - Organize Yourself - Optimize Your LIfe

This book offers a new model for decoding and organizing one’s emotions, improving equanimity, and getting closer to thriving. The Organize Your Emotions model rests on the notion, which you may have experienced in the 2015 Pixar movie Inside Out, that the human psyche is not singular but is multiple, like a family. The model proposes that there are a set of nine universal family members or subpersonalities that may have been sculpted by evolution, each with its own agenda including needs, drives, values, strengths, and voices. Each inner family member tells us whether its needs are met or not through emotions: positive emotions signal that needs are met or values are served, while negative emotions signal that needs not met or values are served. The Mindful Self is the team leader or orchestrator, conducting the inner family, finding harmony and often settling conflicting needs and perspectives. Here are seven insights the book offers to coaches and clients:

  1. Meet the inner family members and get to know how they’ve contributed to your life, and in your life today, whether their needs are well met, values are well served, and strengths are well used.
  2. Accept and appreciate the inherent messiness of being human where inner conflicts based on conflicting agendas and needs are normal and natural.
  3. Do a roll call, whenever you want to decode your emotional weather report, or when facing a major decision, inner conflict or turmoil, like an internal roundtable, to solicit nine perspectives that bring you to an optimal outcome and more equanimity.
  4. Calm down by realizing that not all parts of your psyche are upset at the same time, and by not allowing one noisy part to dominate the whole family.
  5. Perform better by drawing out the strengths and voices of the quieter members of your inner family to balance the dominant ones.
  6. Improve your relationships by helping others decode their emotions, handle inner conflicts, and navigate emotional turmoil.Thrive more by adjusting your life’s activities to use more of your strengths, meet more of your needs, and align with more of your values, more of the time.
  7. Thrive more by adjusting your life’s activities to use more of your strengths, meet more of your needs, and align with more of your values, more of the time. 
Publisher: 
Harvard University

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