The idea is that if you can learn how to use self-talk to control what you are attracted to and repelled by emotionally, then you will ALSO be able to control the results that you attract or repel via your actions.

The first key to doing this is understanding your EMOTIONAL POLARITY.

Emotional polarity is the internal (often unconscious) narrative that labels something as "good" or "bad" and produces a corresponding positive or negative emotion.

For example, if you emotionally crave a cookie, then you have a positive emotional polarity toward the cookie that's stemming from a positive internal narrative that labels the cookie as good - i.e

"Eating a cookie is a GOOD idea because it would taste good!"

This isn't inherently wrong, but if you want to be able to effortlessly stick to a diet involving NO cookies (or whatever your goal is), you'd either need to REPRESS such an impulse (which is usually not sustainable and can even cause other problems) or you need to SHIFT that emotional polarity by shifting the narrative.

So when you are in the middle of craving the cookie, the question becomes:

What narrative could you activate in your self-talk that would make eating the cookie LESS emotionally appealing and sticking to your diet MORE emotionally appealing?

So until our next entry in this series, here's the experiment I want you to run:

1. Find a place in your life where an unfavorable emotional polarity is causing you problems (craving something bad / feeling resistance toward something good).

2. Identify the emotional narrative behind the dissonant drive.

3. See if you can get yourself to act better by coming up with a NEW narrative that shifts things in a favorable direction.

In fact, I recommend trying this with everything until you run into an emotion you cannot seem to budge.

We are only scratching the surface here but it's important to know how far you can get with simple techniques like this.

UYAP,

Mark Queppet