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Emotional Fitness

How to go beyond your personal best, into the peak-performance state of “flow.”

Why Emotional Fitness?

Life is made up of many emotions, yet many people judge them as good and bad emotions. Without fully understanding that all emotions can be valuable if we know how to use negative emotions as opportunities for growth.

True freedom is being able to feel and express all emotions. The tools so we don’t need to hide and suppress negative emotions. Our Emotional Fitness is a significant influence in creating the events that occur in life, as our emotions and emotional programming are a major influence in creating the thoughts we think.

Emotional Fitness Definition

Emotional Fitness refers to the level of our ability to feel, sense and trust the full spectrum of emotions. Knowing how to not judge emotions as good or bad due to the tools to benefit from negative emotions. This helps us to more efficiently create the circumstances, success and ‘flow’ we desire in life. As our emotions and emotional programming, hence Emotional Fitness, heavily influence the type of thoughts we create. This also determines how naturally we can attract the circumstances in life and business we desire.

Like a muscle, our emotions only support us if we use them. Hence good Emotional Fitness refers to our ability to be aware and in-tune emotionally, able to understand and feel the full array of emotions. Not just being positive, able to handle and beneficially use negative emotions, rather than suppress them.

A key outcome of good Emotional Fitness is that it forms the foundation of healthy self-esteem. Self-esteem can be defined as being made up of head esteem and emotional esteem. If we look at emotional esteem, which starts as a child, many people are taught to not validate feelings, so we suppress emotions causing a void of hidden blocked emotions that are our unconscious triggers. These mostly are hidden but can show up as anger, sadness, anxiety, depression, PTSD and many negative other emotions that reduce self-esteem.

Emotional Fitness Outcomes

Good Emotional Fitness is the natural flow of desires, spontaneously becoming reality, which is also known as “flow.” Often our emotions move between being blocked in fear and the much more desired peak-performance state of “flow.”

Good Emotional Fitness is demonstrated by how easily a person can attract the reality of their true desires, to be in “flow.” The following chart lists some of the characteristics of fear, compared to “flow.”

By comparison, an average person is more likely to be in a state of fear, rather than “flow.” Fear is when our “stuff” gets in the road, often unconscious self-sabotage blocks us from achieving our true desires. This could be a high percentage of the population, which we could say are emotionally unfit. This is often shown as repeat non-desired patterns occurring in life and business, shown in relationships, financial situations, or in sport under pressure.

Our level of Emotional Fitness determines our mental state, our mindset due to our emotional “stuff” which for most people is unconscious, having a significant influence on determining our feelings which in turn create our thoughts and mental activity.

What drives Emotional Fitness?

Emotions are a universal force influencing everything that is happening in the world. Emotions drive behaviour, hence either create or stall action. The two ends of the emotional spectrum driving behaviour are fear and passion. With passion being the more connected inspired motivation of “flow.”

Like a muscle, our emotional capacity is dependant on use. If we don’t use a muscle then we have limited support from it. Emotions are the same, if we don’t understand and use them we lack support in the critical emotional aspect of life. For example, often society teaches us we need to be positive and happy all the time. Therefore if we are only comfortable with positive emotions, then we have limited emotional fitness, a limited range of expression. We are then more likely to disown our shadow, which are the suppressed aspects hidden away that actually help to determine our future reality.

Why improve our Emotional Fitness?

One reason to improve our Emotional Fitness is to ensure we get everything we desire more easily. By developing greater Emotional Fitness, we also become more fulfilled, passionate, healthy, connected and able to more consistently perform at our peak in all aspects of business, sport and life.

Increased satisfaction and enhanced peak performance are the more obvious individual indicators of good Emotional Fitness, yet collectively within a group or team, individual Emotional Fitness can be magnified, providing an exponential influence or coherence, to enhance or sabotage the team culture.

Learn more about doing an Emotional Fitness Workout, by visiting this page, Emotion Fitness Workout.

For more details on how to apply Emotional Fitness for teams, in sport and leadership, please visit Robert C Robertson’s site at www.robertcrobertson.com.

About Rob C. Robertson his Story

His Emotional Fitness Journey

This site has been created for Rob C. Robertson and below we share his journey. How self-doubt, abuse and anxiety inspired him along the journey to discover Emotional Fitness, in order to build his resilience to gain a healthy self-esteem, true inner trust and freedom. To live his dreams that always had previously seemed a disconnected reality.

Robert is an Entrepreneur, Author, Meditation Teacher and Mental Skills Coach specialising in the Emotional Fitness empowering high-performance business and sports performance.

Roberts biggest gifts have come from the learning resulting from sexual abuse as a 7-year-old.  This has driven his fascination with personal motivation, emotions and mental skills to learn the best techniques to release anger and self-doubt. Those tools and associated lessons have led to Robert being recognised as an Emotional Fitness pioneer. The result is today he feels very grateful for the huge benefits this experience has taught him. Having experienced both sides of the self-esteem divide, Robert is very passionate about helping people grow by teachings others what has worked for him. While he is always learning anything he can about emotions, the impact has been a massive personal transformation and vastly higher mental toughness in sport.

His love of sport started as a naive 11-year-old country boy growing up in the farming town of Methven, New Zealand. At that age, he was selected for the Mid-Canterbury rep soccer team. While very proud of the achievement, he felt out of his depth at this higher level. This massive self-doubt was reflected in not excelling under pressure. Then a similar situation occurred a few years later, when selected to play tennis for Mid-Canterbury, massive self-doubt again stifled his performance. These experiences helped trigger his thirst to learn everything he could about growing his inner confidence, to release self-doubt and gain the high-performance advantage in sport, then later apply this to business.

A major junction was leaving home as a 17-year-old to live at Lincoln University in the halls of residence, in New Zealand. After a number of consecutive nights with ZERO sleep, considerable relief was found when a counsellor labelled his knotted stomach as anxiety. During that first year away from home, the anxiety became depression, providing a massive reality check on real life and the transition to becoming an adult.

Part of this journey is explained in the following 10-minute TED-style talk recorded on the 1st of August 2017 in Auckland. In this talk, Robert C Robertson shares his Emotional Fitness journey, which is followed by 9 minutes of questions about Emotional Fitness.

Making it through year one of University with these huge emotional ups and downs was only made bearable with the critical support of a counsellor. Then things really changed in year two, after completing a 4-week Mind Power course by John Kehoe, as positive thinking changed everything.

The next ten years using positive thinking provided an escape from the reality of mental illness, although at a price. By turning everything into a positive in the head, an unrealistic positive thinker was born. This seemed like the answer to everything. Inner freedom to be able to escape from the uncomfortable emotions he was experiencing. To feel safe in the head. While providing a reasonable level of success in sport and business, true consistency was lacking due to his hidden unconscious self-doubt. Which was a reflection on the theory that we don’t get what we want in life, we get what our unconscious ‘stuff’ creates.

Then in 2001, it all changed by discovering huge anger and suppressed emotions that had been entirely hidden by the positive thinking. This anger was in some part created from 10 years of turning every negative feeling into a positive in the head, suppressing any negative emotions. This massive discovery was incredibly scary, as he felt huge anger, after ten years of being positive and only allowing positive feelings. This huge turning point was the start of an incredible Emotional Fitness journey, learning to fully connect and understand emotions.

In 2001, after uncovering all this suppressed anger, his Emotional Fitness journey led him to a Men’s Anger Group, when living in Sydney, Australia. It was a wonderful support network despite the Police sending a number of the participants to this group to get help. This was the start of an interesting journey opening up hidden anger, sadness and some challenging lows. This learning and his fascination with understanding all he could from countless personal development programs around emotions and the power of the heart, has provided the key insights for developing the Emotional Fitness Workout.

More recently, it was early 2017 when real evolution becomes more obvious. The shift from self-doubt and low self-esteem, to a more healthy self-understanding and belief, was evident in his more relaxed inner calm and greater self-belief. It was no accident that it coincided with his business taking off, stepping full-time into his work as a Mental Skills Coach and Trainer.

Further evidence of his journey into new bounds of Emotional Fitness was in mid-2017 when he noticed the ongoing anxiety of the first half of 2017 had subsided. The Emotional Fitness Workout had helped him process this anxiety for wonderful new personal growth. Resulting in an important milestone on the Emotional Fitness journey, to release the pattern of anxiety to reach a new level of inner calm and connected peace. This was shown by a much healthier inner self belief and self esteem. With a new zest, passion and excitement in the way he spoke and connected with people.

To read more, visit http://www.robertcrobertson.com/ which contains his personal blog. Click here for an example of one of his blog post, sharing his new found vulnerability about the struggles of this Emotional Fitness journey.

True emotional strength is about being real, not afraid to say the truth, to be vulnerable if appropriate, and of course honest. This is the real strength that is still relatively new for Robert C Robertson. True strength is not the hard guy cover up our emotions, to be a brave man type of strength, but true inner strength is to be real in our emotional expression. To love life, both the highs and also to embrace the lows, to live with passion, purpose and real heart.

Emotional Flow

“The heart is seen as the seat of connection between the mind and the body, forming a bridge between the two. The mind or spirit is housed in the heart, and the blood vessels are the communication channels that carry the heart’s vital, rhythmic messages throughout the body.”

– Chinese Medicine, 2500 B.C.

Throughout history people have referred to the heart in ways that imply it has a natural intelligence.

Cultures around the world use metaphors expressing how the heart is more than a pump: Follow your heart. In your heart you know. Put your heart into it. Even our 21st century dictionaries refer to the heart as the centre of the personality.

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched…they must be felt with the heart” – Quote from an unknown source.

Good Emotional Fitness is shown as a natural state of “flow.” The term “flow” was first defined by Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who earned his fame by providing a detailed description of the “flow” state. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest living psychologists of our age.

We are all capable of reaching this state he calls “flow” which is an effortless concentration and enjoyable, connected state of mind, body and emotional “flow.”

Csikszentmihalyi’s flow model refers to the mental state in terms of challenge level and skill level and how it relates to happiness.

Credits for graphic above w:File:Challenge vs skill.jpg, Public Domain, Link

 

 

Recent Blog Posts

Rocking Midlife Podcast with Robert Robertson

July 11, 2020 By Robert C Robertson 1 Comment

“Emotional Fitness is like a muscle. If we don’t use a muscle, then we don’t have the benefit if its full capacity and range of movement.” ~ Robert C. Robertson  It was such a pleasure to be interviewed by Cat Collucio in her Podcast guests. Cat starts by introducing Robert C Robertson is an Entrepreneur, […]

EMOTIONS & MINDSET IN TIMES OF CHANGE: UPYOURBRAVE LIVESTREAM

May 29, 2020 By Robert C Robertson Leave a Comment

The last week has been significant for my personal growth because I shared the full story of abuse and the gifts I have gained from my journey of self-doubt. I shared the full explanation behind how I moved from self-doubt to self-belief and self-esteem. The Emotional Fitness tools that I have gained as a result of […]

Emotional Fitness Flow

March 27, 2020 By Robert C Robertson Leave a Comment

What is Emotional Fitness? Emotional Fitness refers to our ability to understand, use and integrate our emotions into everyday life. Like a muscle, our emotions need to be used in order to utilise their full capacity. The outcome of healthy Emotional Fitness is greater resilience, higher self-esteem, greater inner calm, self-trust and mental strength. This […]

Emotional Fitness Workout

Why an Emotional Fitness Workout?

The common benefits of doing a workout for the body are well known, yet few understand how to workout and strengthen their emotional resilience and capacity. Emotional Fitness Workouts help to build greater resilience, intuitive and a more consistent peak performance state of high productivity “flow.”

The starting point to increase emotional fitness can be to ask the questions “How do I feel?” This while simple can be used often to tune into our emotions and check-in. Awareness and listening within is a core skill of emotional fitness. This can also apply to our body to build Inner Game Fitness. To be present to your body, simply stop for a moment and do a body scan. Feel the body and appreciate its amazing nature, while feeling for any areas of tension.

Most illness or disease is created from an unconscious emotional block. So the fundamental principle of an Emotional Fitness Workouts, after the principle of listening, is movement. This can be physical, although mostly emotional our energetic flow is best to more rapidly stimulate the bodies natural self-healing mechanism.

An Emotional Fitness Workout has 6 different layers with each suitable at different times and emotional states. One of these six is Emotional Unblocking, which is a technique that can be learnt by downloading the following 4 -page PDF.

When do I workout?

Whenever we feel a non-positive emotion, this is an opportunity to do an Emotional Fitness Workout. This is a multi-stage flow chart to integrate and open our emotions. It is a process you do on your own, or it can be facilitated, which helps to resolve and heal old emotional baggage, creating a high-performance success state.

As we release more of our blocks, we feel different about ourselves. Without all the unconscious garbage hidden within we find we have fewer triggers. Our head slows down from wanting to always judge and think to just be present. We improve our Emotional Fitness by growing our emotional esteem, resulting in greater self-esteem, self-image and more positive expectations.

Ultimately with growth and more emotional self-understanding, we shift our unconscious programming, so that our emotions conspire to help achieve our desires. All based on the theory we don’t get what we want in life, we get what our unconscious conditioning creates.

One of the four core Emotion Fitness Workouts is called Emotion Unblocking (Emotional Clearing) which is a way of supporting peak human performance by healing the source of any negative emotions or thoughts that may occur. It is a method that allows a person to release past programming and emotions that block their ability to maximise future success.

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