L3P1: Inner Strength

The eyes are useless when the mind is blind. We can close our eyes to the things we don't want to see, but we can't close our heart to the things that we don't want to feel. 

My fellow Toastmasters,

Emotions are the ultimate power. It starts war, it causes us to get married, divorce, it got us to shopping spree, and it creates children. It can even make us ill or healthy. It makes us financially poor or rich. When I  think carefully, the history of my life, the history of this world, is the history of emotions.

What is more important to me than the way I feel? I asked myself. 

"I want more money." "Why?" "If I have more money, I feel I have more power, control, freedom and security."

"I want more love." "Why?""So that I won't feel lonely, defeated, appreciated and feeling more love."

The truth is we don't really want the money nor the relationship. We just want to feel better. We just want to change the way we feel, the emotional content of our life at that moment.

Where do emotions come from? For example, the feeling of being loves. If someone touches, kisses, using certain words or behaved in certain manner to me, I feel loved. But is it true? The truth is that I chose to be in that physiology to have those sensations. In another words, when certain rules or criteria are being met, i.e. X,Y and Z happened, then I feel loved. Conversely, if I feel lonely, frustrated, depressed, angry or hurt - all these emotions are created by no one but myself.

So, why do emotions exist?  I come to realization every emotions that I felt in my life is a call to action. For example, being angry means I have a standard that was violated. I feel angry when I see babies are dumped like garbage. Or at times I feel angry to myself, because I have set a standard for myself yet I'm unable to meet it. Another example is fear – an unpleasant emotion caused by potential threat, harm and danger.  For example fear of delivering this speech, fear of personal financial meltdown and fear of disconnecting emotionally from my people whom I loved dearly.  It is a signal that something maybe coming in near future and I have to prepare for it. By heeding these negative emotions rather than controlled by it, I experienced improvement in my quality of life and built my inner strength along this life journey.

My fellow Toastmasters,

We are driven by our emotions. Every emotion serves us, as long as we interpret it with a powerful meaning to our life. By the focus of our mind and the meaning that we choose to attach, we can improve our life tremendously. On the other hand, we can live a life caught in endless loop of negative emotions from moments or even up to a lifetime.  Thus, we need to be very careful to the meaning of the event that happened to us and make sure that these emotions we feel are appropriate, because those meanings determine our quality of life.

In essence, the emotions that we feel should be empowering us instead of disempowering us. This is the inner strength that moves us forward instead of backward. This is our inner strength that all of us can develop. This is the inner strength that we can call upon during tough moments and bring positive changes to our life and people around us.

The choice is ours.