Written by: Danielle Baron, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
There’s a fork in the road when it comes to negative emotions. One direction is that when channelled productively, negative emotions can propel you to new heights. The other direction, of course, is that they become toxic for you and can inhibit your well-being and those of others.
All negative emotions are completely normal, and as humans, they are innate for survival in our epigenetics from the beginning of time when we had to daily fight for survival. Look at ‘comparison’ for example. Historically, in the times of our ancestors, it was the difference between survival and death. With more understanding, it means that we can channel our emotions productively because we realise that the person triggering us is multifaceted and is not only provoking a strong emotion like anger, but other emotions too. Cultivate a healthy and positive mindset around the negative emotions. Know it’s an alarm system trying to alert you. If we are not careful and have not learned to regulate and manage our negative emotions, our amygdala, a part of our brain, gets hijacked and all reasoning goes out the window and then we are a slave to our negative emotions. We need to make sure that our frontal cortex is getting enough oxygen to help out and that is why breathing exercises in these situations are so effective. The key is not to repress these feelings because they will come out stronger. Feelings that are pushed down notoriously become worse if denied. Label the negative emotion you are feeling to disarm it to some extent. But the magic is in how we choose to regulate these negative emotions and manage them. That is the defining difference between power and destruction.
In NLP terms, it’s important to reframe negatives to enable us to have emotional freedom and to not be overcome and a slave to our negative emotions.
Any negative emotion is a trigger from our unconscious. We should treat it like a friend here to help us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean acting on it, just acknowledging it. Imagine asking a toddler to help you paint walls of a room and leaving them with some paint for a few minutes, you may walk back into the room and they have painted all over the floor and wall and think they have helped you. This is like the subconscious. Sometimes it is thinking it is helping you when in fact it is jeopardising you because when it witnesses you experiencing negative emotions, it wants to help you but is like a toddler in the sense that it does what it thinks is best. If you say ‘I hate public speaking’, it will try and help you get out of any public speaking by giving you anxiety, and making you sweat. It needs to be trained and managed. Assign it a different, healthier role that can enhance and not jeopardise your life.
Let’s look at some emotions and the powers of them as opposed to their weaknesses. Many people view envy as something that festers and eats away at you to make you become so critical and negative. But the power of envy channelled in a productive way is that it can inspire you to be a better you and to be the catalyst for transformation. Everyone feels envy, but some people are adamant that they have never felt it. This could be because at the first sign of envy, they are channelling it into something positive and productive so they are not aware of originally feeling it. It links very closely to inspiration. Anger can induce distorted thinking and can permanently destroy your relationships with those close to you and can be detrimental to your health. And, of course, there is the extreme form of anger, which is violence and is very destructive. However, by channelling it productively, it can energise us and promote us to solve problems. It helps us to survive and gives us a sense of control and optimism. Sadness, at its most toxic, can be debilitating and can snowball to larger issues, such as depression. It can be very insular and self-consuming. But focusing on sadness in a reframed way, you become more observant and realise how powerful words can be and are more careful how you use them. You become a better listener. Anxiety can be crippling and can make us prisoners and give us the extremities of the fight, flight or freeze response. But it can also be extremely beneficial and keeps us excited and motivated about life. We become engaged and not complacent It can be a great warning sign to shift something that needs shifting. It makes you more vigilant and to pay more attention to that which you are anxious about. You are more sensitive and empathetic to others.
The key is to feel these emotions but to have the emotional regulation to be able to manage them and redirect them so that they become beneficial. Many people talk about how a state of heightened emotion was a catalyst for positive change for them. This is also the case for me and why I launched my business. The choice is yours as to which direction in the fork in the road you are going to take with your negative emotions.
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Danielle Baron, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Danielle catalyses children and adults to rise like a phoenix from the flames 🔥 and to reach their optimum potential. She is an entrepreneur, inspiring 11+ and 7+ entrance exams tutor, rapid transformational therapist®️, business coach for overachievers, a life coach for all, and an NLP Master practitioner, and she is also certified by the ILM.
One of Danielle’s much-loved abilities is being an overachiever because she thrives on the excitement and follows her passion, which is to help people live fulfilling lives.
Over the last five years of her tuition business, Danielle has become extremely popular and respected in the tuition industry and is a mentor and coach to other tutors to help them increase revenue in their businesses, but ultimately to be the best tutors they can be. Her own tuition service incorporates coaching for parents and children throughout the exam process and NLP classes for children to help them with lack of confidence, bullying, and anxiety and to help them focus on the imminent goal of exams and to visualise and believe in their success.
Danielle’s second business, coaching and therapy, has been a long time coming and her personal interest in people and psychology led her to invest in the most high-quality courses to be the best for her clients. For her rapid transformational therapy ®️, she had the privilege of personally being mentored by Marisa Peer, a world-renowned therapist. Rapid transformational therapy is a combination of NLP, CBT, psychotherapy and hypnosis.
It has been Danielle’s personal experiences that have led her to where she is today. At age four, her father died of suicide, which installed in her a determination to help prevent people from ever becoming despaired again. Her best friend passed away at fifteen, which solidified Danielle’s determination to live life to the full. Growing up with a single parent, they struggled with money, but Danielle was very inspired by her mother’s work ethic, which had a huge impact on her.
As a teacher in some schools, the politics and bullying amongst staff were toxic and she suffered from depression, stress and burnout and was treated badly at her most vulnerable time of being pregnant and having a newborn and that’s why she’s passionate about helping teachers. She wishes that she had someone to help her at the time.
She has been through the journey of setting up successful businesses on her own while undertaking childcare as a single parent of two after she divorced and strongly believes anyone can achieve anything they put their mind to with grit, focus, and passion.
