Insights for a Happier Life: Shortcuts for Creating Positive Changes One Moment at a Time by Steven Jay Fogel

Author:Steven Jay Fogel [Fogel, Steven Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fresh River Press
Published: 2015-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN I-MESSAGES AND YOU-MESSAGES

On the most basic level, when you express your feelings with a you-message, you are likely to make other people defensive because a you-message tells them that they are responsible for your feelings: “You made me upset.” In contrast, expressing your feelings with an I-message simply describes the way you feel—“I felt upset”—but it doesn’t say that someone else is responsible for your feelings.

In reality, other people are not responsible for your feelings; nobody makes you feel as you do. Your feelings are part of your inner world, and how you react emotionally to the outer world—your responses to other people and to the circumstances you encounter—depends on how your inner world is interpreting the situation.

Your inner world is your machinery and your programming (the way you think and act when you’re on automatic pilot, which is based on your mind’s interpretations of earlier experiences). How you respond emotionally to a situation depends on whether you allow your machinery and programming to run on automatic pilot, which keeps you in the past, or whether you interrupt your machinery so that you are in the present moment instead of being controlled by your past programming. If you’re on automatic pilot, the emotions you feel in response to what another person says or does in the present are actually reactions not to the current situation but to a past situation that your machinery likens to the current situation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.