The Emotional Sobriety Toolkit
A most basic life skill
You’re not alone
Q2- Were you left wondering:
That’s not who I am!? How could I have done that? … been so dumb, thoughtless? Where did that come? from?
Q1- Have anger, frustration, or other “What about me?!” feelings sometimes made you do:
sometimes made you do: something you regretted … something which jeopardized an important relationship or aim?
“Restless, irritable and discontent”
Top priority early warning signs.
“Easy does it”
&
A most honored of 12-Step slogans - is also
cited as the most challenging to practice
“Emotional binges”
– Emotional sobriety can easily be sabotaged at our stress pressure points.
From high anxiety to pessimistic “down” moods, many of us can feel on an emotional rollercoaster
If you want to more consistently and fully enjoy your life it by living emotionally sober then This Emotional Sobriety Toolkit™ is What you’ve been looking for
Integrative Motivation: Walking the talk of “We’re in this together” * and “We’re all following the same how-to culture change roadmap” are essential to create the energizing foundation of problem-stakeholders’ mutual trust & all-win gain sharing built on a clearly stated “makes sense” roadmap underpinning how the culture change project will proceed and succeed. Yet this is infrequently achieved … which makes Baked In results within and across the organization a mission impossible.
Toolkit Overview
(A) Emotional sobriety – A make-or-break life skill
Emotional self-mastery is rated as one of the top three stumbling-blocks to success in many of our life aims rippling out far beyond recovery from active alcoholism.
Some alcoholics who … having become daily free from active addiction call themselves “grateful alcoholics”. They are grateful to have discovered, unlike most non-alcoholics, that emotional sobriety has benefits well beyond living alcohol free enriching all life aims.
Whatever goals we’re after, our creating and enjoying success depends on our being and being known as someone who is balanced and reliable. The following diagram highlights how our degree of emotional sobriety can play a lifelong make-or-break role at any of six key steps in both achieving and enjoying important life aims.
Body Mind
Energy on-tap
Motivation
Creativity
Experience
Abilities
Focused
Action
Agility
Flexibility
Relationships
Teamwork
Achievement
Enjoyment
(B) How the Institute’s Emotional
Sobriety Toolkit creates lasting
personalized results
Thirty-five years’ “Vitality Factor” research at the Canadian
Institute of Stress has identified the five major vulnerability
pathways to outcomes including accelerated aging; addiction
relapse; and executives’ under-performance. We call these
emotional lightning rods “Stress-Types”.
Each person’s one Dominant Stress-Type™ typically
accounts for > 65% of their overall emotional turbulence
in both work and personal life.
Meet the Stress-Types
Which one is Dominant for you with its foot on your emotional accelerator? Are you the…
Loner Drifter Speed Freak Worry Wart or Strain Drain?
| StressType™ | Typical StressType™ Characteristics | |
|---|---|---|
|
Strain Drain |
|
|
|
Drifter |
|
|
|
Speed Freak |
|
|
|
Worry Wart |
|
|
|
Loner |
|
|
Each of the five Stress-Type’s requires its own uniquely effective, personalized Rx action strategy. The wrong
Rx start-up skill often backfires. E.G. Relaxation training often makes Speed Freaks more anxious. Or
nutritional information may just be more food-for-worry for Worry Warts.
Results you’ll create as you follow your uniquely personalized Rx for lifelong Emotional Sobriety
Stress Control 32%
Worry Anxiety Control 36%
Life Satisfaction 62%
Stabilizing raltionships 41%
Body- Mind Wellbeing Sleep & Energy
vs fatigue 44%
(C) First things first! Understanding
how your Dominant Stress-Type can
so easily take control.
Neuroscience 101: How your Dominant Stress-Type
easily takes over.
Usually early in life, each person’s dominant Stress-Type was taking shape as their automatic go-to “stress hot reactor” button often shaped by earlier traumatic life events creating unusually urgent needs to regain mastery in stressful situations. The most frequent outcome is a self-defeating loss of emotional sobriety.
“It’s not so much what happens to you that matters,
but how you take it … how your Stress-Type takes it.”
Hans Selye, CC, MD, PhD, DSc
Founder, Canadian Institute of Stress
Internationally known as the “father of the stress field”
Your “Dominant Stress-Type” is a deeply rooted neural-
psychological messaging / switching center which dictates how
powerfully and quickly we will over-respond to sensitive stress
pressure points. Rooted in our instinctual “primal brain”, Stress-
Type responses can be over-powering in their hormone-driven
thoughts, emotions and knee-jerk actions.
The more frequently our dominant Stress-Type is activated in such situations, the more its “fake news” messages will exaggerate our sense of vulnerability and then misguide our “This will put me back in mastery” responses to it. Then that Stress-Type’s hormone cocktail grows both strength and in how it will automatically color our red- alert stress responses in future challenging situations. Sooner or later, a self-defeating pattern becomes obvious to us … and to others at home and at work.
Powerful stress hormones? Ask any competitive weightlifter. Their success depends on very precise mastery of both the “upper” and the “downer” high-octane hormones of stress [strength then relaxation vs their Stress-Type’s anxiety then pessimistic moods]. Those lifters who are, for example, the poorly mastered “Loner” Stress-Type … are likely to become overly focused on audience reactions they lose focus on, and may actually lose, the competition itself.
Anyone with a poorly mastered, rowdy Dominant Stress-Type will lose focus and balance too. And, when their emotional sobriety evaporates, it can put their emotional sobriety at risk for days to come. Our more “adult” Emotional Intelligence EQ skills in our more civilized limbic and executive brains often take a back seat to our Stress-Type’s primal brain’s urgent needs for control.
(D) This Toolkit will fit you like a glove because:
You’ll start by taking our online Stress-Type™ profile.
You pinpoint your Dominant Stress-Type and its impacts on your emotional state. Then …
You’ll focus on the three skills that Institute research tells us
[N > 224,000 adults since 1993] will work best when tailored to you; and then …
You will learn how to tailor and rehearse those skillful steps
for your priority situations.
This ME-Learning™ strategy (a) creates long lasting personalized Strengths (b) anchored in
your mirror neuron pathways for ready recall when you need them.