Hey friends, I have some exciting news about the future of this newsletter.

Starting next week, this will become the first interactive newsletter.

Each email will contain the regular written content but it will also contain a link to a live Miro white board with a more visual and immersive experience for the content.

You’ll be able to comment any where on the board, drop your input and interact with other subscribers.

It’s the first of its kind and free of charge so make sure to take advantage of it next week.

Here’s a sneak peak of what the boards could look like:

We all experience negative feelings.

We feel lost, stressed, overwhelmed.

We have a bad life situation.

We feel stuck and unable to realize our full potential.

The world seems to be spinning just fine, while our little corner is tossed in chaos.

These negative events can take many forms:

• we could be struggling to make enough money.

• having constant fights with our partner or spouse.

• stuck in a rut, unable able to achieve our goals.

What normally happens is we experience some relief from these bad situations:

• the fights stop (temporarily)

• our paycheck is slightly bigger this week

• we achieve some small success

Eventually, these temporary reliefs fade.

The money problems creep back in, the fights resume, and once again we feel stuck.

Then we are all faced with the crushing realization:

But I am going to show you how we can minimize these negative feelings in our lives so we can be happy, achieve more and find fulfillment

To do this, there’s 3 things that we need to understand to prevent this from happening again in the future.

Emotional Control

First we need to understand why we are feeling the way that we do, and how to handle it.

We must accept that emotions are inevitable.

They are a part of human nature.

We will all continue to feel things until the day we die. (if you stop feeling emotions, then you might have a larger problem lol)

But the good news is emotions are fleeting.

They will go away after some time.

The trick is not to give them power.

How do we deny emotions power?

We do not take actions solely based on emotion.

• Don't send the angry text

• Don't quit your job today.

• Don't break your keyboard (speaking from experience here)

Accept the feelings, and move onto the next step

We feel a certain way for a specific reason.

The problem is that reason is often buried.

The simplest way you can uncover the cause behind your emotions is asking "why"

Repeatedly.

3 years ago I was stuck in a rut, stressed and unhappy with my current life situation.

I questioned myself and figure out what needed to change and why.

I realized I needed to:

Get a new job

My job was a core problem that was blocking my ability to get into a good mental state, hit the gym and improve my life.

After asking yourself enough questions you'll get to the core problem that's causing your negative feelings.

But I still didn't know how to get out of this rut.

Create Your Action Plan

Now that we understand what we need to change, it's time to create our plan.

Your answers to "why?" gave us the blueprint we need to start making meaningful change.

Mine was setting out a plan to change jobs.

I needed to:

• Update my resume

• Find jobs I enjoyed

• Apply to new jobs

• Learn new skills

• Practice interviewing

Just the thought of that list stressed me out.

Which brings us to the second point: make it manageable.

If you're stressed, adding a huge to-do list isn't going to make it better.

Find the smallest step you can take in the right direction and do that as soon as possible.

Once that is done, move onto the next step you can take.

Repeat this as long as you can.

Adjust Your Expectations

The most important part of all of this is adjusting our expectations

We don't do our best work in negative states.

If you're a type A performer, or someone looking to do big things, we have to adjust our expectations for the short term.

It will take time to work ourselves out of the rut and get back to where we were.

We have to give ourselves the room to get going first.

If you expect 110% results tomorrow, you're most likely to going to fall flat and risk making 0 progress.

I would much rather get 5% done every day for 7 days, then try for 35% today, fail, and quit.

If you take nothing else away, remember this…

We can never control everything that happens to us, but can control 100% of how we react, how we act, and what we do.

Happy regulating,

Matt