At some point, you will learn that the feeling is the secret. After learning this, the next question would be, “How do I maintain the feeling?” This is where emotional fortitude comes into play.

The difference between successful humans and wild animals is emotional fortitude or non-reaction. The top performers in all human endeavors have trained themselves to not just react to life events or situations but to actively choose the emotional state they desire to be in.

Training your mind to be less reactive leads to fewer and fewer negative thoughts until you reach a point where your thoughts are mostly positive. Once you get to this point, it becomes more obvious when a negative thought creeps in because you can instantly sense the vibe change. With practice, you build a stronger and more fortified emotional core.

Here are 4 steps that helped me build emotional fortitude:

1. Mindfulness

Learning how to be aware of the present moment without judgment, I learned this from meditation. I don’t meditate much anymore, but I practice mindfulness almost all the time. Here's how I do it: I pay attention only to my surroundings, sounds, smells, sights. I treasure every moment without judgment or thought. This helps calm the mind and stop overthinking.

2. Delayed Reactions

I’m often very slow to respond to most things. I could literally get punched in the face and not think about it fully until after 24 hours have passed. Don’t try punching me in the face because you might find out. But seriously, taking even just 5 seconds to respond to anything can give you the buffer you need to regulate your emotions. Jumping into reacting often leaves no space to process the reactions, which can lead you to act in ways that compromise your emotional integrity, leading to more pain than needed.

3. Radical Positivity

A lot of people think they have positive thoughts, but what if I told you that you need to have positive thoughts for as much time as you can maintain it, which should be most times ideally? This means you train yourself to feel good and only focus on that; nothing else is allowed in. Your mind becomes a closed fortress and gets used to and only expects positive thoughts. You can see this in real-time, affecting all those around you. The people who can't remain positive around you will leave, and the rest just can’t help but be on their best behavior around your aura. Radical positivity is very key to building mental fortitude.

4. Backtracking

Even the best of us slip up and let some negative emotions slip through. You can be going about your day and notice a sudden heaviness in your chest, “Hmmm, am I upset? What am I upset about?” I'm sure some of us have experienced being upset but not knowing why. This is where backtracking helps. This is a bit more cumbersome, but I see it as weeding the garden of your mind. There is a negative emotion somewhere, and you have to remember how it got there. You can simply start by thinking back to every conversation you had that day and how they made you feel. You can think about every news or update you may have gotten recently. Eventually, you would figure out the source of the discomfort, and as soon as you do, just weed it out.

Learning how to build emotional fortitude over time would dramatically improve all areas of your life because you become a conscious creator of your reality. Since we know by now that the feeling is the secret, being the sole captain and defender of your emotional state is very important for your spiritual development. Right now, very few things have the ability to move me off-center, and one has to try very, very, very hard to get me to react.

Thanks for reading.