Many people view their principles as strict rules that should never be broken, one who goes against their principals is viewed as a “hypocrite,” a person who doesn’t follow what they actually say they believe.

However, I find principles work best when we view them as guidelines. In this way, our principles become a general rule of thumb, but something that we may have to break every now and then.

Breaking your principles isn’t always a sign of hypocrisy, it could just mean that your principles don’t apply within a particular situation and context. You cannot expect to discover a set of principles and think they will apply to every future situation in your life.

As we learn, grow, and experience new things, our principles will likely change along with us. Having a healthy and practical sense of flexibility in your principles is key toward maximizing how you respond to the world around you.

I find this concept of “breaking your principles” is described well in this short Zen story:

The Burden

Two monks were returning to the monastery in the evening.

It had rained and there were puddles of water on the road sides. At one place a beautiful young woman was standing unable to walk across because of a puddle of water. The elder of the two monks went up to a her lifted her and left her on the other side of the road, and continued his way to the monastery.

In the evening the younger monk came to the elder monk and said, “Sir, as monks, we cannot touch a woman?”

The elder monk answered “Yes, brother.”

Then the younger monk asks again, “But then sir, how is that you lifted that woman on the roadside?”

The elder monk smiled at him and told him, “I left her on the other side of the road, but you are still carrying her.”

In this situation, the elderly monk didn’t hesitate to break his principles nor did he feel guilty about it.

He was called upon to act a certain way in a certain situation, and he did the right thing because that’s what he interpreted to be the right thing in that precise moment.

Sometimes you know what the right thing to do is in a particular situation even if it goes against your principles – in those situations, don’t let your principles prohibit you from doing the right thing.

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Just as you can only see the tip of an iceberg floating in the ocean, we only see a snippet of what is actually going on inside our minds when we make a decision.

Becoming more aware of these unconscious influences can give us a deeper understanding of our own minds and some of the situational factors that can change the way we think and act.

There are many unconscious influences that change the way we behave, but some of the most interesting examples include:

• Olympic athletes and teams that where the color red tend to win more. (Study)
• Expert male chess players are more likely to take riskier decisions when facing an attractive female opponent. (Study)
• Flipping a light switch on before a problem-solving task can improve insight (Study)
• People who were shown objects related to business, such as a briefcase, were shown to become more competitive. (Study)
• Women are more attracted to a man if he is holding a guitar case. (Study)
• People named Kim, Kelly, and Ken were more likely to donate to Hurricane Katrina victims than to Hurricane Rita victims. (from the book Drunk Tank Pink)
• People donate more when there is an image of two eyes hanging on the wall. (Study)
  

• Darkness encourages dishonesty and self-interested behavior. (Study)
• People who constructed sentences using words like “Florida,” “forgetful,” “bald,” or “gray,” walked more slowly across a room after the task, because they were primed with words associated with “slowness.” (Study)
• The presence of a gun can prime aggressive thoughts and behaviors. (Study)
  

• UFC fighters who smile during a prefight photograph are more likely to be perceived as less hostile and lose against their opponents. (Study)

These are all examples of how very small changes in our environment can lead to dramatic changes in our thoughts and behaviors.

While we can never completely understand how every little detail in a situation influences us, we can become gradually more aware of these subtle cues and try to manage the influence they have over us, so that it is a positive influence and not a negative one.

A couple things you can do to improve your response to these unconscious influences:

• Pay attention to new research that comes out. Become a subscriber to my newsletter where I am always sharing new studies I discover.
• Practice meditation and awareness-building exercises, such as the ones I share in my “Meditation Guide” in The Science of Self Improvement.
• Take some control over your environment and surroundings – add positive influences to your day, while minimizing negative influences.
• Don’t go crazy trying to over-think every little detail in your environment. This is useful stuff to be mindful of, but you shouldn’t become obsessive.

A lot of people like to believe that they are completely conscious of why they do the things they do, but research is clear that we are rarely aware of just how much certain things can influence us and change us.

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Our daily lives are filled with small rituals that we believe benefit our lives. For example, putting on your “lucky shirt” before a big date, or giving yourself a pep talk in front of a mirror before a job interview, or visualizing yourself scoring before you shoot a basketball.

While these rituals can often seem irrational and superstitious, research suggests that they may actually serve a positive function.

In a study published in Psychological Science, they found that practicing superstitious behavior (such as someone telling you “break a leg,” or crossing your fingers, or thinking you have a lucky object) can actually improve performance in a wide range of tasks, including golfing, motor dexterity, memory, and anagram tasks.

The reason this works isn’t because of some supernatural force, but because these small and meaningful behaviors can give us a boost in confidence, while also reducing anxiety associated with a task, thus leading us to actually perform better than we otherwise would.

Small rituals can open up something inside us that we normally don’t have access to.

Have you ever seen a movie or TV show where someone gets hold of a lucky object? Usually their life begins to make a positive change and they attribute all of their success to the lucky object. At the end, they face this huge obstacle only realizing after that they didn’t have the lucky object anymore, and it was actually a power that was inside of them all along.

All rituals work the same way – it’s not the actual words, behaviors, or object that give us power, it’s our perception of the ritual that makes it work.

But while the power of these rituals comes from inside us, the physical practice of these rituals (however superstitious or silly they may be) are often necessary to actually spark that inner change in us.

Often the most successful people in their domain – whether it be athletes, businessmen, musicians, actors, or whomever – make use of their own small but meaningful rituals to help them face their daily obstacles.

I’ve been watching a lot of baseball lately and players engage in small rituals all of the time. A player walks to the plate, adjusts each glove two times each, touches both sides of the plate with their bat, kicks the dirt a few times with their back foot, and then steps up waiting for their pitch.

This small ritual helps players find their flow or “groove” while in a game. The specifics behind each ritual aren’t very important, but rather the fact that these players walk themselves through the same preparation each time – and that builds consistency and confidence.

Create your own small ritual

You can create your own small rituals to improve a certain situation in your life. Here are simple guidelines to get you started:

• Identify a specific situation in your life you want to improve yourself in, maybe it’s getting better grades in a class, or being more confident during a date, or performing better at a particular sport or game.
• Find or create something that is meaningful to you that you can do before the situation. For example:
  
  • Carry a lucky object with you that holds personal significance to you.
  • Recite inspiring self-affirmations for 5-10 minutes.
  • Create a sequence of behaviors, such as clapping your hands five times then doing five jumping jacks.
• If you can, try integrating symbols in your life that are already meaningful to you, maybe from a religion, spirituality, or a piece of art you like. For example, a Christian baseball player may make the sign of the cross over the plate with their bat.
• Whatever ritual you do, the most important thing is that is is meaningful to you. Rituals are a personal thing, you can’t just borrow someone else’s ritual and automatically expect it to work. Your own mind has to make it meaningful.
• Keep practicing the ritual. The more often you practice it, the more meaningful it’ll become to you as time passes. Make it become a part of your everyday routine and it’ll become a part of you.

In many ways, creating small rituals like this can lead to a kind of placebo effect, where the mere suggestion that these rituals will work can help make them actually work (a kind of self-fulfilling belief).

It’s easy to be skeptical about the power of rituals – because they are a form of superstition – but I recommend just trying them out for yourself and seeing how they work for you. Despite their irrationality, they can serve a very positive and practical function in our lives.

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Our emotions have a huge amount of power over our choices and actions – and we can either become a master or a slave to them.

When you’re a slave to your emotions, they can motivate you to do things that are really negative and destructive. For example, feeling angry while in a heated argument and then retaliating with insults or aggression.

And when you’re a master of your emotions, they can motivate you to do things that are really positive and constructive. For example, feeling inspired by someone and then using that as fuel to do something creative, such as write, paint, or make music.

One central concept in emotional intelligence is finding a balance between our rational and thinking mind vs. our impulsive and feeling mind. When we learn how to use both of these appropriately, then we have mastered our emotions, and not become enslaved to them.

Here are 5 warning signs that you are becoming a slave to your emotions. If you find that these apply to you, then it may be time to make a change in the way you approach your emotions.

You react without thinking

One of the biggest signs that you’re a slave to your emotions is if you find yourself reacting to a lot of the situations in your life without thinking at all.

In psychology, there is a term known as amygdala hijack which refers to the phenomenon when the emotional parts of our brain have completely taken over the thinking parts of our brain.

This is when you are so overwhelmed with emotions that you aren’t even capable of being reasonable.

Have you ever seen two people really arguing with one another at the top of their lungs and flailing their arms? And their voices begin to change dramatically – as if it is someone else speaking?

That’s just one example of people becoming completely hijacked by their emotions – it can really bring out the worst side of you when it happens – and it’s an ugly sight to behold.

It feels right in the moment, but wrong afterwards

When you’re caught up in the moment, your instincts feel right even when they are wrong.

It always feels like a good idea at the time to snap back at someone, or insult them, or punch them in the face, but that short high is often followed by a long comedown.

When we have emotional outbursts, we tend to regret them soon after. We feel really crappy for what we did, and we wish we could go back in time to take it back. But we can’t.

Extreme levels of regret is often a sign that your emotions are running the show in a certain area of your life. You don’t have good control over them, thus you are frequently acting in ways that let yourself down.

Your actions hurt yourself and others

When your emotions get the best of you, it can often end up hurting both yourself and others.

When people are a slave to their emotions they are rarely pleasant to be around – you never quite know what mood they will become engulfed in next (sadness, anger, jealousy, or fear) and you never quite know how they may react to those emotions while around you.

Often an emotional slave ends up acting in ways that spread their negative emotions to other like a virus. They walk into a room feeling gloomy and upset, and before you know it everyone else in the room is feeling the same way.

When someone is a slave to their emotions, even their positive moods can become out-of-hand and destructive. Sometimes they become so caught up in their joy, spontaneity, and elation that they end up acting in risky and careless ways that scare people or turn people off.

Emotional intelligence is just as much about knowing how to manage your emotions around others as it is about managing your emotions in yourself.

You ruminate at night and can’t sleep

Another sign that you’re a slave to your emotions is if you spend a lot of time at night thinking excessively and not being able to get much sleep.

Staying up at night ruminating is often a byproduct of regret. It could be about how we expressed a particular emotion in a particular situation, or even how we didn’t express a particular emotion in a particular situation.

The other side of being an emotional slave is not knowing how to express yourself at all and just suppressing your emotions.

So if you find yourself staying up many nights thinking about how you really need to talk to your boss, coworker, friend, family, or whomever, it could be a sign that you need to learn how to speak your mind more often (in a healthy and polite way).

People who are masters of their emotions aren’t completely stoic or emotionless – they know how to talk about their emotions and express them in a constructive way that’s appropriate.

Without this healthy expression, you’re going to find yourself dealing with a lot of emotional residue at the end of the day.

You keep repeating the cycle

Everything described above happens to everyone to some degree. No one is perfect and we all have moments when our emotions bring out the worst in us.

Mastering your emotions doesn’t necessarily mean you never slip up, but it does mean that you learn from those mistakes and you don’t keep repeating the same cycle over and over again.

When you start making active changes in improving how you responds to your emotions however, those outbursts tend to become less frequent and less intense.

After reading through this article, how do you feel about your own emotions and well-being? What emotions do you need to work on more? What situations do you need to learn how to respond to differently?

To learn more about emotional intelligence, check out The Science of Self Improvement which provides many practical tools, advice, and tips on how to change the way you process your emotions in your everyday life.

I was quickly introduced to the promising ideas found in Law of Attraction, The Secret, and What the Bleep? – and I was captivated.

They offered the perception that everything in the universe was a product of my own mind. And if I didn’t like reality, all I had to do was change my mind and through some mysterious power in the universe things would begin to work out for me.

How can anyone not find that idea just wonderful and amazing? It makes you feel like some kind of omnipotent God.

Today, millions of people fall for this idea just like me, but I think in the long-term these fanciful ideas actually lead to disappointment, and in worse cases even self-blame and self-hate.

Let me explain.

If everything in the universe is a product of your own mind, then you have a lot of weight to carry on your shoulders. It would mean that you are responsible for literally every good and bad thing that every happened to you.

You didn’t get that new job you wanted? You got into a car crash and broke your leg? You were robbed coming home last night? It’s because you weren’t sending out the right “vibrations” to the universe. If you were, nothing bad would ever happen to you ever.

So under the law of attraction, anything bad that ever happens to you must be your fault, and that’s going to make you feel like shit.

The truth is that sometimes bad things happen to good people for no good reason. It has nothing to do with your mind or “vibrations,” it has to do with the simple fact that the universe is bigger than you, and not everything is in your control.

Recognizing what isn’t in your control is way more powerful than the delusion that everything is in your control:

• It minimizes the unnecessary disappointment, frustration, and blame that often follows when we think we are responsible for everything that happens to us.
• It frees up your mind to focus on things that you can control. So instead of wasting your time, energy, and attention on things you can’t change, you focus those resources in a way that can make a real difference.

Our beliefs and perspective can have a tremendous impact on the results we get in life, but ideas like the law of attraction take this idea to an unhealthy extreme.

If you’re someone who has dedicated a lot of time to the Law of Attraction and The Secret, but you haven’t seen any of the results you really want, then I recommend taking a more practical and balanced approach to life, such as the ideas outlined in The Science of Self Improvement.

When I started taking a more practical approach to my own life, that’s when my self improvement journey really got started. It wasn’t easy, it wasn’t always pleasant, and it didn’t happen overnight, but looking back it was the path that led to the biggest and most significant changes.