What Does Self-Control Really Look Like?

By Robert

A Hard Word
Self-control  and self-discipline can be hard words. Do I pray enough, read my Bible enough, eat healthy enough and exercise enough? Am I a hot head? Do I fight negativity? Emotional intelligence can do a tremendous amount of things to address these issues. Growing in emotional awareness and self-control can seem like you are just stuffing a cork in a volcano. Can I just control myself and not blow up? Can I not eat ice cream or move into a pattern of negative thinking?

Awareness
Awareness begins before this stage. By the time I blow up, many emotions have occurred and there’s a good chance I didn’t recognize all of them.

While there is a place of “controlling” myself, a better place is recognizing little emotional triggers as they happen along the way. This is a learned skill and we can grow in it. It has to do with truly knowing ourselves, allowing ourselves to feel.

So often we struggle to pray or read the Word because our mind goes in a thousand directions. I believe that many times it is because we haven’t allowed ourselves to feel. Our mind is thinking: It isn’t okay to feel something negative or admit we have angry or jealous feelings. Or maybe: It isn’t okay to even have a problem, because we are trying to live up to some kind of image we have of what it means to be a good Christian or a good person who’s acceptable. With all of these emotionally unresolved issues, we end up with too many programs running in the background and we can’t focus on the task at hand.

A Disciplined Life
Self-control does not have to be a hard word. Self-control and self-discipline are the key to accomplishing great things in life. An area of study in college is a discipline. Learning a foreign language or developing a good physic requires discipline. As we grow in awareness and catch things before they build up and explode, we can develop greater self-control and discipline. This helps us develop emotional intelligence.