In addition (to knowing our tools), we must learn how to use our tools for building intelligent emotions (emotional intelligence)?  It would be laborious to show you all the ways you can use the tools that build emotional intelligence.  For example, each person will meditate in different ways.  Some meditate as they drive, some in a regular quiet time, some in bed before they rise, some with the use of an activity like yoga or running, and others as they read.  Therefore, what you need are suggestions, principles, and your own creativity.  Then anywhere, anytime you will be able to master your inner emotional world. We will begin by reviewing the tools we listed in our previous article.  From there, we will proceed to those suggestions and principles that will aid our creativity in managing our emotions.

Ten Tools for Building Emotional Intelligence

1. The learning path:  Knowledge, understanding, wisdom
2. The diagnostic path:  The right questions
3. The attention path:  Focus and its precursor, awareness
4. The motivation path:  Desires and passions
5. The fundamental path:  Beliefs and faith
6. The action path:  Right physical actions, including right speech
7. The determination path:  Mental force or willpower
8. The consistency path:  Memory for repeated success
9. The path inside the virtual mind:  Visualization, a form of vivid imagination
10. The actualizing path:  Meditation

Outlining the Process for Managing Our Emotions

1. Build knowledge and understanding constantly.  Aristotle famously said, “Know thyself.”  Furthermore, the wise man of Jewish fame said, “As a man thinks, so is he.”  This leads to wisdom.  
2. Ask the right question to direct your thoughts to an understanding of the problem and find the solution.
3. Focus on a positive emotion or action.  The positive one should be the opposite of the troublesome, negative one.  Examples abound.  For instance, the opposite of hate is love; the opposite of fear is trust.  In the case of guilt, it is removed by either remedying the situation (if you are truly guilty, apologize; make restitution) or if in making a more honest assessment of your guilt you find you are having guilt feelings but are not truly guilty, replace the self condemnation with positive beliefs.  Hurt is healed by love.  For the person who hurt you, to give them the benefit of the doubt and forgive them in your heart is the start of love.  Think of these opposite feelings and focus on them if you want to be truly healthy.  Awareness of your mental activity is a prerequisite to focus.  
4. Create a desire to change.  Run the benefits through your mind of a positive, opposite emotion and what it can result in doing for you or others.  Also, visualize how you will feel and how it will practically reward you.  Following up!  Dream of being the person you long to be.  
5. Believe totally to achieve the greatest motivation.  Faith is inner power.  
6. If you haven’t already done so, change your actions and your speech to fall in line with the opposite emotion’s typical behavior.  
7. Use plain, brute willpower, which is also called determination.  Make a firm decision to succeed and then make it happen.  Don’t hope it will happen; make it happen!  Making it happen sometimes requires a plan, a step-by-step staircase to success.  So, think it through and take action NOW.  
8. Replay your successes (as small as they may be) as each step is achieved to create a memory track that will become your habitual way of controlling your inner emotions.  As a result, the repeated replays will create a new landscape of mental intelligence in your mind.  
9. Visualize (imagine), again and again, your goal and the steps to it.  Visualization is not creating a dream but consistently rehearsing a dream in detail.  For the NF, bring the positive possibilities vividly to life in your imagination and replay them often.  In fact, possibilities light up the NF mind.  The goal is to let the pleasure of them fuel your desires to create a confident self-esteem.  Always fashion everything in your virtual world before you release your actions into the real world.  
10. Meditate often in the manner that best relaxes your mind and your inner tensions.  Meditation can also produce deeper understanding and initiate creativity.  

Our Commitment to this Process Will Change Our Lives

It is worth our full commitment to develop these tools because they will change our lives.  So put your heart, mind, soul, and strength into it, and value the time it takes.  

How we develop toward the intelligence that best indicates our degree of success in life will depend on how successfully we live in the protective environment of our strengths (which we learned in the last chapter) and how we wield with skill the tools for diagnosing emotions (which we will discuss in the next article).  Let’s commit to the process and succeed in managing our emotions.

One Last Comment

I will refer mainly to negative emotions when talking about tools because they are the ones that most frequently are involved with our emotionally unintelligent behavior.