Get confident that you can handle this emotion immediately. The quickest, simplest, and most powerful way I know to handle any emotion is to remember a time when you felt a similar emotion and realize that you’ve successfully handled this emotion before. Since you handled it in the past, surely you can handle it again today. The truth is, if you’ve ever had this Action Signal before and gotten through it, you already have a strategy of how to change your emotional states.
So stop right now and think about that time when you felt the same emotions and how you dealt with them in a positive way. Use this as the role model or checklist for what you can do right now to change how you feel. What did you do back then? Did you change what you were focusing on, the questions you asked yourself, your perceptions? Or did you take some kind of new action? Decide to do the same right now, with the confidence that it will work just as it did before.
If you’re feeling depressed, for example, and you’ve been able to turn it around before, ask yourself, “What did I do then?” Did you take some new action like going for a run or making some phone calls? Once you’ve made some distinctions about what you’ve done in the past, do the same things now, and you’ll find that you’ll get similar results.
Tony Robbins. “Awaken the Giant Within.”