This is Optimal Living Daily.

Emotional Mastery by Steve Pavlina of Steve Pavlina.com, and I'm Justin Mollick.

Happy Thursday, almost to the weekend, and welcome back to Optimal Living Daily, where I narrate blogs for you so they can take a break from staring at a screen.

Now let's get right to Steve's post as we optimize your life.

Emotional Mastery by Steve Pavlina of Steve Pavlina.com.

I received much feedback on the previous posts regarding the challenge of consciously directing

one's thoughts to feel a certain way.

First of all, recognize that there are people and corporations with a strong vested interest

in conditioning you to maintain the false belief that you need some kind of external validation

to feel a certain way. Marketers spend billions of dollars each year to convince you that you need to drink

their soda, eat their food, wear their clothing, drive their cars, and shop at their stores to feel

happy, cool, fashionable, popular, confident, successful, etc. Who benefits most when you adopt a belief

that you need to dress a certain way to feel

fashionable or drive a certain car to feel cool? When you understand that you have the innate ability

to consciously direct your thoughts to create any feeling you want whenever you want, you're not

going to make such people rich, but you will be much more free since you'll gain the power

of conscious control over your emotional states. This is a skill that takes practice, but it is a

learnable one. For example, in a matter of minutes, I can get myself to feel any emotion I want,

and for those I've already anchored, I can put myself into that state in less than five seconds.

This is nothing unique. Experienced actors can do it too. If you're not a lot of it, I can put myself into that state in less than five seconds.

This is nothing unique.

Experienced actors can do it too.

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