I have suggested to many people to keep a daily record of their Emotional Zones in their Green Zone Diary. At the back of this book, you will find sample page - Discovering Your Green Day - which you can use as a guide to structure your Green Zone Diary. At the end of each day, take a couple of minutes to reflect on your day and complete a page in your Green Zone Diary, highlighting how many hours you spent in each Zone and what was happening at that time. By spending a few minutes every day for a couple of weeks, you will be able to pick up:
- all those people and situations that are associated with your Green Zone, as well as
- all those upsetting people and stressful situations that are related to your Yellow and Red Zones.
Next you need to reflect on those people and situations, as they are a key to recognizing many
of your positive and negative patterns. They will help you to spot and change your emotional patterns.
In addition to looking at your emotional patterns linked to external factors, you need to also consider the internal factors, such as your inner dialogue, the comments - either negative or
positive, accurate or inaccurate – that we all make on an ongoing basis through out our day.
This inner commentary plays a major role in our self-esteem, how we perceive and interpret external factors and stimuli. It has been my observation and experience as a psychotherapist
that people with low self-confidence and poor self-esteem develop a negative thought pattern and become their own worst enemies. People frequently say to themselves:
- I am not good enough
- I am a loser
- I am a failure as a parent, worker, even as a human being.
If you have any of those negative patterns, they can easily keep you in your Yellow and Red Zones and as well lead you to interpret life experiences in a negative way putting meanings onto life encounters that others do not see. Because of your poor self-esteem and negative self-image you can put negative meanings in your life experiences and find reasons, justifications even rationalizations to stay in your Yellow and Red Zones. I share with such people that Green Zone people act while Red Zone people react.
A wise man once said that life is an ocean and the human heart is like a boat. As long as the boat is intact one does not have to worry about the outside water but if there is a hole in the boat
and two gallons of water come inside the boat, those two gallons of water are more dangerous
than the two million gallons of water in the ocean. People with positive self-esteem have a heart that is intact but people with negative selfesteem have a heart with a hole and the stresses
of life can easily come in and cause distress or depression.
