How To Have Poise

Who doesn’t want to have poise? To be able to feel life but also to remain composed when things get crazy. Keeping your composure in the face of an overwhelming emotional situation is an enviable ability. Desired by many, possessed by few.

So how do you get it? That magical ability to feel all the ups and downs of life, but maintain your cool in any given moment.

Poise through self-possession.

Self-possession = poise.

The pinnacle of a three part journey that starts with self-awareness, moves to self-expression and ends in a rare and wonderful place I call emotional utopia. The nuts and bolts of how you get it are as follows.

Become a master of recognizing and naming the feelings in your body. (Self-awareness)
Deal with the negative beliefs you have about those feelings and the expression of them.
Become a master at finding and practicing ways to move and/or express all those feelings through sound and/or physical movement. (Self-expression)
Become a master at deliberately controlling the release of feelings when you need or want to, and a master of digging up and expressing those feelings at appropriate times and places once the situation has passed wherein you chose to control them. (Self-possession)

When you have achieved step 4, your physical and emotional presence will be marked by the characteristics of poise: gracefulness, elegance, balance, and control.

Admittedly, there are plenty of people who appear unfazed by “emotional” situations. They report no feeling at all in the face of what most others would consider sad or enraging. Sometimes, people have difficulties understanding and describing their own emotions. It’s not that they don’t have them.

In studies, the bodies of these people show symptoms of affective response, but their minds do not register it. Rather than recognizing and managing their feelings in a self-possessed, conscious way, they have blocked the feelings from consciousness and cannot, in general, feel anything, including joy or ecstasy. Blocking feelings from consciousness puts you at the beginning of step 1 above; disconnected from feelings in your body. It does not make you a master of recognizing, naming, and expressing/controlling them at will.

Like a floodgate operator who regulates the flow of a river depending on what the conditions require, poise is the self-possessed control of feelings rather than a denial of them through chronic muscular contraction or a splitting of mind and body.