Unknown date Posted May 03, 2017

Psychology Today

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What does it mean to be grown up,adult, or mature? Were not talking

about holding down a job (though that certainly helps) or paying your bills
on time, but rather the way you run your life, yourself, and your
relationships.

Following is my list of 8interrelated skills. I stress that these are skills

learnable, though they require practice, and accessible to most of us apart
fromthe temperament we were born with, the personality traits we may
have inherited. I o er them as food for thought as youcompose your own
adult life, whatever your age:

1. Achieve emotional regulation.

We particularly associate emotional regulation, orthe ability to control

your emotions, with anger, and that is obviously true:Those who struggle
to control their temper get kicked out of class, red from jobs, wind up
divorced, and are easily and often unhappy. There are plenty of tools
available these days to help us slow our emotional processes down, even
phone appsthat let us know when its time to take a deep breath and chill.
But I'm also talking about the softer side regulating anxiety, reining it in
when we begin to get overwhelmed, freak out, shut down, or fall apart.

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The skill here is learning to quiet that over-active amygdala and bring our
rational sideback online in order to control our brains and our emotions.

2. Tolerate confrontation and the strong emotions of others.

Even though its good for us to self-regulate, many of those around us

cant. Tolerating others'strong emotions is about our own self-regulation
not getting angry in return, not getting overwhelmed but also not
allowing ourselves to be abused. But the bigger issue here is that if we cant
tolerate confrontation and strong emotions, its easy to learn to blanket-
avoid them, and then we cant step up and say what we need and want. Not
only do we then have trouble getting these needs met, but others never
really get to know us at a more intimate level, and we spend much of our
time walking on eggshells, trying to make others happy as a way of
managing our anxiety. Our own lives become stunted.

The skill is calming our own anxiety and mentally realizing that
others'reactions and problems are not our own.

3. Admit mistakes.

Admitting mistakes means admitting them to ourselves and others. By

admitting them to ourselves, we move away from a sense of entitlement or
grandiosity; it helps us be more considerate to the mistakes of others. By
admitting them to others, we show humility and our humanness.

The skill here is realizing that mistakes are mistakes, not character defects.
They do not deserve our punishment (mentally beating ourselves up) or
punishment of others. They require only that we repair them and learn
from them.

4. Be honest.

This is a broader version of admitting mistakes. Honesty is often confused

with truth, which is about facts and evidence. But honesty is about
emotion, saying what is in our hearts and mindsin the moment, which can
certainly change over time, and should not be confused with dishonesty or
lying. Being honest can be extremely di cultbecause it requires rst that
we know what we feel and think, and then that we have thecourage to state
it. For some, the knowing itself is an obstacle; for others, it is fear of
confrontation and walking on eggshells.
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9/8/2017 8 Essential Emotional Skills for Every Adult | Psychology Today

The skill is slowing down and asking what it is we truly think and feel, and
then stepping up and saying it.

5. Approach anxiety.

We all have anxiety, and we can avoid it do what we need to do to make

the feeling go away, whether it's to accommodate, shut down, or drink a
quart of bourbon. We can bind it keep the feeling at bay by staying in a
small, constricted world that never lets anxiety in. Or we can approach it.
Approaching anxiety allows us to expand our world and ourselves. By
taking acceptable risks, we bring intimacy into relationships and we
discover what we did not fully yet know.

The skill istaking baby-steps to move outside our comfort zones,

desensitizing ourselves to the feeling of anxiety itself. With practice, it all
gets easier:we become braver, we expand. The antidote to anxiety is
learning to run towardwhat we fear.

6. Ask for help and support.

In order to take these baby steps towardanxiety, it helps to have others to

support us. Some of us have learned to not trust and lean on no one, and
thus lose both the comfort of relationships and self-expansion. The goal is
not tobe independent, but to realize that we are interdependent and that
asking for support does not diminish our power.

The skill here isonce again stepping up baby steps.

7. Be proactive.

Its too easy to be reactive, to be always responding to whatever is coming

at us, or to go on auto-pilot and just do what we do and not be awake.
Being proactive is being deliberate, conscious, and shaping what we do,
what we decide, what we want. It's about running our life, rather than
bouncing o of or spending our time sidestepping the lives of others.

The skill here is rst to step back and lookat what we are doing and why
and how we are doing it, and then to makedecisions about what we
want to keep, what we want to change.

8. Determine and live by your own values.

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This is being proactive writ large, but also maybe thestarting point for our
notion of being grown up. What is our vision of how we want to be not in
terms of big, concrete goals like jobs and relationships,but in terms of
what we value in life? It is being grown up, because it enables us to step
away from the shoulds that we received from our parents. It helps us
step away from the looming shadow of our pastand its guilt, enables us to
sidestepappeasing others in the present.

The skill here is stepping back to envision what we believe and hold dear,
what is on top of our list of how to be, what we need not to have a life of
regrets. Then setting out to put these into operation every day,
intentionally, with mistakes, with honesty, with compassion for ourselves
and others. This creates a life of integrity, in which our inner and outer
worlds nally match.

Thats my list. Think about your own, then set a path to learn the skills you
need to develop to grow up and become the adult you envision.

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