I just finished the book “Life Force” by Tony Robbins and one of the concepts he talks about in that book is our “Emotional Home”. He talks about how people stay in the area where their home is, even if they experience disasters, floods, etc. Since it is home they don’t think about moving somewhere else, because, well, “this is home”.

Just like our physical home, we have an “emotional home”. This is the place in our mind where we keep coming back to, regardless of our circumstances in life. As Tony points out, we might have three beautiful children and a loving spouse who adores us, but if we are constantly worried and anxious, we’ll have a worried and anxious life. If you have a billion dollars but your primary habitual emotions are frustration and anger, then your life won’t be “wealthy”, even with a billion dollars! Even more important perhaps, unless we are aware of our “emotional home” and what condition it is in, we won’t have a chance to change it. It will continue to be the same place as long as we live, because it is “home”.

My question (to myself) is, what is my emotional home like? What are the characteristics of my emotional home and are they conducive to living a positive and powerful life? And beyond positive and powerful, does it enable me to live an antifragile life? As I have discussed in previous articles, Antifragile life is one where we not only survive and tolerate change, but we thrive on it. We welcome change and enable change because we know it is what produces the most growth in our life. So what qualities are required in our emotional home to enable an Antifragile life?

I think there are at least 3 qualities that enable an Antifragile life. They are curiosity, love of learning, and acceptance. I will touch on these 3 briefly, and I would love to hear what qualities you think are necessary for an Antifragile emotional home.

• Curiosity: Our interest in what life brings us. Things, people, money, adventure — all of it. The focus to identify things that are interesting and worth learning about.
• Love of Learning: Never stop learning. Very close to curiosity in that curiosity drives us to be interested, love of learning keeps us focused long enough to learn more about that thing.
• Acceptance: Acceptance enables us to have curiosity and learn with no expectations about the outcome. We learn and grow and we accept whatever it brings to us. We don’t stop at a “bad” outcome — we keep going because that is simply “what happened”. Acceptance is a powerful quality that, with the other 2 qualities, makes us unstoppable.

What qualities do you think are needed in your emotional home? What qualities are there right now?

My goal is to provide helpful suggestions that you can apply to your life to make it more full, fun and interesting and help you thrive on change (Antifragile!). I do this from the perspective that if it works for me, likely it will work for other people!

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