In this book, Victoria Ichizli-Bartels offers simple tools to explore your emotions, resulting feelings, and connected experiences as if they were games.
Ichizli-Bartels argues that you may not be able to control your emotions, but you can navigate them; often without having to act through them, but allowing yourself to feel with curiosity and without suffering, pressure, or guilt. All you have to do is know your tools and use them well during your navigation adventure.
Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games is a surprising, revolutionary, and never-before-undertaken approach to exploring emotions, feelings, and experiences by dissecting them into the main and well-known game components: goals, rules, feedback systems, and voluntary participation.
The three parts of the book present a detailed introduction to the approach, many examples of gameful explorations of emotions, feelings, and related concepts considered in pairs, and true stories from the author’s life illustrating sometimes surprising but always illuminating experiences of emotions.
The concluding two chapters will introduce you to the start of an infinite list of emotions, feelings, and related concepts and give you some ideas and a template for your gameful explorations of emotions.
Letting yourself feel an emotion does not need to be stressful or scary. Take the gameful challenge this book offers. Learn how to navigate your emotions by exploring them like games, the tools you will need for that, and what you can do to control these tools and become the best designer and player of the fantastic game collection that is your life.
Our review of Navigate your Emotions by Exploring them like Games
Navigate your Emotions by Exploring them like Games is a unique and intuitive approach to delving into and coming to a better understanding of ones emotional responses in life. The author breaks the subject down into easy-to-bite pieces, comparing emotional groups such as Regret vs Gladness, Joy vs Frustration, Jealousy vs Love, many such comparisons, and with a short narrative which invites the reader to open each emotional box, she helps you to navigate using a simple and eye-opening approach.
As the author says in the book;
"The information the emotion games provide can be jarring, loud and scary, or quiet, soothing, and peaceful."
The prime principle of her approach to analyzing one's emotions, which, as we all know can be locked up inside us and influence how we see and feel things later in life, is to simply treat the matter as a game and open the door to each package she provides, inspect one's responses, and experience whatever comes walking through that particular door. In the end, as the author says, one can experience greater calm and peace, but also other reactions, all of which help to better understand oneself. This self-improvement procedure follows the basic principle that it is better to look at one's life than to hide or run from it.
In doing so, one can learn to better control emotional responses and given that the road we travel will always have twists and turns to challenge us, knowing how to control one's reactions to it helps one to navigate both rough and calm seas.
A recommended read and simple approach to self-discovery - one that anyone can benefit from.
International Writers Inspiring Change
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About Victoria Ichizli-Bartels
iWIC Interview:
1. What inspired you to write?
I realized I loved reading after finishing school and during my university years. But I think I loved it much earlier. Even as a baby, I used to lie down with a book and follow the lines with my index finger without knowing what the lines said. After reading books for many years, the question loomed: Can I write a book? The question was too daunting, so I started with a blog. I was thrilled by the readers’ feedback and made friends through this experience. One story kept coming to me repeatedly, which couldn’t have been captured in a blog post. It had to be a book. I decided to try it without any plans to publish it. In parallel, I read about the art of writing and self-publishing, found an editor who was also a professional illustrator, had my book's cover designed, and published my first book in March 2015. Since then, I have authored and published over twenty English books, some translated into German, Romanian, and Danish.
2. Who or what most inspired you in life?
The first to inspire me most were members of my family, starting with my parents, then my sister, who had to grow up too quickly after the death of my father, and helping my mother to take care of me. Then, when my sister had her daughter, my niece inspired me and continues to inspire me. She and my sister are my best friends. Then, I met my husband, and the circle of my closest friends extended. He and my children continue to inspire me every day, especially when it comes to my current favorite topic of writing: games and how they relate to life. My husband and my children are gamers, and I get a lot of inspiration from them when it comes to games.
I have to say books to answer the question about what inspires me in my life. Many authors inspire me. But my all-time favorite author is Nora Roberts. My latest book, the one featured here, is dedicated to her.
3. What do you hope to inspire in your readers?
I hope to share with the readers the possibility of living gamefully and enjoying life to the fullest. I will always be grateful for discovering the possibility to live gamefully, including explorations of our emotions, feelings, and experiences.
4. Is there a story behind this new book?
Like the wish to write books, the story behind Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games developed gradually. I love approaching anything in life gamefully. This approach includes viewing anything as if it were a game. At some point, I started wondering what would happen if I tried to consider emotions along the core game components, as the renowned game designer Jane McGonigal defined them: goal, rules, feedback system, and voluntary participation. Around this time, I heard of the New York Times best-selling book Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown. I started reading it and researching other resources on emotions, feelings, and experiences. I also started sharing the idea of this book with others, including teaching it to students of a creative writing school in Aalborg, Denmark. The growing interest in this new and never-heard approach to emotions and my own experiences in the process urged me to write and publish this book before the others I was working on.
Author bio:
Victoria Ichizli-Bartels is a writer, coach, and consultant with a background in semiconductor physics, electronic engineering (with a Ph.D.), information technology, and business development.
While being a non-gamer in the traditional sense, Victoria came up with the term Self-Gamification, a gameful and playful self-help approach bringing anthropology, kaizen, and gamification-based methods together to increase the quality of life.
She approaches all areas of her life this way. Due to the fun she has while turning everything in her life into games, Victoria intends never to stop designing, developing, and playing them. Inspired by a tip from friends, she now likes to call everyone who approaches their life gamefully, including herself, a “life gamer.”
Victoria is the author of more than ten books and the instructor of two online courses on turning life into fun games and living gamefully.
Victoria was born and grew up in Moldova, lived in Germany for twelve years, and since 2008, has lived in Aalborg, Denmark, with her husband and two children.
Author website
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