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In this episode we discuss how emotions are a physical reaction to our thoughts… they are a signal, alerting us of what is going on in our internal world; of which thoughts we are believing or that our actions are not aligned with what we are trying to believe. Tap into the power of your emotions without letting them intimidate you and run your life! Enjoy my friends.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello My Friends! It’s so glad to be back. I just got back from a conference in San Diego put on with 2,000 people all on a mission to make a difference in the world with their passions and their businesses. They want to serve and create content to make better the lives of those they come into contact with. It was inspiring, energizing, and incredibly helpful on so many levels.
On that note, today I want to talk about how you won’t always feel it. By it, I am referring to the fact that you won’t always feel the motivation or the good feelings you want to. You won’t always naturally have the energy and the drive and the desire. It isn’t a right, it’s a habit and it takes action and intention and practice.
It is interesting how seemingly opposites are often true; that you can’t always trust your emotions, and yet need to listen to your emotions at the same time. You see, your emotions are a signal. They help you to learn what you are thinking and believing; they alert you when something is off. The thing that is off can go either way. By this, I mean, from our thoughts we have feelings and form beliefs. Those feelings result in action and our results. Well, we can have feelings that feel icky when we are not acting in alignment with the thoughts we have or are working on having; we can also have icky feelings when we are thinking in ways that don’t align with the way we want to live our lives. These are incredibly valuable messages and will require much more chewing than we will get into today, but just the awareness of this can shift our appreciation and caution when it comes to our feelings and their power in our lives. We do need to respect the way our brains work, understanding that our feelings are there for a reason, but not allowing them to be the end all be all.
You see our actions flow and reinforce our feelings and the anchored thoughts. Our emotions are the body’s reaction to our mind… when we feel emotions, we actually feel them in our body. Again, they are a result of thinking a certain thought, and choosing to believe a certain thought or idea.
When you are working to change your thoughts and feelings, and you still have countless thoughts and beliefs that you aren’t even aware of yet that are dictating the direction of your life and the emotional weight of your days, it can be really hard when you just don’t feel the good feelings. You will not feel the good feelings until your brain starts to believe the good thoughts. Remember, your emotions are a result of your thoughts. It’s a constant circular process.
So, nearly a year ago, my mother-in-law who works in mental health, asked me if I would write a piece for her blog on her website. She is an incredibly passionate woman working to serve people suffering from abuse and trauma, chronic pain and cancer. She understands incredibly deeply how integrated chronic pain and trauma and cancer is, as she herself has dealt with all of these and has come out the other end like a rock star, on fire and helping others with her compassion, knowledge and mission. Anyway, she asked me to write for her blog and I froze. I questioned my abilities. This is something I wanted to do but I was crippled by imposter syndrome and severe self-doubt. I initially told her I was really busy but maybe and I would think about it. Mind you, one of my dreams since I was in my early twenties was to write a book. I loved writing poetry when I was a teenager and expression is one of my favorite things to do; which makes sense why reading and consuming personal development information is a deep love affair of mine. I struggled so deeply. Then I emailed her saying I could do it but she would have to be brutally honest and it might suck and on and on and then I basically retracted. It was painful to have to realize and face that I felt this way about myself, but to become aware of the feelings of self-doubt I had was a huge wakeup call. I had always struggled with imposter syndrome and self-confidence, but I used to push through the fear to try to prove it, even if I didn’t believe it. What had happened?! It had been 7 years since I had worked in the corporate world and I felt like I was incompetent. I had these thoughts and I believed them for so long that I was crippled by fear and consumed with feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. I realized that these were thoughts that stemmed from feelings of rejection and hiding from when I was a child and a young adult. I didn’t share my insecurities, instead I had tried to prove them wrong, but that was a lonely place that just empowered the feelings of being an imposter, the fear of being found out as incapable or less than. I remembered struggling when I was in an interview for a sales award, and blabbered on aimlessly having forgotten the question and not knowing how to recover. I remembered feeling totally incapable with my ex and not knowing how to escape those feelings.
This rooted within me a deep rebellious awakening. My soul stirred and, although I had been working on thought work for a while, I amped it up. I made changes in my life and my actions. I wanted to believe in myself again. I didn’t want to just believe in myself, but I wanted to actually be what I wanted to believe myself to be. I started to learn that this was not about me changing who I was. It was about me changing the feelings I had that were affecting my behaviors. This meant I would have to deal with these feeling and act anyway. This meant I would have to understand these emotions and learn how to change my thoughts about myself. This meant that I would need to figure out what the thoughts came from and how they were connected to my emotions and proactively change them.
I still didn’t know how I would do this but I started to make huge changes in my life. I quit drinking, because although I didn’t drink a ton, it was in the way of me feeling the feelings fully and processing where they were coming from. I worked to stop eating emotionally, or exercising emotionally and I worked to become a detective of my thought world. I welcomed the pain and fear, and dissected where it came from. I listened to podcasts and read books. I changed more habits, I started waking up early so that I could have time alone every day when the birds had not yet risen to think, and feel and become aware of those thoughts and feelings and my life began to change.
I was proving the thoughts wrong. The thoughts that had become beliefs that had kept me trapped and limited me for so long began to weaken, and I replaced them proactively. I stopped watching shows that would reinforce ideas that were unhelpful and I started consuming ideas I knew would empower myself and change the way I lived my life.
Then I hit speed bumps. The kids would get sick, we would all get sick… it would take us down and I would have less time for myself. I would be stuck with these emotions and less time and space to manage them, and as more layers were pulled back, more layers were revealed. I had moments of overwhelm and I had times where I was so consumed by my emotional triggers and habitual ways of thinking that I felt like I couldn’t break free.
I started to understand deeply that relying on feelings bypasses the reason for them and hides the actual choices I have. We always have a choice. But when we are consumedby feelings that we are not acknowledging, we will respond to them and don’t always see that we have a choice. We can dig, find the thought and work to change the thought.
I realized that even when you are working incredibly hard to change your thoughts, it’s a process and you won’t always feel it. You won’t always feel the good feelings you are working so hard to produce because your brain is still trying to cling to old ideas and beliefs and habits and as a result you will question all of it; you will doubt the process; and you will struggle sometimes to find the joy, or to feel it. This is a result of the beliefs you are struggling with and also the reinforcement you may be getting from your choices. When you act in alignment with the old thoughts, and patterns of thinking and believing, this will reinforce those thoughts and the negative emotions. This makes you doubt the thoughts you are working so hard to believe and cling even more to the thoughts that you don’t want to believe.
When we hide from our feelings, any of them, we actually strengthen them because they are able to perpetuate themselves with the cycle of thought, feeling, action, result. Just because you aren’t acknowledging a thought, doesn’t mean it isn’t working in your life. Quite the contrary my friend… when you ignore those thoughts, it actually gains momentum and incredible power in your life to control you because of this very cycle. Your brain will keep filtering through incoming information from a lens of those negative thoughts and beliefs and will grow in power and results. The worst thing we can do when we are doing thought work is to ignore a difficult emotion, and try to “just think positive” because the emotion is still there… the thought it is warning you of is now able to continue to fuel the inner critic and the positive thoughts actually become fuel as well. They become impossible to believe because your inner critic is much more powerful than you realize.
I am not saying don’t think positive or use affirmations or any of that. These are all good things. No, those are great. You need to fuel the truth, but you need also figure out what you are already believing that is hurting you and call BS on those thoughts. These are thoughts that are calling into question your worthiness and identity. These are thoughts producing fear and shame.
We all mess up. It’s not that I am saying you should feel no remorse for things you’ve done wrong, no emotional reaction when you make mistakes. What I am saying is that you are not perfect and you need to learn to look at your mistakes, own them, be honest about them with yourself and the world as much as you can, but not allow it to be a value judgement. Instead, allow it to be a lesson. See what you can learn from this and start to work on thoughts that say that your worth and acceptance have nothing to do with what you do or don’t do. When you think that you have to be good to be loved, you will continue to shame yourself and get stuck in fear and imposter syndrome, hiding your real self from the world, and thereby never getting the connection and acceptance that your heart and soul so deeply need.
My whole point here is that you won’t always feel the good feelings when you are working to change your thoughts. You can get all amped up, like I just did at this conference, and then come home and your patterns and beliefs that you don’t know you have, or are starting to uncover, begin to try to take over again.
The trick here is not to think that this means your doomed. The trick is to not fear the emotions. Take the power back from the emotions. Start to recognize and form thoughts and beliefs about thoughts and beliefs and emotions that will help you during these times when you’re not feeling the good feelings and struggling with thoughts and feelings you need to purge and break free from.
You can’t trust your feelings as a gauge of truth… you can trust your feelings as a signal of something that’s up. Something you need to deal with. Signal that you have a lesson waiting to be learned. If you’re visual like me and like metaphors, picture it like a banner on your phone. Each time you have a difficult feeling, you can see it as a banner that you need to open your smart phone (i.e. your brain) to see the notification. Dissect the thought that is producing that feeling and then choose how you want to respond to that notification.
So instead of trusting your feelings, realize also that you do have the power to generate them. You don’t have to sit idly by and just feel the feelings you have. Once you’ve dissected the notification by opening your phone and you’ve figured it out, you get to choose. How does it feel to think that thought, having that feeling is not great clearly. What would it be like not to have that thought? How would you feel? Now you get to choose. Just this awareness is a huge step in releasing the power from that thought and belief. It’s unveiled, it’s not hiding anymore like the wizard in the wizard of oz. You can see that it’s a little old man, not an all-powerful wizard and you can choose.
You might think that you don’t know how to choose good thoughts to proactively shift to, but you do, you just don’t know it. When you are living in those great feelings that you live in, also use those as a signal on your iBrain. Swipe to open and dissect the thought there. This is a thought that is fueling you. This is your hero self, out-talking your inner critic and fueling you. These are the thoughts that you want. So when you reveal that the negativity wizard is really not as powerful as you thought and that you have a choice of whether you will believe what the little old man has to say or what your hero self is saying; the thoughts of your inner ally, you can then choose.
And, just as a friendly reminder… OWN IT! Own your choice here and now.
No you won’t always feel the good feelings for the thoughts you are trying to believe. But you have a call to action right then and there. You get to own whatever feeligns you have, knowing that they are not just parts of you. They are signals from your brain. Once you are aware of this, you can’t claim ignorance anymore my friend. When I have a crappy day these days, or a bad attitude, or am just feeling down, I am not hard on myself. I try not to beat myself up; instead I try to own it. I slow down, open the notification, write out what’s going on and process it. I process what I am leanring from this emoition and how I can own it followed by what lesson I will take from this.
You ALWAYS win when you choose to own your shit and find the lesson. When you don’t own your part in your thoughts and feelings and see your choice and what you have learned, then and only then do you truly fail and truly lose, because you surrender your power and get stuck. You can’t move forward. Even this is not to be ashamed of, because when you know this you always know where to start going forward. You will get stuck sometimes, you will forget and then you will remember that this emotion is a banner… a message… a blessing. And you will go hunting for the choice. You’ll go searching for the lesson and you’ll shift to a perspective of gratitude and growth. Nothing can stop you when you’re in gratitude and grace. You will feel all of the power that God has given you and you will NOT LOSE. You can’t lose when you find this lens. Just remember, you can’t release a feeling by ignoring it. In order to take your power back, you have to acknowledge and feel it for a few minutes. Don’t be afraid of the feelings, even if they are intense. Remember, it’s a message. Read the message. Get it out. Type it out. Write it out. Talk it out. Then reflect. Write out the lesson and say thank you. Then, as I say every time, rewrite the story. There are so many viewpoints to everything. How do you want to look at this thing you’re dealing with. Choose wisely and own that choice. When you don’t own your choice, you choose to be a passenger and a victim, but you aren’t really. Don’t surrender your power. It is a process. Give yourself grace. Don’t try to be perfect, try to be present. Don’t shame yourself, thank yourself for working to change your life. Thank your body for sending you signals that you can work with to make an impact on your life and all of those you come in contact with. Whether you believe it or not, your life is a message. You are sending messages to your kids, your spouse, your friends and family and strangers every day about what is important, about what matters and about what is possible. You get to be a difference maker just by starting with changing what you choose to believe about yourself and your life. You are not in charge of all of the circumstances. Let go of what you can’t change and focus on the power you do have to choose with every thought and every emotion and every action you take, and stop resisting the rest and you’ll never feel more connected with yourself and the world around you. You’ll never feel more powerful.
I really hope that this message helps you to make more progress in your life toward owning who you are and loving your journey. I am so grateful for each of you in my life, sharing in this mission. We are in this together. Until next time, have a wonderful week!
Sincerely,
Holly Ann Kasper
The Radical Imperfectionist