This one thought has set me and so many of my clients free: "The worst thing that can happen is a negative emotion." And you can be liberated too, woman. Hear me roar!
Think about it for a second, it’s not the circumstance itself that’s hard. It’s the thoughts you have about the circumstances that cause you pain. Emotions are just chemicals in your body that vibrate. When you feel stress your body releases a chemical called cortisol. This chemical vibrates. You can learn how to process stress and any other emotion with these 7 simple steps below.
Suffering is optional
Our thoughts about anything that happen in life are 💯% optional. I’m gonna teach you how to become a pro at managing your emotions. It’s probably the single most empowering thing you can learn to do in life.
Imagine you're never afraid to feel any emotion 😞 & 😀 !
What's one thing you'd be doing that you're not doing now? What's one thing you'd stop doing that you're doing now? Imagine the freedom of limitless possibility when you can trust yourself to this degree? I tell you it's one of the best feelings in the world.
The problem is we get into trouble when we resist, avoid and push down our feelings.
But do you know anybody, besides me (LOL), who goes around being excited to process negative emotion?
I’m excited to process negative emotion because I know it helps me be unstoppable. It opens my life up because I am willing to feel any emotions, in other words, I’m willing to go for my dreams no matter if I fall down flat on my face. I’m not perfect at it, but that’s never the point, and you don’t need to be either.
You just need a little willingness, and tenderness with yourself
One of my students, let’s call her Lynda, for confidentiality purposes. Lynda will serve as a composite for many women I work with on this issue of starting and building a successful business. She was taking the plunge and building her practice as a General Practitioner.
After medical school and residency, the thought of building a business was daunting. All these new skills she had to learn felt overwhelming.
She had many emotions but wasn’t clear on how to process them. When she came to me she was stuck, and everything felt stressful. She had been so practiced at being so “busy" with her education and training that she literally felt she had no time to feel or process emotions and even if she did she didn't know where to begin to know how.
You get so good at getting it done ✅ that you have little time to decompress and even think about what you are thinking, or feel what you are feeling. Insert runaway train lifestyle, that leaves you going through the motions and accidentally creating your life out of busyness instead of on purpose, designed just as the color of your heart 💜 ❤️'s desires.
Like the song, do you think, "I haven't got time for the pain?" Yep, neither do I sister, and the best way to the other side is to go through it...Let's get it, mama! I got your back.
When we make room for pain, by learning how to process emotion a funny thing happens. It goes away. It no longer has a hold on you. Ummm, that's what we want right?
When we try and resit any feeling, it is like a boomerang effect. You think you have flung the emotion off you and gotten rid of it, but it comes back and hits you in the face. Ouch.
I explained this other analogy to Linda, that resisting emotion is like holding down a beach ball beach ball under water 🌊 and it skyrockets 🚀 into the air with full force when you can no longer hold it down, intensifying the emotion.
Suppressing any emotion and resisting it in this way actually makes it more intense and last longer. Because the mind and body are so connected it can even cause physical symptoms like headaches, rashes, irritable tummy issues, sleeplessness, fatigue, and colds, you name it.
The problem's that no one teaches you how to feel and process emotions all the way through so you can dispel it from your mind and body and move on. This is exactly what I taught Lynda how to do so that she could start her business no matter what emotions were hitting her smack in the face.
It’s unrealistic to think we'll never feel negative emotion. It’s a huge part of life. I use the cognitive construct, the 50/50 theory.
As humans, it's normal for us to feel negative emotion about 50% of the time and positive emotion about 50% of the time. So if you'll feel negative emotion about 50% of the time that’s ok because it means you’re alive, and a normal human being going through normal emotions. I’ve witnessed that when we accept this 50/50 theory on emotions, we end up feeling less negative emotion because we just think 🤔:
“Yeah, this is part of life and I’m totally normal.”
The funny thing is this makes you more ok with negative emotion, and so you end up feeling less negative emotion because when one comes up you don’t perceive it as so negative anymore.
The goal is never to experience negative emotion that’d be weird. You’d be like a robot. Can you imagine everyone gloriously happy all the time? It’s in the contrast of knowing what it’s like to feel grief that we know what it’s like to feel joy. And this goes with any emotion you can think of.
Negative emotion helps us understand what we want in life. It provides contrast. It’s an important part of being a human.
If you learn how to process emotions you'll be so empowered. When you know that the worst thing that can ever happen to you is a negative emotion and not a circumstance, your confidence will skyrocket. Because there won't be any emotion (or situation) you can't manage.
Learning how to be a pro at managing your emotions will jump start your dreams🌈! Come with me…
Here are the 7 quick steps to being an unstoppable dream producing woman who ain’t afraid to run wild with the wolves so she can rest in a field of daisies amongst her wildest dreams:
1. Name the emotion. In a one-word feeling word. Ask yourself, “What feeling am I experiencing right now.” Typically there are 8 basic emotions. Here's some help in getting started: Robert Plutchik's theorized that humans experience eight basic emotions:
Fear → feeling of being afraid, frightened, scared .
Anger → feeling angry. A stronger word for anger is rage
Sadness → feeling sad. Other words are sorrow, grief (a stronger feeling, for example when someone has died)
Joy → feeling happy. Other words are happiness, gladness
Disgust → feeling something is wrong or nasty
Surprise → being unprepared for something
Trust → a positive emotion; admiration is stronger; acceptance is weaker.
Anticipation → in the sense of looking forward positively to something which is going to happen. Expectation is more neutral
There are many more feelings of course but these are the most common ones to get you started. I also recommend downloading the one on my website. I send this one to my clients when we first begin our work together. It’ll help you get started learning to identify what you’re feeling. Then you can learn to process the emotion and learn how to feel more of the emotions you want and less of the ones you don’t.
TIP: Print it and keep it in your purse, or take a picture of it and make it your screen saver on your phone so that you’re reminded several times a day to check-in with yourself and identify what you're feeling. So many of us busyaholic women are busy “doing” it’s easy to get stuck in your head and forget what’s going on with your body, in this case emotions.
2. Find where it’s in your body. Ask yourself, “Where am I feeling this emotion in my body?” If you identified that you feel stress, is it in your chest, your shoulder, your stomach?
3. Relax into it. Lean into the emotion. Relax all your muscles, your hands, your shoulders, your neck, your face. If you feel stress in your chest - think about relaxing into that stress in the specific area of the body you identified.
4. Describe it as if you’re describing it to a cute green martian who's got no idea what emotions are like. “It feels like this… When it happens this…”
5. Picture it. What color is it? Is it hard or soft? Flowing or stagnate? Heavy or light? Tight or swirling? Does it have a name even?
6. Remind yourself of this truth over an over again, “This feeling is just caused by my thoughts, just sentences in my mind, this feeling cannot hurt me.” You don’t have to do a thought model at this time, you can just ease into allowing the emotion to ebb and flow through you. This is just the chemical of the emotion processing through your body. Let it vibrate and do its thing.
7. Continue to breath and allow the emotion until it subsides. You’ll know that you’ve processed it all the way through when it starts to subside. When you get practiced at this, you’ll see for yourself that emotions you’ve been avoiding won’t last forever. Actually, the more you allow an emotion instead of resisting it you'll find that it’ll subside rather quickly if you catch it early on. This may be harder if you’ve had a lot of anxiety or any other strong 💪 emotion that’s been building. If this is you, jump on a mini session with me and I’ll teach you what you can specifically do to manage more intense anxiety and other emotions. The trick is to catch it early on.
YOUR SELF-COACHING ASSIGNMENT FOR THE WEEK:
I want you to give this a try for a week. Let me know how it goes. Ask me any questions you might have. Take 5 minutes to process your emotion by going through each of the steps above. You'll be amazed at how going into instead of resisting will allow you to move through negative emotion much more quickly. It'll also help you be less fearful about certain situations you tend to worry about because you’ll have the confidence and ability to process ANY negative emotion that comes up, not get stuck and move on as quickly as possible.
It’s so liberating, try both negative and positive emotion to see how it also feels to process positive emotions. It's the same process!
If you're afraid that you'll get swept up in a sea of negative emotion because you allow a feeling you’ll want to schedule a mini session with me. We’ll work through it together. Don’t delay. Your amazing unstoppable life is waiting for you on the other side of processing emotion. You’ll be amazed. Once you learn this skill you’ve hit the goldmine Bella.
A lot of time we feel like crap 💩 because we are afraid to feel emotion, we hide, avoid, procrastinate, buffer, don’t look in order not to feel. But the thing is you're feeling the negative emotion anyway, it’s just subconscious and lingering and you don’t know how to process it all the way through to the other side to get to more positive emotions. You can stop this cycle with these steps above. I can help you learn how to cross this river of misery and you can start feeling better as soon as you learn how. It just takes one phone call. So be courageous and set yourself free. Call me, I have just a few mini sessions available a week and I promise you, you won’t regret the time we spend together.
Everything you truly desire awaits you when you’re willing to feel any emotion and do this work, which I swear is the secret to an amazing life y’all.
Here’s to processing negative emotion like a pro. and becoming an unstoppable dream producing unicorn🦄.
