Today I want to tell you about what up-leveling your life is not. It is not making you feel amazing 100% of the time. I don’t care who you are, being human and having a life means you will experience all of the emotions and feelings, including the ones you’d rather not feel. How you handle your negative emotions and feelings when they come up will determine how amazing your life can be. Ironically, embracing the negative will up-level your life and make it more amazing.
I bring this up because when I coach, we often start by focusing on an area in your life that isn’t where you want it to be. After some coaching and teaching the tools I use, there are usually really bright light bulbs going off and you get powerful insights. This can then lead you to the idea that you should be able to feel amazing 100% of the time. Never the case and not something I’d ever recommend you strive for.
In fact, most of us want to avoid feeling “negative” emotions because we’ve been programmed to believe we shouldn’t feel them (social media and advertisements among some of the culprits). So we end up pushing any negative feelings away and try to resist them. I believe it was Psychiatrist Carl Jung who coined the phrase, “What you resist, persists.” What he meant by this is that if you’re feeling let’s say angry, but you don’t want to feel angry so you try to push it away, you only end up making the angry feeling more intense, or it spills out in other areas in unintended ways. You’ve probably heard the analogy to resisting feelings as trying to hold a beach ball under water. It’s really hard to do. And the harder you push, the more that beach ball (your negative feeling), wants to pop out.
So what do you do? In the simplest terms, be open to accepting what you’re feeling and permit it to be there without reacting to it. Name it, identify where you feel it in your body, and breathe it in and out – no self-judgement.
Let me emphasize that by permitting the emotion to be there, I do not mean react to it and behave in ways that you’re later going to regret. (So no permitting the anger, then using that as an excuse to hit someone over the head or scream or yell.) Often by simply not resisting, you’ll feel some level of relief because you’re not compounding the negative feeling by resisting it. But remember, the goal is not to get rid of the emotion. I know this is a tough one to sometimes get, but stay with me and try this and see what happens for you.
My least favorite emotion used to be anxiety. I used to do anything to avoid it, and when I felt it, I would do anything to try and relieve it. I made it so much worse for myself by doing this. Instead of just accepting that I was feeling it, breathing into it and feeling the feels, I would make it mean that something had gone totally wrong and that I had to fix it immediately. I would spin in thoughts in my head that sounded a lot like: “This can’t be happening! I shouldn’t be feeling this way. I have to make this go away. I can’t live like this!” This would send me into a fight or flight type response and I would spiral. The part of our brain that is responsible for fight or flight (the amygdala), literally stops us from being able to access the part of our brain that does the higher thinking (pre-frontal cortex). Ooh this used to be big for me.
It’s no longer my least favorite emotion, because I’ve learned to just accept it without reacting to it, and not judge myself (in other words not make it mean anything about me). I don’t fight it, I breathe into it, and I get curious about what’s going on in my head to cause the feeling of anxiety. Where before I couldn’t even access that higher-brain activity. So to summarize, in order to up-level you’ve got to embrace all the feelings that being human has to offer – the good and the bad.
I will give you the tools and help you figure this out in a specific area of your life, so you can up-level! Schedule time on my site to coach with me, and if you’d like to get emails when I post a blog along with special updates from me, sign up below!