Episode 44 - A Mini Course in Emotional Agility
Welcome to the final part of the mini-course in emotional agility.
In this Episode, I’m going to bring all the things you learned about your emotions and how to manage them in the past four episodes together and show you how to integrate them and apply them in your daily life.
I’ll give you a decision tree for emotions - as well as my shortcut for emotional management.
And I'll take you through four real life examples of emotional management in very different situations.
Resources:
I've created a workbook for you to help you apply this mini-course - you can download it using this link.
Podcast Episode 16 on Emotional Processing Technique
The Work by Byron Katie
Full Episode Text
Episode 44 - How to change the way you feel about pretty much anything - A Mini-Course in Emotional Agility Part 5
Welcome to this episode of the managing the smart mind podcast with Master Certified Coach Else Kramer, a.k.a. Coach Kramer.
Welcome to the final part of this mini-course in emotional agility.
Today, I’m going to bring all the things you learned about your emotions and how to manage them in the past four lessons together and show you how to integrate them and apply them in your daily life.
I’ll give you a decision tree for emotions - as well as my shortcut for emotional management.
But first: a quick reminder of where we’re at.
We’ve covered quite a bit of ground over the past four weeks so here’s a quick recap:
In Part 1, we looked at the neuroscience of emotions. How they’re created - and how they shape both your experience and your future.
In Part 2, we focused on how you can create a healthy baseline for emotional well-being, and what your options are when an emotion arises in your body.
In part 3, we looked at how your your thoughts colour and contribute to your emotions, and how to be more intentional about that.
And in part 4 you learned about solidified stories - thoughts that have become patterns and create the same emotions over and over again.
Today I’m going to take you through some real-life situations where emotions arise, and show you all the different options you have of dealing with them.
And to help you do this, I’ve created a workbook to go with this course, which you can download using the link in the show notes. I really recommend you do this - you’ll find not only an outline of all five Episodes, as well as the transcripts, but also a handy overview with arrows (you know I love me a visual) which will help you decide what to do with your emotions when they arise.
So if you’re not driving or doing something else, why not go and download it now - it will be massively helpful.
And if you’re driving don’t worry - just listen to me and try to visualise as we go along.
I want you to picture a bubble with an emotion in it. It’s vibrating a little (emotions are energy expressed through your body).
This is an emotion arising.
Now whenever this happens, and it’s important or intense or different enough for you to notice, you go to step 2, and ask yourself:
Given the current context, does this emotion seem appropriate TO YOU?
Let’s say your burying your cat for example, and you feel deep sadness.
I would consider that emotion appropriate. And you may too (although I can’t stress enough that you want to make this a personal choice, not one determined by societal/cultural values).
If the emotion does seem appropriate, answer the next question:
Is the emotion a response to a shock to your nervous system?
I.e. were you scared by a sudden loud noise, a traumatic experience like witnessing an accident, etc.?
If the answer is YES, you want to do anything you can to regulate your nervous system.
Do like animals do - shake it off, roar, sob, cuddle up against a loved one - anything that feels like a good way to allow your nervous system to settle. You can also use the emotional processing technique if that feels appropriate, but usually in these situations you really want to get PHYSICAL.
If the answer is NO, your nervous system has not been shocked, then you have a couple of options.
My preferred first step is to simply notice the emotion.
Let’s say you’re grieving the end of a relationship.
Simply noticing that you are experiencing sadness can create the space you need to grieve.
So instead of ‘I feel sad’ - which has the potential to call in all sorts of thoughts processes that try to make you feel better or judge you for feeling sad or both - simply say to yourself:
‘I notice sadness’ or just ‘Sadness’ - as if you were labelling items for storage.
After that, if you would like to clear up at least part of the emotion, you can go on to allowing and processing it.
This is what podcast Episode 16, ‘What you can do to feel better’ explains in detail (and yes, a transcript and summary of that Episode is also included in the workbook I mentioned before).
So if we’re creating a decision tree starting with the emotion in a bubble, we have now
gone down one step;
answered the question ‘does it feel appropriate to me in this context?’ with a yes;
explored two options: dealing with a shock to the system, and, when that’s not applicable, allowing and processing.
Now we’re moving on to the opposite answer to the question ‘Does this emotion feel appropriate to me in this context’ - a ‘no, not really’.
And remember, this is YOUR answer - not someone else’s.
So you may feel anxious about flying, and be totally OK with that.
But if the anxiety is interfering with your desire to travel the world (and boy do I know about this, I was terrified of flying and wouldn’t get on a plane for over 10 years), then the answer could be a ‘no’.
Or you may be building a business and part of that is speaking to groups of people, which causes you a minor level of anxiety. You may just decide that that’s perfectly OK and to be expected - in fact, that this level of anxiety is exactly what you need to energise you and help you focus during the talk.
Now if the anxiety completely paralyses you, makes you nauseous, not sleep for weeks, etc. then I’d put it in the ‘not appropriate in this context’ bucket.
So we’re now at the point where you are experiencing an emotion, and, basically, not only do you not like it - it also feels inappropriate in this specific context.
The first thing I love to do is to keep it simple. So I always ask myself:
Is there an easy fix?
Can I simply change my state, for example through changing my situation, setting, or e.g. using scent, as we talked about in the second lesson of this mini-course?
If so, simply do that. Reset your state rather than dwelling for hours on the how and why of this emotion.
Unless…or until…it becomes a bit of a pattern. In which case you want to travel down the last part of our decision tree:
Is there no easy fix and/or is it a recurring pattern?
If you can’t think of an easy way to change the way you feel, or you’re noticing a pattern, you want to take some time to dive deeper.
If this is not a triggered trauma response or a phobia (both of which can definitely be addressed, but preferably by a certified professional), then you want to look at the thought patterns underlying the emotions.
This is what we focused on in lesson 3 and 4, where we explored both underlying beliefs and solidified stories, and how they colour our experience and thus our emotions.
So there you have it.
Create a healthy emotional baseline - and then use the emotional decision tree (I am now picturing a very emotional weeping willow by the way) to guide your response to arising emotions that confuse, upset, disorient or otherwise trigger you.
Now, what can this look like in real life?
I’m so glad you asked.
Here are some examples.
A shock to the system
It was early morning, I’d say around 6am. Both my daughter and I are early risers, so we were downstairs. I was sitting on the sofa wrapped in a comfy blanket, drinking a delicious double espresso with whipped cream.
She was at the other end of the living room, where we have a massive table, and, around the corner, our kitchen.
She’d made a large cup of tea using our Quooker. She put it on the table, turned around and walked two metres back to the kitchen to get some bread and cheese when we heard a massive bang.
Her supposedly heat-resistant duralex glass had exploded.
There was glass everywhere - and not just big chunks.
The tiniest needles of glass were embedded in the tabletop where she had stood only a couple of seconds before.
If she had been sitting down her face would probably have been covered in shards of glass.
This was definitely a shock to the system.
We were literally in shock for the first couple of seconds.
This is that ‘WHAT THE HELL’ moment where your brain is trying to make sense of what’s happening.
And we were shook.
There was a loud bang, there was glass everywhere.
This was a shock to both our systems - definitely not a situation where you want to start working on your thoughts.
So instead, after I got her safely out of the glass-covered part of the room, we hugged.
We co-regulated.
We talked it out.
I then got to the work of cleaning up hundreds of tiny parts of glass mixed with earl gray - not the most fun experience ever, but hey, it had to be done.
And then I cried for a couple of minutes.
Our emotions of fear, shock, and then, in my case, anger (how the hell could this happen!) made perfect sense in this context. So we regulated our nervous system in ways that worked for us.
Now if after this I would be terrified of being around glasses of tea all the time, that would NOT seem appropriate. So then I’d want to do some work. But in this case: shock to the nervous system, regulate emotions, and process whatever needs to be processed.
A break-up
When someone breaks up with you in a way that you weren’t expecting, that can also be a shock to the system - but in a different way.
This is where, rather than jumping to changing your thoughts and trying to stay upbeat with thoughts like ‘when one door closes, another one opens’, you want to allow and process your emotions.
There is probably anger, and, underneath that, sadness.
You’re grieving the relationship - and that is a real, biological process, it’s not something you imagine.
Your body needs to readjust to no longer be with that person.
So in this case you want to allow and process the emotions (again, check out Episode 16 for more info on how to do this work).
And no, you probably don’t want to do this day in day out.
So give yourself the amount of time every day that feels right to you.
Maybe it’s half an hour, maybe it’s an hour in the morning and then again an hour in the evening.
Allow all the emotions, let them move through your body and process them.
And then take what’s left with you.
No need to push it away - I sometimes visualise it as sitting on my shoulder.
If I’m deeply sad about something it makes sense that I carry it with me for a while.
That’s not something that needs to be fixed - it’s just part of what it means to be a human.
Do you also notice yourself telling stories about what this means about you, your life, your capacity to have and/or find a partner?
Those you definitely want to investigate!
An annoying colleague, teacher, or family member
We all have people in our lives who have such different values or ideas of what is required of them to do their thing well, that we end up being incredibly annoyed and/or frustrated by them.
This is not a situation where you want to sit down and process your emotions (unless that’s the only thing that prevents you from lashing out).
This is where you have a whole bunch of thoughts, beliefs, and rules for other people that you want to investigate.
Byron Katie’s The Work is an excellent tool for this.
Running a business
If you’re an entrepreneur, you get your challenging emotions for free.
You take risks - and your brain will not like that.
So I would say that this is first of all for people who are willing to deal with a kind of baseline discomfort - and may even be able to see that as a kind of flipped excitement.
‘But you have know idea whether that’s going to work!’
‘I know, isn’t it exciting? I’m about to find out!’
If you’re able to run with that, then there is the day-to-day discomfort of things like:
being visible
risking being wrong about something
making an offer that you don’t know anyone will buy
And so on and so forth. The list is loooong.
I always joke that running a business is the best personal development program on the planet - and it really is.
The better you get at managing your emotions, the easier it will become for you to run a business.
Allow the discomfort, get used to it - as long as it doesn’t paralyse you from taking action.
But when you notice emotions like feeling defeated, feeling stuck, etc. it’s time to dive into the underlying thought patterns.
What makes you feel disempowered?
What thought are you believing that is generating these emotions?
Is it even true?
You could be secretly thinking ‘Nobody is going to pay 3000 euros for coaching in a recession.’ - and that thought will definitely create some emotions that are not going to be useful in your business.
So your job as a business owner, when you start noticing emotions that block you, is to find those thoughts (and, by the way, I’m an expert at doing that in a single session, so if that is something you’re interested in check out the break through your money blocks tab on my website)
Shorthand version.
OK, so those were a couple of examples to give you a feel of how to handle emotions in different daily situation.
I also have a very short version I use when shit hits the fan - and I think you may find it useful too.
When someone frustrating, scary, bad or otherwise shitty happens, don’t start changing your thoughts. Instead say:
“This sucks!”
And give yourself a couple of minutes to sit in the suckiness.
To process.
After that, simply ask: ‘Now what?”
And you’ll be right on track to do whatever you can do to mitigate the situation - without having to expend lots of energy on suppression your emotions.
So “This Sucks - PAUSE - Now what?” - that’s kind of my formula for emotional health.
Wrapping it up
You now know an awful lot about emotions - and how to manage them.
It’s time to put all that knowledge into practice.
Over the next week, whenever an emotion stands out, use the decision tree - and ‘treat’ it appropriately.
Be warned: this can result in a massive increase of energy, confidence and calm.
Just so you know.
And don’t forget to download the workbook to go with this five part mini-course (which probably doesn’t make it so mini, but there we are) - link in the show notes.
Have a beautiful week,
Else a.k.a. Coach Kramer
Ready to get some help in managing your smart mind AND your emotions? I can help. DM me on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook to learn how you can work with me, or email me via podcast@elsekramer.com.
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