Feel your Feelings and Feel Your Energy Soar
Fear. Joy. Anger. Sadness. When it comes to running a business, we’re taught to keep these primary emotions out of the picture and suppress them. But what if these powerful emotions are not only NOT bad but actually serve as gateways to a higher wisdom and clearer thinking and decision-making?
What if understanding these emotions at the gut level and harnessing them to act wisely could give you a new superpower—and was something a simple exercise could teach you? You could get on board with that, couldn’t you?
Watch the three mini-montages in the first part of the attached video, then come back here. Did you watch them? When you watched the video depicting fearful situations, did your hands begin to sweat and your breath feel shallow? Mine did. That’s because we were experiencing fear up close and personal.
Fear is a natural emotional response to a perceived threat or danger, often triggering a fight, flight, or freeze response to protect oneself. We’re not even there on that tower or looking over that bottomless pit, yet our hands are sweaty. The truth is that powerful emotions aren’t good or bad, they just are. But learning to harness them can help you keep your resonant energy at a high level.
If you love dogs the way I do, you can feel sadness in the tightness in your throat as the dog owners in the second video face the prospect of putting down their beloved four-legged family member. Sadness brings a feeling of loss, disappointment, or sorrow, often arising from a difficult experience or unmet expectation, which can lead to reflection and healing. We often feel sadness in our throat and behind our eyes.
In the third video, the little girl’s unbridled joy in being surprised at Thanksgiving by her father’s return from his military post is something I couldn’t take my eyes away from. Joy is a state of happiness and pleasure often experienced when something positive or fulfilling occurs, leading to feelings of contentment and elation. But there was also sadness because the girl realizes how much she misses her dad from day to day.
Do you allow yourself to feel these kinds of emotions? You should, and here’s why: emotions are energy rolling through our bodies every day. Emotions can be a superpower if you can harness the energy and learn the right lessons from them. Conscious Leadership teaches us, for example, that emotions can serve as the energy source for wisdom and wise action. For example:
Fear tells us that something must be known and faced—like getting away from the ledge of a bottomless pit … or empowering my team to make more decisions on their own.
Sadness means something needs to be completed or let go of, such as losing a beloved pet … or missing a key projection that seriously messes with your budget.
Joy means something wants to be celebrated, like having daddy home for Thanksgiving … or successfully implementing a new software system in your firm.
Anger means that something has to stop, such as when a team member constantly shows up late for meetings, unprepared.
The key to turning emotion into wisdom, and wisdom into conscious leadership, is to commit to feeling your feelings all the way through to completion. They come, and you locate them in your body, then you move, breathe, and vocalize them so they release all the way through. Don’t leave all your thinking to your brain. If your stomach hurts, you can ask why and bring the reason to the surface and understand where it’s coming from. Maybe you can even do something positive with it?
Fact v Fiction
When we don’t commit to feeling our feelings, we risk resisting, judging, and apologizing for our feelings. We repress, avoid, and withhold them. We fall below the line because if we don’t consciously seek awareness of our feelings, our amygdala takes over to protect us and make us feel good, safe, and right … always right. It’s the fight, flight, or freeze response.
One way to understand it and unwrap it is to set the facts beside the story. For example, if our business goal was to make 20M this year and we only made 19M, the fact is we came up 1M short. The story we make up is that we did something wrong and that it’s bad. But if we consider another fact, which is that the 19M was 4M more than the previous year, well, that certainly changes things, doesn’t it?
The answer is “yes, it does.” You can create a new story, one based less on fear (of failure) and more on a tempered joy (of improvement).
If an employee regularly shows up five minutes after a meeting start time, that can be a fact. However, if we conclude that the employee is bad and doesn’t respect the leader, we have made up a story about them. By listing out the facts of any topic or issue about which you are meeting or having a discussion, you insert a little gap between stimulus (apparent disrespect) and response (anger). Putting this space between the fact of your tardy employee and the story of their threat to your authority will allow you to ask them, after a meeting, why they have shown up late—and to do so with genuine curiosity!
Harnessing emotions is a great way to direct them toward productive action. And we at ScalePassion are always ready to help you tap into this important superpower.