Emotional Well-being

Welcome to This Daring Adventure podcast where we work on bridging the gap between where we are and where we want to be in order to live a bigger and bolder life. In this podcast, we will provide inspiration, tips, and skills you need to make your life the adventure you want it to be. Here's your host, mindset, mentor, and life coach, Trista Guertin.

Hey everybody. Welcome back. Thank you for joining me today. Today we're gonna talk about emotions, and I know this is a challenging subject for, let's be honest, all of us, and I've spoken with many clients. And just, just in general with other people, and they will tell me that they're not in touch with their emotions. They don't express their emotions, they don't know how to express their emotions. They're not emotional, all the things. And it's understandable, you know, this is not something that we are often taught in school and.

Obviously a lot of the messaging from our parents, from our teachers, from our culture, media and whatnot, can be quite to the contrary. That instead of telling us to express our emotions and to feel our emotions, that it's normal, that nothing has gone wrong.

We're given a lot of message not to to do that, and it can be anything from, you know, telling us not to be so emotional and telling us not to cry, telling us to back up, telling us not to worry about it, telling us that everything will be fine. I mean, there's, there's everything in between. And this messaging, particularly when we're children, can be quite powerful. Our brains are not yet formed, they're not quite sophisticated. They're trying to make sense.

Obviously, we trust our, the adults in our lives, our teachers, our parents, whomever it is. And so when they tell us something, Usually it's not just going to be one time, it will be several times. It can be messaging that we hear over and over again, particularly if this is the way they were raised. If this is the way they manage and handle their emotions, then this is the messaging that we are going to receive and we will pick it up. Especially as children, we don't know any differently. We don't know how to analyze and to think for ourselves at that point. So it's very common that we will internalize this and we will keep it with us into adulthood. Our brain is not fully formed until we're in our mid twenties. Then we reach that point, and again, we're not really told that we can examine our beliefs and examine the way. That we were raised and the way that we handled different issues and what we are thinking about different things, including ourselves, our emotions, our lives, and so we don't take the time to reflect to see what it is we believe, what it is that is serving us. Whether we want to keep these beliefs or not, and whether we want to decide to choose new ones. And this pertains to the way we handle and express our emotions.

Emotions are a healthy part of the human experience and all of the emotions that we experience, everything that we feel is completely normal. It may not be pleasant. There may not be pleasure associated with it or in the experience of it, but that doesn't mean that anything has gone wrong.

Obviously flying into rage. Intense anger, intense sadness. All of these things sometimes indicate that there is an issue there that maybe needs treatment, maybe that there is a diagnosis and that requires clinical help, and so, I'm not talking about those things. If they are part of your experience, then you want to get help from a therapist or from a doctor. But for normal day-to-day emotions, which sometimes can include us reacting quickly and being very upset, very angry, it still doesn't mean that anything has gone wrong and.

Learning how to experience those emotions in a healthy way can help us to improve our emotional wellbeing and how we experience the world, how we live our lives and our relationships with others.

Essentially, we have a choice as to how we want to respond when we experience an emotion. This can include reacting, so it may mean acting like sort of like a child, having a tantrum, slamming doors, swearing, yelling, stomping our feet, not talking to the other person. All of these things are basically emotional childhood and we are reacting to the emotion that we are experiencing. Then there is resisting, so we're trying to keep from feeling it. It's like having a beach ball, holding it underwater. You don't wanna experience, don't wanna feel it, don't want it here, it shouldn't be here. Let's try and get rid of it. So you're really resisting trying to, to experience it.

And then we have sort of a numbing or buffering, which again is resistance to experiencing the emotion, to feeling it. And that in order not to feel it then we indulge in something that doesn't serve us, and it has a net negative experience for us, or a net negative result.

So this would include gambling to excess drinking, to excess, porn, shopping, netflixing eating, any of these things that we do beyond what we might regularly do, if we were feeling well, feeling fine, feeling content. they tend to just be in excess and not serving us, not helping us.

Finally, then the fourth way we can respond to our emotions is to allow them and to process them. And this means being aware of what we're feeling, naming it, and then allowing it to be there. An emotion is a vibration in our body, so. If we can allow it, most of these emotions will pass through us relatively quickly, within a few minutes.

Sometimes it takes longer, sometimes it may take a few days, few weeks. It depends on obviously the situation, the issue, and we're thinking about it. But for the most part, in order to move through an emotion, let's say frustration, irritation, disappointment, we can allow that emotion to be with us. And usually what that looks like and what I work with my clients through is sitting with the emotion. Being aware of it, naming it, sitting quietly for a few minutes, closing your eyes, dropping into your body to identify where this emotion is sitting in your body. Sometimes it can be your stomach, your chest, your neck. Sometimes it can be your head, like a headache, and if you can sit with it for a few minutes and just. Allow it to be there. Breathe into it. So if it's in your chest, you wanna breathe into your chest and you don't have to do anything else, but just focus on allowing that, say it's frustration, your frustration and your chest, and patiently just refocusing your mind if it drifts off and coming back to your chest and just allowing. It to be there breathing into it. You can focus on it by thinking and seeing if it has a shape, if it has a color, if it's vibrating, if it's still, if it's light, if it's heavy, concentrating on that sensation and that vibration in your chest, typically what'll happen is it will dissipate. It will diffuse. It will lessen. It will reduce.

As I said, sometimes you can do it a couple of times. You may need a couple of sessions to move through it, but oftentimes with some of the, the smaller issues, you can do it once and release it and let it go. When we do this, when we are allowing and processing our emotions. It moves through us quicker and therefore we are able to move on. We are not experiencing and creating some of the behaviors that are not serving us The more we do this, the better we will become at it.

And what I have found is that my emotions now are not so up and down. I'm not getting so angry. I'm not reacting as quickly. I feel a much calmer and centered person. You can ask the people around me. I don't know if they would agree, but I definitely feel different. I definitely have a much greater sense of calm in myself that I experience on a daily basis as long as I keep up this work.

As long as you are human, as long as you have a human brain, you're going to have to continue to manage your mind and manage your emotions. But the more you do it, the better you will become at it, the easier it will become. It's just like, or learning any other new skill. If you're learning a new language, if you're learning an instrument, learning a sport, whatever it is, you just need to practice and you keep going and you keep showing up, and you will eventually become so much better at it.

The reason why this is so important is because everything we do is because of how we think we will feel, and when we know that we can experience any emotion and we won't be harmed and we won't fall apart, and we can get through it to the other side. We can go after anything we want. We can go after any goal. We can go after creating any result in our life because we know we can experience the failure. Any disappointment, any humiliation, any shame, any frustration, whatever it is that we may experience along the way, we can get through it and get to the other side, and everything we want is waiting for us on the other side.

So this is one of the most important practices that we can learn as children or when we are adults. Regardless. If we can teach our children how to do this, they would be ahead of us. It's such an amazing way, but no matter where you are in your life, this practice and this skill, can change everything for you, I promise.

If you're interested in learning more, the link to my calendar is in the show notes. You can sign up for a private one hour coaching session and I will teach you how to process your emotions. I will teach you that you can take anything you're feeling and get through it.

And in fact, if you want to create amazing results in your life, if you wanna make big changes, learning this skill is key. So come to the coaching session, bring any issue you wish, let's chat. I can help.

All right, that's what I have for you today. Thank you so much for joining me. I'll talk to you next week. Take care everybody. Bye-bye.

Thank you for listening to This Daring Adventure podcast with your host Trista Guertin. We hope you enjoyed the tips and conversations on how to get excited about life again.

As always, you can head to tristaguertin.com for additional resources and to book a one-on-one coaching session.

You can also follow Trista on Instagram at tristavguertin.

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