Truth Bomb Tuesday: How to reclaim your power from your emotions.
“Sometimes my emotions get the better of me. I get close to landing a deal, and then I get scared. Self-doubt creeps in, and I just can’t go on. I know my emotions are holding me back, but I just don’t know how to overcome them.”
I’ve heard my students say this a hundred times. And it’s true. Your emotions can hold you back.
But let’s break it down a bit and let’s start at the beginning.
(Bearing in mind that I don’t have formal training in psychology, just a lot of experience working with people over the years. If you burn out a fuse in your brain trying these hacks and cause a small house fire, I take no responsibility.)
Ok, so what are emotions. Your emotions are your DNA’s way of controlling you. They’re the tool your DNA uses to e-motivate you into particular courses of action.
We tend to talk about emotions as if they’re an end result. “I did the good thing, and then I was happy. End of story.”
But they’re not an end, they’re a means. Good emotions like happiness motivate you to do more of the good things. You sit in the sun and feel warm. Being warm is good for the organism. And so you get a feeling of happiness to keep you coming back to ‘staying warm’.
Similarly, “bad” emotions like fear or jealousy motivate you to avoid certain situations. If I do public speaking, I risk looking like a fool and being rejected. Rejection is dangerous for a social animal like a human. Therefore, you get fear to make you avoid public speaking.
So our emotions are a tool designed to control us and motivate us. They are the mechanism the body uses to keep the conscious mind focused on achieving our basic human needs – safety, social inclusion, self-actualisation etc.
And that’s awesome. The only reason we’ve reached this stage of evolutionary sophistication is because we had a simple guidance system like this hard-wired into our brain.
Go life!
But like any system, it’s not without its glitches.
And those glitches come about because the world we live in is much more complex than the world we evolved in.
First up, that means we’re not great at evaluating what our self-interest actually is. We tend to overstate how risky a situation is, and we have trouble comprehending the potential benefits.
(I’ve literally heard someone say, “I can’t get up on stage with you Dymphna. I could die. Or worse!” …There is a “worse” than dying?)
Our system wants to do what’s best for us, but it’s often very hard to understand what ‘best’ actually looks like.
The other thing that’s hard to navigate is time. We just don’t do well with it. So given the choice between closing a deal that sets you up for financial freedom in ten years, or looking silly in front of a real estate agent you’ll never see again, many people will choose to avoid looking silly.
So it’s glitchy.
But the point is, your emotions are a system. It is a system designed to motivate you into particular action. And it’s not a perfect system – a long way from it.
When you feel an emotion, it’s not the end of a story. It’s the beginning of a process.
I find if we can keep this in mind – that our emotions are not us, and do not define us, but rather are one of the many wonderful and flawed systems going on in the human body – then that gives us a bit of space and perspective.
And it gives us an ability work with the signals of our emotional system consciously…
… which takes away some of their power.
DB.