How To Feel Your Emotions and Improve Your Emotional Intelligence 2.0

How To Feel Your Emotions 

There's an old joke about a man walking home along the street in the early hours of a weekend when he notices another man, obviously very drunk, on his hands and knees looking for something. "What are you looking for?" he inquires of the inebriated man. "My house keys," the man says. "Where did you leave them?" he inquires. "Two streets away," he mumbles. "Why aren't you looking there then?" he wonders. "Because the lighting is far superior here."

During my initial training and learning, I was very self-conscious in many ways! Yes, even I, some might say I've gone too far in the opposite direction now! I tried a variety of self-hypnosis techniques and various aspects of standard NLP approaches to overcome my uncertainty and lack of confidence in my ability to do what I wanted to do, but none of them seemed to work for me. I still had butterflies in my stomach and lacked true confidence; in fact, I was nervous about doing what I wanted to do (what if everything went wrong and I failed!!). I had spent some time fighting the anxious feeling, but one day I told myself, "Adam, just experience it, stop resisting, fighting it; just feel it," and an amazing thing happened. I had a nervous feeling, and then it went away! I was taken aback. All those months and years of battling it, and all I really needed to do was feel it. I recognized it and stopped resisting.

This will help you become more aware of your own personal map of the world.

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One of the tenets of NLP is to meet people where they are on their world map.' This is a process of seeing things from their perspective or being aware of their experience, which is a much more in-depth discussion for another time. Now, I was fine doing this with other people, and my successful therapeutic consultancy over the years has been solid proof of that, but before all of that began, all those years ago, I suddenly realized that I had not been meeting myself at my map of the world. When I had negative feelings, I would struggle, resist, and fight them, and you know what they say: When you fight with yourself, someone always loses, and that someone is you. So I resolved to stop fighting and resisting my emotions and instead acknowledge and work with them.

So, where am I going with this? If you have an unpleasant feeling, one that seems unhelpful, or one that you simply don't like, first map it out.

This is simply a process of determining where in your body that feeling is located, truly locating that feeling in your body. Consider its size and movement; I used to have a fluttering feeling in the pit of my tummy that spread into my chest and back down as I resisted. Consider how you feel physiologically, as well as what temperature it is. You can even go a step further and consider what color it would be if it had one, and so on.

While most people claim to know what they are feeling, you would be surprised at how many people have not become even slightly acquainted with the physical characteristics of the emotions they are experiencing; they simply allow them to happen passively without becoming aware of them. Emotions are physical (along with chemicals and other things), so the first step is to map out that physicality.

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Next, accept the sensation. Accept the fact that you are feeling it. Again, dig out the article from a previous edition of "Adam Up" that was all about accepting things in your life; it's in the archive on my website. 

Of course, this can be difficult for some people, who will undoubtedly say, "But I don't want to feel it" or "I shouldn't feel it." I'm sure some of you are thinking the same thing.

So here's the thing: you're feeling it, and the quickest way to change your feelings is to meet yourself at your map of the world and accept that presenting feeling that you're having. If you refuse to do this, you are simply resisting or fighting it, as I was doing at the time. Then any attempt to change it will require you to start from where you aren't, which rarely works out well (as our tipsy man looking for his keys on the wrong street can attest to).

Then you discover the positive intent. What is your body or unconscious mind attempting to tell you? Sometimes our emotions have a message for us. Other times, they are simply sensations that our bodies experience for some reason. What (if anything) is this sensation doing for you or attempting to communicate to you?

Then just feel it. Simply feel it. Make sure not to struggle or fight it; simply feel it. Remember to breathe as well.

You don't have to do this for very long, but it's nice to feel something. Even if it hurts, the fact that you can feel it means that you are alive (woo-hoo!) and that you are aware of how you feel. These are both positive things to be able to recognize and realize within yourself. Accepting and realizing a feeling often puts it in a completely different context.

The final step in this process is to experiment with the feeling.

Increase the intensity of the feeling. Then you reduce it. If it was one color, change it to another, if it was moving in one direction, change it to another, if it was a certain size, enlarge it or reduce it; basically, experiment with it to see how much control you have over this feeling. I believe you will be surprised to realize how much power you truly possess.

One of the things you'll discover as you begin to experience is just how much control you have over your emotions. You may come to realize for yourself that feelings are neither true nor false. They have no real meaning. They are simply sensations that you are having in your body. If you resist them, they will remain for a while, but if you accept them, you can begin to play with and change them. Is this to say you'll never have a bad feeling again? No. Feelings will come and go, but it does mean that you can begin to have more and more of the kinds of feelings you want to have. I'm sure that whatever you want to do in life, you'll want to fill it with more and more good feelings, am I right?

So, have a good day today and make sure you're spreading some positive energy around.

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