Hi, I’m Roberta Fernandez, your Ability Activator. Today we’re going to talk about emotions. We’re going talk about emotions because they are a key component in our successes and our failures in life, whether it be personal or business because emotions combined with the way we think, our perspectives, our beliefs, all of these things kind of join forces and help us create the reality that we see in the world and our beliefs about what our capabilities are or aren’t.
So I want to break down emotions into something very simple, because emotions are complicated. Very rarely are we feeling just one thing at a time. There may be several things at work, at play, at same time. And we have a lot of different words for how nuanced our emotions are. And rightly so, they’re complicated. It’s important to note also that emotions are actually chemical reactions that happen in our body. In fact, a scientist by the name of Candace Pert wrote a book a while back called The Molecules of Emotion. And she talks a lot about how they act in our body and how emotions actually stay in our body.
In simple terms, emotions are kind of like your internal GPS. They express, they help you understand that you have a need or a desire that’s not being fulfilled. So they serve a really good purpose. Therefore, all emotions are good, even the ones that we’ve been told are bad. So let’s take the specific emotion of anger. Most people are taught that anger is a bad thing. But in reality, anger is your sign that you’re perceiving something as unfair. And world history has been changed by people rising up in anger because something truly is not fair. There are many times when anger is justifiable. The thing about anger that can be bad is the way it’s expressed. If you’re taking a baseball bat to someone’s car because you’re angry, well, that’s not a very good way to express your anger. So it’s not so much the emotion that’s bad. It’s how we handle it, what we do with it, how we react that can be portrayed or perceived as negative.
Another thing to know about emotions that they’re processed in your subconscious mind, and the subconscious mind and the conscious mind don’t necessarily have a great way to communicate with each other. So the subconscious mind communicates through the to the conscious mind through the body so when we say we have an emotion or a feeling we tend to use those things those words interchangeably but in reality they’re very different. The emotion is created and the subconscious mind creates a feeling a physical feeling in the body to express to the conscious mind what emotion you are actually feeling.
So for example, with fear maybe the hair goes up on the back of your neck or your heart starts to beat a little bit faster. Typically with sadness, tears are a natural way that your body expresses the fact that you are feeling sad, that you are having the emotion of sadness.
Let’s talk about these primary emotions that we feel, keeping it super simple, okay? First of all, we might have the emotion of boredom. Well, boredom is just trying to tell us that we need a challenge and that this is the way we can grow.
Another emotion is anger. We’ve already talked about that. Anger is the perception that you’re viewing something as unfair. And what we need to do is to make it fair for other people and for ourselves.
A very close cousin to anger is guilt and it’s close because it is also a perception of fairness but fairness where maybe we haven’t been fair to someone else or to ourselves and we need to make that right.
A fourth emotion is sadness and sadness is when we’ve experienced a loss of either a person or something that’s valuable to us and that emotion is trying to tell us that we need to have valued things and people in our life.
A fifth emotion is loneliness. Now there’s a difference between feeling alone and feeling lonely, because I know a lot of people that can feel lonely and a whole room full of people, they’re not actually alone. Loneliness is saying you don’t have meaningful relationships in your life and you need those meaningful relationships. So that’s what loneliness is trying to tell you.
Another emotion, which a lot of people don’t think of as emotion, but it is, is stress. Now, stress comes in many, many, many forms, but stress is trying to tell you that you’re not being successful in managing your life and you need to get your act together. So, stress is being that overwhelmed, I have lost control of my life.
The next emotion and probably the biggest emotion that drives almost everything is fear. And fear is the need to feel safe and secure.
Now, all of these emotions take on lots of nuanced aspects. And so, it’s important to realize also that you could be feeling fear and sadness, fear and loneliness or sadness and loneliness at the same time. You might feel boredom and anger at the same time. What I’m just trying to say is that emotions are complicated. not as simple as I’m portraying them here.
But the reason why I wanna portray these in a simple way is because if we don’t understand what we’re actually feeling, then there’s no way we can possibly resolve them. And all emotions are meant to be resolved because if they are not, they fester. And a lot of us are very good at sweeping emotions under the rug and saying we’ll deal with them later. And this can go on for years and years and years. And as that subconscious mind keeps trying to communicate what it needs to the conscious mind, the wires can get crushed and things can go haywire.
There’s also two other emotions that I wanna. touch on. And that is the feeling of frustration. Frustration is not a primary emotion. There’s always something behind it. So basically, the emotions that I’ve talked to you about are emotions that a lot of times will come hand in hand with distractors.
And by a distractor, what I mean is that we use other things to make us feel temporarily better. We may shop too much, we may work too much, we might gamble, we might smoke, we might overeat. That that one cookie makes us feel better in the moment. And then we need six cookies, or a half a bag, or the whole bag of cookies to get that same good feeling that we get used to get with one cookie. And when that whole bag is no longer helping us distract from the emotion, which by now we don’t even know what it is anymore, then we develop frustration. Because, geez, that always worked before, why isn’t working now?
And when we can’t figure out what we’re so frustrated about and how to fix it, a tertiary, a third emotion comes into play. And that is one of depression. And I don’t mean clinical depression here. I mean, the kind of depression that says, you know what, I give up. I am, I got to go on a vacation. I got to take the weekend off. I just, I can’t deal with this anymore. And it’s kind of our, our body and our minds way of keeping us from exploding or imploding, just to take a break.
Typically, what happens though, is if we haven’t identified the primary emotion, the boredom, the anger, the guilt, the sadness, the loneliness, the stress, the fear, whatever it is that was driving the frustration, we go right back from depression into frustration. If we don’t fix. the original problem.
All of these emotions lead to internal issues like imposter syndrome or feelings of unworthiness or inadequacy. A lot of people say they feel inadequate. An adequacy is not really an emotion. It’s a thought. It’s a thought that I’m not good enough. And that thought, what’s really behind that thought, is the emotion of fear. If I’m not good enough, I won’t be able to take care of my family. If I’m not good enough, I won’t get that promotion. If I’m not good enough, people will think of me as a failure.
So fear honestly is at the base. If I had to do just two emotions in the whole world, I would choose fear at one end of the spectrum and love at the other. Everything else is just on that line somewhere in between.
So this is just a little education about emotions. So the next time that your body is expressing feeling, and you’re not sure what it is that you are actually feeling so that you can properly resolve it, ask yourself, what am I really feeling here?
Because it is all very important. If you try to solve guilt and what you’re really feeling is sadness, the solutions are two very different things. So getting in touch with what you feel, what you need is the most important thing that you can do.
Resolving those old feelings is important because those younger versions of you, whether you know it or not, they’re running your company, they’re running your life.
I’m Roberta Fernandez, your Ability Activator. Thanks for tuning in.
