Ever find yourself puzzled by the choices you make? This week, I'm sharing the answer to one of life's biggest mysteries: why do we do the things we do? (and why DON'T we do things even when it seems we should?)
I'll explore the complex relationship between our emotions and behaviors. Gain insights into how your feelings can both fuel and foil your professional and personal growth. We'll unpack strategies to cultivate emotions that serve your goals and manage the negative emotions that hold you back, like avoidance or misplaced anger.
Ready to step into the best version of yourself? Let's confront the discomfort together. I'll guide you through acknowledging the societal pressures that make it difficult to face challenging emotions head-on, and learning to recognize and address your feelings.
Facing your feelings - both good and bad - may sound scary, but I promise it's not as bad as you think. And it's worth it! Once you learn this skill, you'll be able to stop shying away from necessary confrontations, or drowning your sorrows in the next Netflix binge. You'll stop letting your emotions hold you back from being the mom and wife you want to be, and you'll be able to accomplish your goals more quickly.
_________ Need help applying this to your life? Ready for more strategies like this, but personalized to YOU? Set up your free consult and let’s talk about your unique situation and how coaching can help: https://getcoached.jennyhobbsmd.com/consult _________
Everything on this podcast and website is for informational purposes only and should not be used as medical advice. Views are our own, and do not necessarily represent those of our past or present employers or colleagues.
Ever find yourself puzzled by the choices you make? This week, I'm sharing the answer to one of life's biggest mysteries: why do we do the things we do? (and why DON'T we do things even when it seems we should?)
I'll explore the complex relationship between our emotions and behaviors. Gain insights into how your feelings can both fuel and foil your professional and personal growth. We'll unpack strategies to cultivate emotions that serve your goals and manage the negative emotions that hold you back, like avoidance or misplaced anger.
Ready to step into the best version of yourself? Let's confront the discomfort together. I'll guide you through acknowledging the societal pressures that make it difficult to face challenging emotions head-on, and learning to recognize and address your feelings.
Facing your feelings - both good and bad - may sound scary, but I promise it's not as bad as you think. And it's worth it! Once you learn this skill, you'll be able to stop shying away from necessary confrontations, or drowning your sorrows in the next Netflix binge. You'll stop letting your emotions hold you back from being the mom and wife you want to be, and you'll be able to accomplish your goals more quickly.
_________ Need help applying this to your life? Ready for more strategies like this, but personalized to YOU? Set up your free consult and let’s talk about your unique situation and how coaching can help: https://getcoached.jennyhobbsmd.com/consult _________
Everything on this podcast and website is for informational purposes only and should not be used as medical advice. Views are our own, and do not necessarily represent those of our past or present employers or colleagues.
Kevin:
Welcome to Rethink your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. A fresh perspective on relationships, success and happiness for high achieving moms.
Jenny:
Hey, there it's, jenny. Welcome back to another episode of Rethink your Rules. This week, I want to talk with you about why we do the things we do, why you take certain actions in your life, whether they're good or bad, or logical or not, and why you don't take other actions, even if maybe you want to or you think you should, or you plan to. So, on the most basic level, any action we take or don't take, any behavior that we're showing up with in this world, is determined by how we feel in our emotional state. Okay, so our emotional state, the feelings that come along with that, all of that combines to lead directly to our actions and how we show up to other people. There's a couple of ways that this works. So the first, and probably the most straightforward, is simply that when you have more positive feelings and emotions, you are better able to show up in the world in terms of your performance at your job, better attention, more creativity, be better able to communicate and cope with interpersonal situations. They have even shown that when people are grading work, like a teacher is grading students' work, grades are better when the teacher is in a more positive emotional state and lower when they're not. So there's a lot of ways that sort of just directly your physiologic state, created by these feelings and emotions, contributes to kind of your higher level functioning and skills in the world. That, I think, is probably the most self-evident and it's the one we often try to hack and coaching, where we talk about okay, if you want to show up in this, you know, as your best version of yourself, then how can we get you, how can we kind of create an emotional state that makes that easier, right? So we would go kind of work backwards thinking about those are the actions I want to be taking and these are the emotions that make those actions easiest. And how can I spend more time creating those emotions? Or how can I plan to do those activities when I know those emotions are going to be present and kind of avoid them when I'm in a more negative space, etc. So you can kind of hack that to optimize how you show up and kind of cultivate certain emotions as well.
Jenny:
The second way that our feelings influence how we show up and behave in the world is that we often react to a negative emotion. So what I mean by that is if I feel nervous or scared or ashamed or afraid. My primitive brain does not like this feeling. Right, as a human being, I don't like that feeling in my body. It feels very uncomfortable, it feels like I might even die from embarrassment, right, or whatever the emotion is. And so often, subconsciously, without even realizing it, I will try to somehow get away from feeling that terrible emotion, and we all have different ways that we do this. Sometimes, if we know that a conversation's gonna bring about shame or discomfort or embarrassment, we'll avoid that conversation, even though it needs to be happening, right. Or maybe we'll try to numb that pain or that fear with sugar or alcohol or drugs or Netflix, right, maybe we'll try. Maybe we'll be so hurt that we will react to that hurt with anger and lash out at someone or take it out on somebody else. Maybe we will.
Jenny:
We've been taught that we shouldn't feel angry, so we repress the anger and pretend like it's not there and throw ourselves into our work. There's lots of different ways that we try to either avoid or resist or react to get that icky, uncomfortable emotion out of our body, because we are so conditioned throughout our lives, both by our physiology with our primitive brains, but also just from the messages we get all the time that feeling a negative emotion is something to be avoided at all costs, that it should be, that we should always feel good and that we shouldn't have to deal with pain and things like that. And these are obviously, as I'm saying it, a lot. You're kind of like well, no one thinks that there should never be pain. But, honestly, once you start noticing this, you will see it everywhere. We are constantly giving ourselves, our kids, our friends, our family messages that a negative experience is something that we should be solving for, avoiding, preventing.
Jenny:
Some of us spend so much time and energy just trying to prevent our kids getting upset or something going wrong, and not that that's all bad. Right, of course we wanna protect our kids to some extent, but it's pretty interesting how, what lengths we will go through to avoid feeling normal human emotions of discomfort and disappointment and things like that. So often people will tell me oh, I could never do what you're doing, I could never speak in front of people or whatever. But technically, it's not that they can't speak in front of people, right, it's that they are strongly, strongly motivated to avoid feeling whatever negative emotion they think will be associated with speaking in front of people, whether that's embarrassment, anxiety, failure, fear, shame, whatever, something in their brain has decided there is something very painful, emotionally associated with that task. So I will just not do it, and then I can avoid the pain. Right, and all the time our brains are just going around doing their best to avoid pain and seek pleasure. And it doesn't make a lot of logical sense, right? Because our poor, primitive brains don't understand that it's just not possible to fully avoid all pain. They also don't understand that negative emotions, like even shame and guilt and embarrassment, will not kill you, even though they may feel like they will. But at the end of the day, we are just very strongly conditioned to avoid sitting with any sort of uncomfortable emotion in our body, and so we wanna get either avoid it or escape it or resist it or react to it, whatever we can do to get that out, so we don't have to feel it anymore. Okay, so that is the second way that your feelings can contribute to how you're showing up.
Jenny:
Now, the third way that our feelings explain why we do what we do is because our feelings drive our decisions. So if we decide to do something, the primary reason behind that is that we believe taking that action will make us feel a certain way. So this would be like you know, my goal is to have this number in my bank account, and the reason underneath that would be, you know, because I believe if I had that number then I will feel secure or safe, right. Or if I get this job, then I will feel like I'm validated and intelligent and smart and I won't question myself again. Or if I do this whole long list of things for my family at Christmas, then I will feel like a good mom or a good daughter. Or if I finish this whole to-do list today, then I will feel like I deserve a break and to relax. You know, I'm sure you get the idea, so I won't belabor the point.
Jenny:
So this third one starts from the same root as the second, which is that we want to avoid uncomfortable, negative emotions and have more positive, comfortable emotions in our lives. But the way we're going about it is different, right, in the second one it was sort of very reactionary, instinctual. You know, I'm just gonna try to get rid of this any way I can right, often going back to habits we've learned from since we were kids, where we were taught to deny our emotions or repress them or, you know, react to them or things like that. This third one is much less reactionary and instinctual. It's more, you know, forward thinking, logical, planning ahead, why we want what we want, why we set the goals that we do. And I think that distinction is important because it can often feel very logical and cerebral and we think emotions not playing a role, but quite often it's still there as the primary motivator, is just kind of under the surface and not really articulated.
Jenny:
So we don't even realize how much our emotions are driving us. Sometimes and because we don't even realize the power they have over us, or if we kind of notice that they're there, we're afraid of them because we've never been given the skills to really sit with our emotions. We've been told it's a waste of time or something we should ignore or be embarrassed about. We kind of compound that fear of our emotions and they continue to have even more power over us because you know it's like Voldemort If you're scared to say the name, you're giving it more power over you. If you just put the name out there, that's you taking some of that control back.
Jenny:
And when I talk about the headless chicken syndrome that my clients get into and that I've been in before many times myself. It's this idea of going through the emotions and rushing around without a centered calm, purpose and intention, and feeling like you can't stop and you have no time for yourself and you know you should set the boundary or take a break or whatever, but you can't do it. Well, why can't you do it? Because there's an emotion you're afraid to feel and so, as that headless chicken, you're running around desperately trying to avoid the emotions that are painful, and the only way out of that is actually the exact opposite of what you think you have to sit with the negative emotion and allow it in and allow some of its power to dissipate, just like saying Voldemort's name right, naming the emotion, allowing it to be there, sitting with it, instead of running away from it. Now, I'm not saying this is easy, but I am telling you that the number one skill that is needed, the first thing, is simply to move toward the emotion instead of constantly running away from it, which doesn't work anyway. Right, because they're not avoidable and, as I've said, they're incredibly powerful. They're motivating you, no matter what, all right. So if you know that you are in a place where you need this. You are tired of overthinking and the anxiety and the headspinning and you know you're smart and you're capable and you can do all the things, but somehow you just can't be centered and calm and present and relaxed and you realize that you have to just try something completely different.
Jenny:
I want you to join me for my webinar. It's going to be Thursday, february 8th, at 1 pm Pacific time, 4 pm Eastern. I'm gonna talk about how to cure your headless chicken syndrome with my call method, and we're really gonna focus on the starting point of simply recognizing and allowing your negative emotions instead of running around trying to avoid them like we've been taught our whole entire lives. There's really quick things you can do in just a couple of minutes to start taking the edge off and understanding yourself better. I cannot wait to see you there and hear your questions and help you apply this to your life.
Jenny:
So please join me, and, of course, you can also set up a console. Both the webinar and the console are free and links for both are in the show notes, and I would love to talk more with you about this. I hope you have an amazing week and be sure to notice this week whenever you're doing something. Notice like why am I doing it, what emotion is driving me? Or, if you want something, what feeling do I think I'm going to get by doing this thing? Let me know. If anything interesting comes up, you can email me. I'd love to hear. Bye.
Kevin:
Thanks for listening to Rethink your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. Would you like to learn more about how to apply this to your own life through personalized coaching with Jenny? Visit us on the web at jennyhobbsmdcom to schedule a free consultation. If you found value in what you heard today, please consider subscribing to the podcast and giving us a five star rating so we can reach even more women like you.