Permission To Feel

Permission to feel your emotions is a powerful gift for yourself! Feeling your emotions is more powerful than you know. We talk all about what emotions actually are and the answer might surprise you! Then we cover what causes emotions so you can take a balanced approach to them. Next, we dive into what society has taught us about emotion and how that affects our decisions, goals and relationships! Giving yourself permission to feel your emotions is the first step in managing negative emotion and in cultivating positive emotion.

We are talking all about emotions today and giving yourself permission to feel.

Now you might say to me, Ember, I feel my emotions. I feel them all the time. And that is true. And I want to open up your understanding and your mind a little bit further into the world of emotions. Some people are very uncomfortable talking about emotions. And I completely understand that and let’s get to the root of that and see why, why we feel that way.

So, first of all, when we’re talking about emotions and giving ourselves permission to feel, the first thing we need to talk about is what is an emotion? What is an emotion? And that’s a little bit harder to describe. All of us kind of have a vague understanding of what an emotion is, but what truly is it?

Well, it’s a vibration in our body. It’s something that causes a physiological response in our bodies. And so many of us stick to like five basic emotions, happy, sad, I’m angry. I’m glad, you know, just like some really basic emotions. And so often we don’t even know what we’re actually feeling. Even if we feel mad, there’s something underneath that it’s layered.

It typically comes. In a way of disappointment that some of our expectations have not been met. And then we feel frustration or we feel anger. So an emotion is an actual physiological response in our body. Another great way to think about it is that it’s a vibration in your body. Some of you may have heard that, that your different emotions, vibrate at different frequencies inside your body.

And just knowing that is to your advantage. So what causes our emotions? Now? This is something that many of us may not know what causes our emotions. Now there are some things hormonally or chemical balances in our mind and our brain that will cause us to feel emotions. Um, when people have clinical depression, the chemical imbalances in their brain will cause them to feel more depressed, things like that.

So there are some emotions that are caused primarily from a physiological, um, cause sometimes somewhere in our body, But the majority of our emotions are actually caused by what goes on in our mind. Isn’t that fascinating. Most of emotion originates in our mind. So the thoughts that we have, the belief systems that we have, um, our perception of a situation, these are the things that cause the emotion in our bodies.

Isn’t that interesting. So knowing that gives you a whole new perspective, at least it gave me a whole new perspective on emotion. For so much of my life, I have felt like I was captive to my emotions. That of course I would feel this way. And how could I not feel this way? Which was partially true when I encountered a situation and my thoughts and my beliefs and my perceptions of that situation.

How could I not feel the way that I did, right. Because I was filtering all of that through the lens of my thoughts, my beliefs and my perceptions. So I was creating the emotion that I was feeling, how you’re going to say to me, Amber, you’re telling me that I create the emotion that I feel. And yes, you do just that.

You create your experience, you create the emotions that you feel and by your thoughts and beliefs and perceptions that go on in your mind, it actually creates a physiological response in your body. Knowing that is powerful, knowing that you create emotion is super powerful. So you are going to say really, do I really create all of this?

Most of it? Yes. Most of emotion is created in your mind. Let me give you an example to illustrate this two people are given the same diagnosis, the same type of cancer or whatever. It might be. Two people are given the exact same diagnosis. One person handles the situation and turns it into a positive and a learning and a growth opportunity.

Another person can get wallowed down and be frustrated and have it be the most miserable experience of their life. Yeah, it was the exact same diagnosis. You see this all the time. People will be in similar situations and like, we’ve talked about. We get to choose our response and our thoughts.

We get to choose our beliefs and we get to choose our perceptions of any given situation that’s empowering. So if we know what an emotion is, and we know primarily how that emotion is created, then we are able to give ourselves permission to feel the emotion that we are feeling. And recognize the source that it’s coming.

Yeah. So this is a tricky topic, Vic, because I’m telling you to give yourself permission to feel. And then I’m also telling you that you are creating the emotion that you’re feeling. Now, a lot of you will just jump right on the bandwagon of judgment and be like, if I’m creating all of this, then it’s my fault.

And that’s not the approach I want you to take at all. I want you to drop the judgment and I want you to try on some curiosity, and I want you to look at this and say, if I’m creating the emotion that I feel that also gives me great power and someone else is not in charge of my emotions and someone else doesn’t create those emotions for me, I do.

That my friends is how you emerge. Empowered. Now, take back your personal power and realize that you create the world around you. You create in your mind, your thoughts, your perceptions, and your beliefs. But we do live in a society that does not encourage us to feel our emotions. Western culture does not necessarily help us to have healthy relationships with the emotions that we experience.

Now, I believe that emotions are divinely given, and I also believe that we are here on earth to experience every emotion. Positive emotion and negative emotion that we are here to experience joy and sweetness and love. And we’re also here to experience disappointment and frustration and some of those negative emotions as well.

And that’s okay. In fact, It helps us enjoy the positive emotions even more because we have something to compare them to. Now in our society, we are told many of us were told, growing up, stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about. Is that giving someone permission to feel their emotions?

Absolutely not. Or some of us were told. Men don’t cry. Right? Interesting. And there’s a lot of gender stereotyping that happens with emotions. I’m stereotyping that women are more emotional than needed and that men shouldn’t be emotional at all. There’s been, we’ve made lots of good strides over the last few decades, but as a society and hold, there has been a lot of gender stereotyping around feeling our emotions.

Now, I’m not talking about making our emotions bigger and more intense. I’m talking about giving yourself permission to feel the emotions that you’re feeling and by. So doing, you also understand where those are coming from. What are some of those other messages that were sent as a society about emotion?

Some of the classic ones that I have seen have been that it’s not okay to feel emotion. People are embarrassed to cry in public. Why is that? Because the general message of society is that it’s not okay to cry in public regardless of your gender. What else have you been taught regarding emotion? When a child has a tantrum, what do parents usually resort to it’s okay.

Or everything will be just fine or stop crying. And all of those things negate and teach a child that they shouldn’t be feeling what they are feeling. But the reality is, is that’s how they are feeling right now, whether it’s created in their mind or not. The reality is that’s how they feel. And by sending those messages over and over through an, all of us do it, we can freely admit that all of us send those messages because it’s so deeply ingrained in our society that we should not give ourselves permission to feel emotions or.

That we should not give other people permission to feel their emotions and adults do this all the time with children, because they, they think that the child’s concern isn’t valid or that they just simply don’t want to deal. With the repercussions of what that emotion looks like for that child and thereby they send the, the, the message that I do not give you permission to feel this way.

Isn’t that fascinating? So I want you to really think about this week, what messages you are personally sending to yourself and giving yourself permission to feel and what messages you are sending to others. Coworkers, maybe it’s a significant other. Maybe it’s a child. Maybe it’s even a neighbor or friend.

What messages are you sending about allowing emotion to be in our lives? Interesting to think about and a really profound introspection that I highly recommend. So why talk about giving ourselves permission to feel. Why is that relevant? We’ve talked about what emotions are, what is the main cause of them?

What, where they originate and what society has taught us about emotions, but why is it so important to give ourselves and others permission to feel here? It is. As a human beings, we are driven by emotion. We are driven by emotion in the decision-making process, we are driven by emotion in the goal setting process.

We are driven by emotion in our relationships. So if we are not giving ourselves permission to feel the emotions that we feel. It affects our decision-making our goal setting. It, it, it affects our relationships with ourselves and with others. So let’s take each one of those as an example, what. So I just want to walk us through a couple of things.

If, if our emotions largely determine our actions, then if we’re feeling something positive, if we’re feeling confidence and optimism and contentment, then we will come to one conclusion about what we should do. And if we are feeling. Largely negative emotion, anxiety, anger, sadness. Then we will come to a different conclusion about what our decisions should be.

Even though we are working with the same set of facts. I want you to think about that for a minute. I want you to think about a decision that you made this week. What’s a decision that you made this week. And if you are feeling optimism and you’re feeling positive, confident feelings, what decision are you more likely to make?

And if you come to that same decision, feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, or feeling anxiety or sadness, and you’re letting that drive that decision, what decision would you make? Do you see how understanding emotion and giving ourselves permission to feel and using emotions to our advantage can help us in so many different ways.

Let me give you three examples. So think about a decision to start a business. I’ve decided that I’m going to take the leap, going to be an entrepreneur, and I’m going to start a business. What kind of decisions am I going to make from positive emotions, from abundance, from confidence, from optimism, from being content, with what I have and wanting more.

What kind of decisions as a new business owner am I going to make now? Let’s look at the flip side, that same decision of starting a business. I’m anxiety ridden. I don’t know about the future. I have a lot of scarcity that there might not be enough business to go around, or that I have a lot of frustration about all the steps that I need to take in order to start this new business.

What kind of decisions am I going to make? Very different ones. Very different decisions, scarcity versus abundance, anxiety versus contentment. Those things drive different actions and different actions bring a different outcome. So by giving yourself permission to feel and knowing what emotion is driving your, your decisions and your behavior, and your actions is a powerful tool.

Because when I start a business, I want to become, I want to be coming from a place of abundance and excitement, not anxiety ridden and frustration because my decisions will determine my outcome. That is powerful. All right. So let’s take another example. What if I want to run a half marathon? I have a goal that I’m going to run a half marathon.

That would be a lofty goal for me, just saying for a non runner that would be lofty. Um, but say I had the goal of running a half marathon. Now, if I was stressed out about my training protocol, if I had a lot of anxiety about running the race, if I was not sure I could even finish the race and there was frustration, how would that go for me?

If I’m driven by frustration and anxiety, what are my actions going to be? Whereas if my goal to run a half marathon is surrounded with positive emotion, competent that I can run this race confidence in the training that I have put in and gratitude for my body and what it can do. Those kinds of emotions drive a very different result because they drive.

Action. That creates a more positive result. Let’s take one more example. What about in our relationships? The way that we feel impacts our relationships more than we even realize. And as human beings, we’re so good at reading emotion. In fact, more than 80{845c495dc00ac885fceaf0923b974883c8d3cc4438e1ad89d6a5e8fd6cb5e1f8} of communication is through body language and observation.

More than 80{845c495dc00ac885fceaf0923b974883c8d3cc4438e1ad89d6a5e8fd6cb5e1f8} and communication is huge in our relationships. So if we have an interaction with our significant other or a spouse or with a child, how does that interaction go? If we come frustrated, wanting to knowing that we are right, how does that interaction go? Rather than if I come to the interaction with open, like an open mind and open heart and wanting to understand this other person and where they’re coming from, the interaction goes differently because we’re driven by a different emotion and we make different choices.

That is how you can emerge empowered this week. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to recognize what emotion am I actually feeling and get more specific. Get more specific. Are you feeling fulfilled? Not just happy. Are you feeling fulfilled? Are you feeling grateful if you are angry, what is it really that your feeling?

Is it frustration or disappointment? Or is it just that something didn’t go as expected? How are you really feeling? And then the next step is to give yourself permission to feel those feelings that is imperative, to break free from what society and our families, most of our families have taught us. And what we’re perpetuating is that it’s not okay to feel our emotions.

It absolutely is okay to feel your emotions. We are human. We are human beings on this earth having an experience. And part of that is experiencing all the emotions positive and negative. And then knowing that your emotions drive your actions, they drive your behavior, your actions and your decisions.

They impact your relationships and the impact, your goals. So what kind of emotion do you want to be making those decisions from? What kind of emotion are you going to approach your goals from and what kind of emotion do you want to bring to the relationships in your life? Those are powerful questions and the answers to those will only help you emerge empowered.