“Feel the feeling but don’t become the emotion. Witness it. Allow it. Release it.”
Crystal Andrus
A young girl wrote on my Facebook page that she was tired of Coaches and our tyranny of positive thinking. My use of quotes could make people feel they were inadequate and whatever they were doing was never good enough, she said, and that I was looking to make money out of other people’s misery.
First reaction, I got curious, which people she was referring to; I stumbled across the word “never” that is a very long time to feel anything really, and then I thought, well she had judged me on my ads without getting the full picture. Then I thought, maybe she had had a bad experience with a Coach, I really don’t know, but still, I wrote my last blog “How to choose a Coach” thinking of her. But then, I thought about the tyranny of positive thinking, and I actually agree with her. It is okay not to be okay all the time. And yes it is true I earn my living by helping other people and businesses, just like so many others. I know no doctor, psychologist or consultant who does not charge for their work, whether they work for the private or the public sector.
People, we have emotions, they are part of us. Personally I don’t think there are good ones or bad ones, I think there can be some more constructive than others in any given situation. I’m not a big fan of the “think positive” wave, meaning that some times, we may just hurt and maybe there is nothing positive about the situations and then, as we say in New Code NLP we shake it off and find out how to change our state for the situation, challenge or problem, as you like. Or as the quote above suggests “Feel the feeling but don’t become the emotion. Witness it. Allow it. Release it.” John Grinder the (Co-creator of NLP) puts it in a different way he says, “it is not the problem that is the problem but the state you are in”. Grief comes to mind in this case, loss of loved ones, who has passed away or have moved on, the end of something, as we knew it. We grieve and then we let go! Without becoming the grief and staying permanently in that emotion. In fact, I’m not sure I can think of an emotion I would like to be in permanently, can you?
Joseph O’Connor puts it like this: “human emotions are an integral part of thinking and decision making” so we need them to think and make decisions, there are no positive or negative emotions maybe it is as Shakespeare said “there is no good or bad, only thinking makes it so”. How about envy? A good friend of mine suggests, what is envy good for? Well if we look at the Oxford dictionary Envy is: A feeling of discontentment or resentful longing aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities, or luck. If that is the case, could envy be a drive to get what someone else has? If so is it all bad? Well, my friend said, then what about jealousy? Again it becomes a matter of definition. If we define it as being fiercely protective of one’s rights or possessions, could it be that it is useful to have an alarm bell that gives us notice if we are about to lose something or someone dear to us? Again without becoming the emotion. Fear, she mentions, fear can paralyze you, yes I say, and fear can stop you from picking up a venomous snake or jumping from the Eiffel tower. And happiness she adds would you not want to be happy all the time? I think about it, and yes, I like to be happy but if I’m happy all the time how would I know and be appreciative or be thankful of being in a state of happiness? For me happiness is very much being grateful for what we have (will explain more in next week’s blog post).
So yes, I think all of our emotions can be useful in a given situation, learning to listen to them and to be able to choose your own state makes it, in my opinion, more interesting. As long as I’m not a victim of the autopilot of my own emotions and sometimes, when I get stuck, I look for help from a Coach.