Living With Your Emotions
Coaching Tip # 55
What disappointments from your past have been motivators for your future? If you do not know the answer to this question, I challenge you to spend some time thinking about it.
Knowing and using this information can make or break your future success as well as impact your ability to show resilience and bounce back.
Your feelings are the physical manifestation of your emotions. They can come from many places and will differ based on the situation that you find yourself in. The more you become aware of how these influences your future actions, the more able you are to apply this information in a way that benefits your future you.
This coaching tip challenges you to ask yourself a defining question around your potential success:
Do you hold the power over your emotions or do your emotions hold the power over your future you?
To answer this, we need to be able to put a label next to a feeling. In the actual moment of an intense emotion, it can be challenging to pause and understand what exactly you are feeling. That takes practice and a high level of discipline.
However, that does not mean that you cannot reflect back on an experience, think about the emotions, analyze what the effect was and then figure out how that effect will support or detract from your future performance.
Pick an experience from your past where you did not achieve your desired result. To begin, start by understanding your primary feelings around this event. Your basic emotions are the are the broad-based categories - happy, surprised, bad, fearful, angry, disgusted and sad. That can be your first go-to label but to truly understand the impact of your feelings, I recommend doing a deeper dive in articulating what you are experiencing.
Take the feeling of anger. Is it really anger, or can it be better described as letdown, humiliated, bitter, mad, aggressive, frustrated, distant, critical, betrayed, resentful, disrespected, ridiculed, indignant, violated, furious, jealous, provoked, hostile, infuriated, annoyed, withdrawn, numb, skeptical or dismissive?
When I was competing at the highest of levels, I had failures where I let my emotions get the better of me. For me a failure brought on a grouping of those core feelings: anger, fear and disgust. But by using a similar reflection process I learned that anger was really humiliation and disgust was a form of personal judgement. These pieces of information were key to my ultimate success.
To help my clients with this, I use a an Emotional Word Wheel. You can find many examples by googling this or simply click on the hyper link. This tool can help you describe your feelings with as much clarity as possible.
The feelings we have in the moment of struggle are completely normal. When something is important to you, and you do not achieve it, you will experience a version of disappointment, sadness, or anger. We must learn to live with these emotions. It is the space after the emotion where you can turn a mistake or failure into a future success. When Tiger Woods hits a bad golf shot, he has a version of anger. But watch him 10 seconds later. His ability to regain composure is a critical aspect to his success.
A reflection process is key for you to develop this skill. We cannot change what we do not acknowledge. Returning back to your example above, take a moment to consider how your emotions effected a future outcome. Did it…
Spur you on or caused you to stop
Enhance or impair next performance
Disrupt your focus or deepen your attention
Living with and managing “in the moment” emotions equips you with the kind of bounce back resilience that grit is made of. It gives you a confidence that you can handle adversity and use those experience to write a new script going forward.
Melinda