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Emotions are not meant to be avoided…they’re meant to be felt. When you give yourself space to feel your emotions, they don’t linger as long, you feel more in control of them and you don’t allow them to build up to an explosion. In today’s episode I am sharing 7 truths about emotions and how to give yourself space to feel them.
Topics in this episode:
My journey out of being a feeling avoider
Why toddlers are so good at feeling their emotions
What to do with disappointment, anger and other icky emotions
What science says about emotions and how they vibrate in our body’s
An emotion can pass through your body in just 90 seconds
What it takes to give space for an emotions and how to do it
Show Notes & References:
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Transcript
Intro
Most women don't want to experience icky emotions, things like frustration and disappointment and anger and failure. They see them as being bad and hard, and so they avoid them, stuff them away and they don't allow themselves to truly feel them. But when we give ourselves space to feel all emotions, when we don't judge ourselves for feeling the way that we do, when we don't push down the emotions and react to them, life gets so much easier and kinder. Learning how to feel your emotions is a big part of creating a balanced life. Because emotions aren't meant to be avoided. They're meant to be felt. In today's episode, I'm sharing 7 truths about emotions and teaching you how to give space for them. You ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Hey, working moms, how are you doing today? I got to be honest - there is a lot going on in my world, and there are a lot of emotions flying about right now. We're going to have to move out of our house that we've been living in for the last 14 years and I have a lot of feelings about it, and I find myself tearing up, you know, at almost every memory in this house as I'm walking around. We're not leaving any time soon, but it's coming down the line. And so we're starting to think about it and there's a lot of feelings. So it felt like a really good opportunity to talk about our feelings and talk about emotions.
I was emotionally numb.
Because I used to go through my life not feeling very aware of what I was feeling and not letting myself cry when I wanted to cry. And in many ways, I just would describe myself as emotionally numb, almost intentionally not allowing myself to feel any of the sad, icky feelings or any of the wonderful happy feelings either. And I can even remember around the age of 14 or 15 being able to describe myself to people as being very emotionally neutral. I didn't have a lot of highs, and I didn't have a lot of lows. That's how I would describe myself to people. And even at the time, I could see that that way of operating didn't feel quite right to me. Like it didn't feel like it was the best way to be operating, particularly because it wasn't allowing me to experience all of the goodness that life had for me and has for me. And I wasn't experiencing all of the lessons that come with some of the more icky emotions either. I was avoiding all kinds of emotions on all ends of the spectrum, and it felt like I was sort of missing out on me.
Stuffing down hard emotions.
I had a classic case of just stuffing my emotions. I would have an icky or an uncomfortable feeling surface; disappointment or anger or irritation or sadness. And I would tell myself, I don't have time to feel this right now, I don't want to feel this right now. And so I kind of push it down and then of course over time you push it down enough and that emotion is going to come out. That's kind of what stuffing your emotions really means. And then it comes out much bigger than you want it to be and usually over something that doesn't matter as inconsequential in some way. But of course, once you do that, you feel really good when all of the emotion comes out. And we're going to talk a little bit about that in a bit and why we do that, why that happens.
But it wasn't really until I became a coach that I was introduced to the idea of feeling your emotions. And to be honest, I was blown away. I had lived 35 years of my life not really understanding emotions or consciously or subconsciously avoiding them, spending a lot of effort avoiding them. And some pretty amazing things began to happen when I started to really understand what emotions actually are and I learned how to have a healthy relationship with them and give space for them. And when we talk about creating a more balanced life, like we talk about on this podcast, emotions are a really big part of it and balance itself. I always refer to that as being a feeling - we want to feel balanced and so emotions can't really remain a mystery to us. In order to create a balanced life, you have to understand the role that emotions play in creating balance. You have to learn how to respond to them with the level of intentionality. It's really important because we essentially experience our life through the way we feel. And if we want to feel good in our life, we have to know what it means to feel good. We have to know how to cultivate that feeling of goodness. It has to be something that we have some level of control over. So this is our focus today. I'm going to be sharing 7 truths that I have learned over the last five’ish years of being a coach all about emotions. And then I'm going to talk about what it means to actually give space to your emotions, to be intentional with your emotions so that they don't feel so overwhelming and they don't feel like something you have to avoid and so you don't stuff them, so that you don't feel like they're lingering around with you everywhere.
Emotions are meant to be felt.
Okay, so let's start with the first truth. And if I'm really honest, this was probably the most revolutionary one for me. I recall the moment that somebody said this to me. It is that emotions are meant to be felt. I had this amazing coach that is one of my colleagues in my mastermind with me. She's an expert at teaching people how to feel and to leverage their emotions. Her name is Elizabeth Salzar, and she and I were on this coaching call together, and she asked me about something I was feeling and said, well, how does that feel in your body? I looked at her because we were on a video call, and I said, what? She said, how does that feel? What are the physical sensations that you're experiencing in your body as you feel that emotion? And I literally sat there in that moment and said, I don't know what you're talking about. So she had to backtrack and kind of explain to me this idea. It had never been introduced to me before, and maybe it's never been introduced to you before, and I'm the first one saying it, but it blew my mind. Your emotions are meant to be felt.
Scientists have studied emotions, they have studied the human body, and they find that when you're in the middle of experiencing an emotion, your cells vibrate and they vibrate in different frequencies and in different ways when you're experiencing different emotions. So we can actually describe those vibrations differently with different emotions. There are different sensations that people use to describe the different emotions because they literally feel different inside of your body. Mind blown by this idea. And I think the reason why it was so revolutionary to me is because I had never brought that much awareness to the various sensations and the various things happening inside of my body before. That idea is often talked about in things like mindfulness and things like yoga, which I dabble in yoga and dabble in mindfulness and those types of things. But there is a presence that you have to have with yourself in a moment when you're really focusing in on how something feels. The practice of learning to feel my emotions and just this idea just generally that emotions are meant to be felt brings your awareness to your body and for me, in a way that I had never experienced before.
Your emotions come from your thoughts.
Second mind-blowing truth to me, I also learned this in coaching. Your emotions come from your thoughts. What psychology tells us is that our feelings come from the way we think. So let me give you an example. If your toddler is in the middle of a meltdown and you think, oh my gosh, I don't know what to do, he shouldn't be doing this, I wish he wasn't doing this right now. You're likely going to feel helpless, maybe a little bit inadequate as a mom. But if instead while your toddler is having a meltdown, you think, oh, this is perfectly normal, I can handle this. You're probably going to feel a lot more confident as a mom. You're going to probably feel supportive. You're likely going to feel like you can handle whatever he's dishing out at that moment. What's important to see is that the circumstance is that your toddler is having a tantrum, and that isn't what is causing you to feel anything. It's the way you're thinking about that tantrum. You're either thinking things in such a way that makes you feel really confident as a mom, or you're thinking things that make you feel very helpless and, like, this is a big problem. It is the way you think that dictates the way you feel. Your emotions flow out of your thoughts. Your emotions are not dictated by your circumstances itself.
Your emotions are useful.
The third truth, your emotions are useful. There are a lot of people that are more in tune with what they feel than what they think. Right? I was kind of the opposite, which is why I think I was so numb to my emotions in the beginning, at least. Turns out I actually do know what I'm feeling. I just had never really cultivated a language before in a way of thinking about it that made sense to me. But I know for a lot of people it’s easier to get to an emotion than they are to a thought. So they might say to themselves, wow, I'm feeling really anxious right now. You can then use that. It becomes useful information if you go, wow, I'm feeling anxious. The next logical thing to think is, why am I feeling anxious? Which is going to get you to more of the thoughts that are creating that anxiety. So emotions are kind of this gateway into our thinking, which is really useful when you want to understand why you're feeling the way you're feeling, or if you want to change the way you're feeling about something. Right? Because if your thoughts are actually what dictate the way you feel, you're able to change your mindset. You're able to change your perspective about a situation and then completely change the way you feel about it. So if you're not wanting to feel so helpless and feel so frustrated every time your toddler has a meltdown, you need to change your mindset and your perspective around that meltdown, because inevitably your child is going to have another meltdown. You're not going to be able to prevent the meltdowns from happening to a two-year-old. They just happen all of the time. All you can do is change the way you think about those meltdowns. You change your perspective so that you can change the way you feel about it.
So emotions are really useful because they become a tool to help guide the way we think or the way that we want to think - like a perspective we want to cultivate in the future. There's this beautiful Pixar movie called Inside Out, which, if you have not seen this movie and you want to learn more about the inner workings of emotions and how they operate, it's just such a wonderful animated film that, I think, depicts a very accurate picture of what's going on inside of us and all of the conflicting emotions that we have. There's this wonderful scene at the end where Sadness and Joy are talking about their favorite memory and they both end up having the same exact memory and it surprises both of them. Sadness picks a memory of when she lost the hockey game for her team because she had missed the last shot before the buzzer went out and Happiness picks that same memory, but the focus is on how the team rallied around her and lifted her up on her shoulders despite missing the shot. It's a beautiful moment in this movie because they realize how they need each other, how Sadness and Happiness actually often go hand in hand and we can't really experience one without the other. They're both useful in helping us to feel the spectrum of emotions in life.
Life is 50-50
Which really brings us to truth number four, which is that life is 50-50. And this comes from a coach that I follow, Brook Castillo. She created the Life Coach school. She taught me this truth, essentially about emotions because it's one of the things she likes to say a lot. She likes to say that life is 50-50, which means that 50% of the time you are meant to experience emotions that are on the positive end of the spectrum and 50% of the time you are meant to experience emotions that are on the negative side of the spectrum, like the uncomfortable side. And a lot of times we experience emotions that are right there in the middle that are not overly happy or are not overly sad. They're somewhere kind of right there in the middle, maybe skewed slightly one way or the other, like as if it's a spectrum. I like to think of our emotions as being a spectrum. This is a really important point to understand because oftentimes as human beings, we want to label uncomfortable emotions like sadness and disappointment and failure and frustration and irritation and overwhelm all of those types of emotions as being bad, as if we're not supposed to be experiencing them, versus the idea that half of the time we're supposed to be on the kind of neutral, negative side of the spectrum. And half of the time in life we're going to be on the neutral positive that is over the course of our entire life, not necessarily in our day or a week or a month or even our years. We can have seasons of life that are skewed one way or the other. But when you really take a step back and look at it over the course of your life, it's going to be about the time on one side and 50% on the other.
Emotions are normal
This then leads me to our fifth truth, which is that emotions are normal. When I say this, what I really mean is that all of the emotions, even the ones that are on the negative end of the spectrum. They are all normal. And I even want to try to shy away from the idea of calling negative emotions negative because it sends a message to our brain that they're bad. I try not to use the word negative. Instead, I'll say something like an icky emotion or an uncomfortable emotion, because emotions like sadness and anger and disappointment and failure and frustration, they don't often feel very good in our body. Right? That goes back to point number one. Those emotions, when we feel them, when we feel their vibration, they don't feel very good inside of us. They're very uncomfortable. And so we like to avoid them, but they are, in fact, very normal. All of these emotions are completely normal. We are meant to experience them. We have a body that is able to experience them. There are no other species out there on the planet that we know of that experiences emotions in the range that we do. Some animals can experience some types of emotions that we have found. But humans have this amazing ability to feel a whole spectrum of emotions, very nuanced emotions in a way that no other living being can. It's normal for us to have emotions all across the spectrum, good and bad.
When you feel an emotion, it passes quickly.
Truth number six, when you feel an emotion, it passes quickly. Now, one of the nerdy things I have learned about emotions as I've been studying it and working on these things, is that emotions vibrate in our body in a pattern. Okay, so I was telling you earlier that your cells vibrate. Well, our cells actually vibrate in a pattern. I'm not going to use all the scientific language here. I'm just kind of simplifying it. But essentially, the moment our brains react with a big emotion, let's call it anger or frustration - what happens is our brain releases signals in our body to release a whole bunch of chemicals. And those chemicals travel in our cells, causing them to vibrate and then eventually they dissipate. Different chemicals are released with different emotions. But from the moment our brain sends the signal to release the chemical reaction, and then we start to feel that feeling because of those chemicals. And the vibrations happen to the moment that there is no more chemical in our body. That whole cycle is 90 seconds long. That's it. Now, for most of us, when we feel something like anger or frustration, it sticks with us a lot longer than 90 seconds. But that is because our body and our brain are holding onto the emotion. Or maybe we have stacked emotions. We have a bunch of emotions going on with it, or maybe we're replaying situations in the past that we are connecting to that, and that is what's causing the lingering emotion. But our bodies literally have the ability to move on from an emotion in 90 seconds. And a lot of people, they spend a lot of energy and time, Avoiding uncomfortable feelings because they think that they're going to last for days or for hours at a time. But in reality, the body can let that go in just a couple of minutes. It's the act of fighting an emotion or stuffing an emotion or not allowing ourselves to feel an emotion, like resisting it, that is what makes the experience of an emotion last so much longer than it has to.
So I want to give you a really great example of this, because our kids demonstrate how emotions pass through us in a very beautiful way. We're going to come back to the tantruming toddler because we all can relate to it as moms. When your child begins to have really strong emotions, It comes out in a big tantrum. My son, for example, really prefers the blue cup over the red cup. And I recall times when I would pour his milk and put it into the red cup and not into the blue cup, and then he would flip out, and he would throw himself on the ground, and he would throw something. He might even try to kick me, or he would try to kick the wall, or he would whack the cup out of my hand or whatnot. And he would start to cry, and sometimes it would be real tears, and sometimes it would just be like crocodile tears. Or sometimes he would just scream really loud, and he would run out of the room and then flail himself on the ground and scream, and he would just repeat over and over and over again, I don't want that cup. I don't want that cup. I don't want that cup. And it doesn't matter what you say - you could be like, I'm so sorry, buddy. Here, let me give it to you and the other cup. It's no problem. Here you go, this is no big deal. It doesn't really matter what you say or what you do.
I know we all have these moments and have experienced them. Your child is still going to have the tantrum. The most fascinating thing is for every child, there is a moment when the tantrum stops, and it's not because you've said anything or you've done anything. It's as if the emotion is just no longer there. Like, they have felt whatever they needed to feel, and then it's over, and then they're done. And with my kids, what would tend to happen is they would come and they would get their milk, and then they would look at me, and usually, I'd wipe away their tears or whatever, but they would be so over it, and they would just be like, hey, do you want to play now? Can I have a snack? Can we go outside? And I, as a mom, would be sitting there being like, oh, my gosh, that was like ten minutes of screaming. I am not over this yet. I have a lot of feelings about your feelings, but you look like you're completely over it, like, in an instant. It's the most amazing thing to watch emotion pass through kids, because it really does feel like you can watch the brain release the chemicals in the body, and the vibrations begin to happen, and then they begin to respond to them in a very physical way, a way that they have no control over, and they just allow it to. They scream and they throw themselves, and they get all of the energy out until the vibration stops, until the chemicals are gone, and then all of a sudden, it's over. This is the same thing that happens for us as adults. It can be the same thing that happens for us as adults. Emotions still pass in exactly the same way that they did for us when we were toddlers or as we watch our kids go through the same thing. The emotion can pass quickly if we don't fight it. A toddler isn't fighting the emotion. They're not stuffing it. They're not pushing it away till another time. They are saying what they want to say. They are crying it out. They are flailing their bodies in all of the ways it needs to be flailed. They are releasing it all. And that is why the emotion passes so quickly, and they can move on to the next thing. They're just allowing themselves to feel it, and then they are moving on.
When you actually allow yourself space to feel an emotion, it will pass quickly.
We, as adults, begin to hear a message over time that we're not allowed to react in that way or that there's a certain way to allow our emotions to be experienced. So we begin to taper our emotions, which really means what we're doing is we're kind of stopping the whole experience of emotions and through that process of resisting them and kind of boxing them in, we are making them linger way longer than they need to. When in reality, the truth is, when you feel an emotion, when you actually allow yourself space to feel it, it will pass quickly. From a physiological point of view, it passes in 90 seconds.
I'm willing to feel anything.
And the last truth I want to give you today is that I am a person that is willing to feel anything. Now, this is almost a mindset that I have had to take on while I've been learning a lot about emotions - I'm willing to feel anything. I believe that my body is able to feel anything. There isn't an emotion that I need to avoid, because literally my body was designed to experience and house and have emotions, so there really isn't anything to avoid. So it's really a mindset that I am willing to feel anything. I'm an ambitious person. I have big goals in my life. I want to live life to its fullest. I don't want to settle. I don't want to have regrets. I don't want to feel held back. I want to experience everything that life has for me. That also means I have to be willing to experience all of the emotions that come with those things. I can't actively be living life to its fullest and avoiding feeling disappointment and failure, because disappointment and failure are going to come along when things don't go the way I want them to go in life. Right? These are emotions that come from going after a big life, which means I need to be willing to feel them, and I want to be learning how to feel them even better.
So those are my seven truths. I'm going to say them again for you because these were so revolutionary to me.
Emotions are meant to be felt.
Emotions come from your thoughts.
Emotions are useful, they have something to offer you.
Life is about 50-50. 50% of the time you're going to feel uncomfortable emotions. 50% of the time you're going to feel ones that you really like.
All emotions are normal, and none of them need to be avoided.
When you feel an emotion, it passes quickly.
Feeling your emotions or being willing to feel your emotions is a mindset.
So now let's talk about the practicality of feeling an emotion. I like to say giving space to an emotion. Now, this doesn't have to be a long process, right? It could only be a couple of minutes because that's really all our body physiologically needs in order to experience an emotion. But of course, you can give yourself longer. Really, at the heart of what we're talking about here is giving yourself a moment to feel something to acknowledge a feeling. So, for example, this morning, as I said earlier, I've been processing this inevitable move that's going to be for our family. And I noticed myself getting teary-eyed a lot this morning at little things like watching my kids eat breakfast at our breakfast table that made me teary-eyed. And I'm just going about my normal routine. And I just noticed that I kind of had this sad feeling. And at one point, I just had to stop and be like, wow, I have some really strong emotions right now. I'm really feeling something. And so I stopped and I took a big, deep breath and I said to myself, I'm really sad now - I didn't do it at this moment, but sometimes one of the things I like to do that's been taught to me before is to put my hand on my heart while I breathe really deep. And I let out a big exhale. I just really focus on deep breathing, because when I'm doing that, I'm acknowledging that there's a physical sensation that's coming with everything that is bubbling up for me right now. And I'm noticing those vibrations vibrating, if you will. I'm noticing the sensations that come along with those things, and I'm bringing attention to them so I simply stopped. I took a deep breath, and I said to myself, wow, I'm sad. And I let myself take some deep breaths. And then I moved on. And I did it again later in the day. And then I did it again after I dropped my kids off at school. And I actually took some time, even more intentionally, to sit down with the journal and write out some thoughts. And I did a lot of deep breathing and just noticed my sadness in that moment.
This is truly all that I do when I talk about giving space to an emotion is - I stop. I acknowledge, I breathe. That is essentially the process.
But I want you to imagine what would happen for you if this was something you began to practice. And particularly, we like to do these things when we're having one of those uncomfortable emotions. But I'm trying to practice it more and more when I'm having a really good emotion, too, when I want to, like, let a good, happy feeling kind of penetrate into the deeper parts of me and just let myself really experience joy. I don't do it very naturally, but I'm really practicing doing that too. But for most of us, the emotion that we want to pass quickly is the one that doesn't feel so good to us. Right? And so I want you to imagine, right after you have a difficult conversation with one of your staff members or with your boss or with a colleague of some kind. And it was just a really challenging situation. Rather than coming back to your desk, jumping into your email, looking at your to-do list, scrolling on social media, going to get a snack or something like that, instead of doing any of those kinds of avoiding actions, instead, you just took two minutes to take some really deep breaths to connect with the sensations that are going on in your body. And you just give yourself some space to be a human, to have some feelings in that moment.
Emotions will linger if we don’t acknowledge and release them.
For many women, difficult conversations, whether it's at work or home or family, whatever it is, those conversations linger with us for a really long period of time. And what I've noticed is that all of the work that transpires after that moment, when you haven't given yourself space to feel the emotion and kind of acknowledge it, everything that you do after that moment is exponentially not as good as it could have been. Your email writing takes longer. The project you're working on you feel less motivated by. You're more tired. That icky feeling kind of effects everything that you're doing. So the moment you actually stop and you take in what you're feeling and you acknowledge it, and you give it some space, and you let it breathe some air, you begin to let it go. Sometimes you can let it go entirely in that moment. And sometimes you're just letting pieces of it go over the course of time. What you're doing is you're allowing yourself that space and that freedom. So that when you re-engage in your to-do list, or with your email list or whatever it is that you're going to do, that action that you take is going to come from a much more strong and powerful place because it doesn't have all of this icky, lingering stuff going on with it. Or let's talk about one of my favorite examples that I talk about a lot here in the podcast, because it's very real for me and my five-year-old, which is the whole getting dressed, putting your shoes on struggle every single morning. That's my job because I take my kids to school. I'm in charge of getting them dressed, putting their shoes on, and helping them with that. And that can be a very frustrating time of my morning, depending on how my son reacts to that. And rather than just push myself forward, and get myself out the door and lock the door and try to get everybody into the car and just keep pushing through until I get them to school. That always feels horrible when I'm in the midst of that, when I finally drop them off and I'm sitting in my car, sometimes those moments lead to tears because it feels so bad in the moment to have to be pushing and to be so frustrated. So the moments that I just allow myself to breathe deep, sometimes it's literally 30 seconds of breathing and closing my eyes and acknowledging this is really frustrating, I'm really frustrated right now, and I'm able to breathe and then re-engage back with my kids. I'm able to create some connecting moments with them before I drop them off to school, which always feels better than if I drop them off without all of those moments and I drop them off in a place of frustration and I just want to get rid of them and I'm kind of desperate. That never feels good to me as a mom versus the moments that I give space to my frustration and I let it go. And then I feel connected and so much more present with them.
Validating how you feel.
So when you're giving yourself space to feel, what you're doing is you're acknowledging that you have a feeling, you're affirming it to your brain when you commiserate with another mom about, for example, your kids getting dressed and getting them out the door in the morning and they're like, oh, my gosh, I totally know what you're saying. It's so frustrating when they say that it feels good to hear that they struggle just like you do, right? It feels really validating to hear that. And that's kind of what you're doing in these moments when you're giving yourself space, you're validating how you're feeling. You're acknowledging it. You're not judging it. You're not telling yourself you shouldn't be feeling that way. You're just saying, yeah, this is how it feels. If your friends were to be like, oh, my gosh, I never feel that way, my kids just put on their shoes perfectly every single day. That feels awful, right? You feel like you're a terrible person because maybe that shouldn't be your experience. That is what we're doing in our self acknowledging and self-validating is that we're telling our brain, hey, this is hard and this is normal. We're not resisting it. We're not shaming ourselves for feeling it.
Last week in my podcast, Cathy talked about giving herself containers of emotions. That was kind of the way she talked about it, right. And she called it the ‘this sucks kind of moments’ because that's the way she labeled it. When her toddler spills a whole bowl of cereal and milk on the ground and she gets frustrated, she takes a deep breath and she lets it out and she says, yeah, that sucks. Let's clean it up. Or when she's struggling with her son to get him out the door in the morning and trying to run out of the house and she stops. She takes a deep breath and she says, yes, this sucks. Sometimes it sucks when he doesn't want to put on his shoes. And even though I know he can do it, this is super frustrating. That's what she decided to call it for herself. It's her ‘this sucks moment’. It's when we're having a really difficult emotion that's hard to feel. And we just say, yeah, this is a really hard place to be. This is a hard conversation or this is a sucky moment. This doesn't feel good right now. And we allow ourselves space to just say that and feel that. So giving yourself space to feel an emotion, just like Cathy talked about last week or I'm talking about here, it literally just is stopping sometimes as little as 30 seconds to connect to what's going on and then putting an emotion to it, like labeling whatever you're feeling right now, even it could be as general as like, this is just hard. Sometimes I feel like hard is an actual emotion to us because we like to use it in that way. And for me, as I've been practicing giving space to my emotions, some of the most amazing things have come out of it. Here are some of the things that I've noticed:
The uncomfortable emotions, like frustration and irritation and overwhelm, don't seem to last as long. When I give them space, I come out of them so much faster. It might not be 90 seconds like I know is actually possible in my body, but still is exponentially faster than when I don't give it space.
I also don't explode as much because I'm not stuffing my emotions, I'm feeling them as they come. I'm letting the wave of emotion happen. And so there's nothing building up, so there's no explosion. I'm so much kinder to myself. I don't personalize things as much. I don't tell myself I shouldn't be feeling this way or I should be doing better. I don't do those things as often because I'm really practicing allowing where I'm at and being kind to myself in that moment and being accepting and validating of myself so that is showing up in a lot of other ways as well.
I also just feel emotionally healthier, like I'm not avoiding emotions. I'm not stuffing emotions. Things feel much more free, much more loose, much more open in my body. I just feel like I'm more in touch with me. I feel more in control of me. I feel so much more proactive about what I'm feeling instead of reactive in a lot of ways.
And then lastly, I'm feeling just so much more joy. I'm noticing when I'm feeling good, and I'm choosing to linger in that moment, be in that moment so much more than ever before. I don't even know if I would ever have realized I was feeling as happy as I was feeling or I was feeling joy in the way I was feeling it before. Now I see it so much faster, and then I choose to stay in it longer.
Emotional processing is such a big part of creating a balanced life.
In the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective, I actually give them a seven-step process of how to handle negative emotions or how to handle those uncomfortable emotions because we spend so much time avoiding them and so much energy avoiding them, rather than just recognizing that we have some control over them and that we can allow them to pass faster. I have very specific tools, I have a meditation that they can also use, so many ways to help them emotionally process because the emotional processing is such a big part of creating a balanced life. That's a big part of one of the steps that I teach in the five-step process of creating work-life balance. So if you're looking for more tools, that could be a really useful place to be to help you be more proactive about your emotions and learn how to control them more intentionally.
Conclusion.
All right, Working Moms, I hope that you have a wonderful week. I hope that you take time to let yourself experience and be in full acceptance of your emotions. And I will see you all next week.
I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you're looking to create a life where your career and your home life never feel at odds, where you're working less, but achieving at the same level a life without regret, where you know you are doing exactly what you want to be doing. Then join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. This is a group of ambitious working moms who believe that work-life balance is possible for them and are committed to creating it. The program includes 30 short videos and workbooks that teach you how to create the building blocks of a balanced life as well as weekly group coaching and in-depth support within a private working mom's community. And did I mention that when you join the community you get lifetime access? That means you have access to coaching and material to help support your balanced life in every season. You can find out more information and sign up for the collective on my website at www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective.
