Episode 10: Who creates your feelings?

Hello my friends! I am so happy you are joining me today. I wanted to take this episode and talk about one of the fundamentals of this mind management work that we are addressing together.

And this is the concept that thoughts create feelings.

Now we were all raised where when we were upset our parents or other adults in our life would say Did Sally hurt your feelings? And of course, we would nod our tear streaked faces and our parents would make Sally apologize for hurting our feelings and off we would go.

This taught us that Sally was responsible for our feelings and off we went into the world now trying to make others behave so that we could feel happy, and validated and content in our lives.

But Darn it! People do not behave properly and so we experience negative emotion – anger, frustration, rage and we work so hard to control them and it all doesn’t work very well.

And this is why! Way back in our playground days the lovely adults in our lives taught us a lie.

Sally does not create your feelings.

Do not get me wrong – Sally is still responsible for pushing you off the swing or stealing your favorite ball. But she is not responsible for how you feel.

She didn’t create the sadness,

She didn’t create the anger.

You created the sadness

You created the anger.

And maybe you wanted to and would choose that emotion again. But either way stop giving her the responsibility for your feelings. It is time to take that power back!

You were the one that created the sadness by thinking something like I wanted another ride on the swing and she took it from me.

You were the one that created the anger by thinking “THAT WAS SO MEAN!!!!”

 Now let’s look how this plays out as you are an adult:

You get some negative feedback on a work project and you are infuriated. You will make comments like – my coworker just made me so mad.

Sorry, friend. No co-worker has ever made you mad.

You made you mad by thinking something like: that feedback isn’t even relevant.

That darn cow cuts back and leads her calf off into the brush and you feel dread. You might say something like she always does this and It is going to be an awful thing to dig her out of there. I don’t want to have to do that.  

That cow and the brush didn’t create dread.

You did…she can’t even feel your emotions or you acting things out if she hides in the brush good enough. You create dread by your thinking and you see how that thinking has you often reacting in a way that isn’t who you really want to be?

A professor at university laughs at you in class for a comment you made. You might say something like I will just never speak in class again, they embarrassed me so bad.

 Sorry again friend. No professor has ever embarrassed you.

You felt embarrassed because you thought oh my goodness, I said the wrong thing. I shouldn't have said that.

Now this is not about excusing other people’s behavior! You still need to be a nice human being! Seriously We all still need to be nice to one another and do our best not to trigger others but at the end of the day you are responsible for how you feel and you are creating that feeling by how you are thinking.

Now how do we know this is true? Because we do not all have the same emotional response when a co-worker gives feedback, a cow hides in the brush or a professor’s laugh. Different people have different responses because they think different things.

THIS IS THE BEST NEWS!!!

Wanna know why? Well of course you do!

This is how we put you back in the driver seat of your emotional life and we stop making you ride shotgun while your nemesis drives the bus!

Literally this is true. We are most likely to blame our emotions on the people we like the least and trust the least yet they are ones that

Make us mad

Make us feel small

Make us embarrassed

Make us feel _____ insert any emotion here.

But the truth is they don’t make us feel anything.

They do things.

We think thoughts.

We feel emotions.

 We create the emotion. It's kind of funny how we all work though because we have learned that it is so much easier to blame others for our emotions than to take responsibility for them. But this is where it gets hard.

You can’t control others, cows, horses, or any livestock to make you feel anything. And trying to control them is the hard part.

When we take responsibility for our emotions then we only have to control our own brains to feel different.

When that old cow takes off into the brush like a world wind…. You know you could be excited; you could feel motivated; you could feel intrigued. These emotions would just come from a different though:

Oh, she thinks she is smart but I will outsmart her.

I am for sure getting her to go where I want her too.

The art of learning this is to just slow it all down.

Recognize the emotion or the feeling.

Slow down and watch your self place the blame on the person, the animal, machinery or the other outside circumstance

And ask what I am thinking?

And there will be the key to what is causing the emotion.

So often I do this in retrospect- I was feeling angry when that email came in, what was I thinking?

I was feeling unsure when I was questioned in the meeting, what was I thinking?

Give this a try and see if you find a go to emotion and a go to thought.

We will often find patterns and if they are patterns which are helping us create the life we want, let's keep them.

If they are patterns that are not creating the life we want, let's do the work to change them.

It will be fun!

Have a wonderful week.