The Five Emotional Skills

Build the capacity to feel your life fully instead of hiding from the parts that are uncomfortable.

Confidence does not come from knowing you will never be rejected.

It comes from being willing to feel rejection.

When I speak to a group, make an offer, or pitch an idea, I do not need a guarantee that everyone will like me. I need to know I am willing to experience the feelings that may come up.

If the answer is yes, I can show up with confidence. I do not have to hide from my life.

That is part of what I mean by emotional health. It is not happiness all the time. It is having the capacity to experience the positive and negative parts of being human.

1. Identify your emotions

Begin with a simple question: What am I feeling right now?

Many people answer good, bad, or fine. Those words do not give them much information.

Can you distinguish excitement from anticipation or elation? Can you notice the difference between frustration and another uncomfortable emotion?

The more specifically you can identify the feeling, the more clearly you can understand your experience.

Sometimes we are so busy resisting an emotion that we only notice the anxiety of pushing it away. Slow down enough to identify what is there.

This is a skill to develop. You are learning to name and feel the experience in your body rather than treating your emotional life as something mysterious that happens to you.

2. Process and allow discomfort

Once you know what you feel, practice allowing it.

That is different from fixing it, pretending it is absent, or insisting someone else stop doing the thing you associate with it.

If I feel frustrated, my work is to allow frustration. I do not have to say another person must change so I never feel it again.

One way I teach this is through allowing urges. We are accustomed to reacting to an urge to eat, smoke, or watch Netflix. We can practice separating the urge from the action.

The feeling can be there without your obeying it.

I teach allowing 100 urges as a practice. You notice restlessness or desire and let yourself experience it without eating it, fighting it, or immediately reacting.

An emotion has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Allowing it is like digesting it. Resisting it can make it feel as though it will take over your life.

Learning to delay gratification and be present with discomfort gives you more choice about what you do.

3. Separate emotion from circumstance

The amount of money in your bank account does not determine your feeling. Neither does another person's behavior.

Your thought about the circumstance creates the emotion.

When you separate facts from your emotional experience, you can see where you have authority. You stop requiring the world to change before you can manage your mind.

That does not mean you decide to be happy about everything. I teach that life includes a positive and a negative half. You can accept that contrast.

There is an interesting peace in knowing you will not always feel peaceful.

When you stop fighting the existence of negative emotion, you stop creating so much additional negativity through resistance.

4. Identify the thought creating the feeling

Look for the sentence in your mind.

What are you thinking that creates this emotion? What meaning are you giving the circumstance?

Knowing that thought does not require changing it immediately. It gives you an accurate understanding of what is happening.

You can change your thinking as much or as little as you want once you recognize it. But first you need to stop assigning the cause of your feelings to everyone else.

There is also a difference between allowing an emotion and indulging in it.

Indulging keeps you in a spin of worry, self-pity, blame, or self-loathing. It does not move you toward what you want. You may feel justified, but look at what that feeling is producing.

Allowing means experiencing the feeling without blaming someone for it or automatically acting it out. You can keep moving forward with it.

5. Create wanted emotion

What feeling do you need to take the action that will create your goal?

It might be motivation, discipline, courage, or love. It is not necessarily happiness.

You generate that feeling through your thinking. In the Model, the thought creates the feeling, the feeling drives the action, and the action produces the result.

People tell me they are stuck, unmotivated, or always procrastinating. Often they have not learned to create the emotional fuel for what they want to do.

Sometimes the feeling you need includes the discomfort of change. You can be willing to experience that instead of waiting to feel good before you begin.

The point of a goal is not to make you happy forever. It is part of the experience of being alive and becoming more of who you want to be.

Let willingness make your life bigger

If you will not risk embarrassment, you may never make the offer. If you will not risk failure, you may never set the goal.

You do not escape negative emotion by hiding. You experience a different version of it while your life becomes smaller.

I want to be willing to experience rejection, humiliation, doubt, and fear. Then I do not have to organize every decision around avoiding them.

I can pursue a bigger dream and have a bigger experience of both positive and negative emotion.

That is also powerful in relationships. Instead of pretending to be perfect, I can bring the truth of myself. I can let the other person bring the truth of who they are.

We do not have to tiptoe around each other trying to produce only pleasant feelings. We can have an honest connection.

Practice the full human experience

We know that life includes heartbreak, frustration, and pain. We still want to be here. Many of us choose to have children knowing they will experience those feelings too.

We recognize there is something valuable in the full experience, even when part of it hurts.

Emotional health is that openness. It does not feel like constant joy or the pleasure of a cookie. It feels like being human.

Practice naming your emotions, allowing discomfort, separating circumstance from feeling, identifying your thoughts, and generating the emotion you want.

The more willing you are to feel, the more willing you can be to live.