Day 17: Feelings
“ Emotions can get in the way or get you on the way. “ -Mavis Mazhura
Emotional Regulation can be challenging when you have ADHD tendencies.
You can have a tendency to feel strongly. It can be difficult to manage your emotions. Today I want to talk about how you can feel your way forward, rather than staying stuck.
You can take back the reigns when it comes to your feelings and practice managing them. It’s a skill.
The past two days I’ve been focused on the 5 step tool that I use with my clients that’s called The Model. It’s a framework that’s based on universal truths and was created by Brooke Castillo.
There’s an acronym to help you remember it. C-T-F-A-R. Each letter represents one of the 5 steps in order.
Step 1 is Circumstances. If you didn’t read the post that talked about how we define circumstances for purposes of using the model hop on over to that post here.
Step 2 is Thoughts. We looked at how a thought is just a sentence in our brain. You can read more about that here.
Today we’re going to focus on Step 3, which is Feelings. When we’re using The Model, we’re going to describe a feeling as a one word emotion that you can feel in your body.
Some examples of common feelings are happy, sad, excited, nervous, overwhelmed, distracted, or confused.
There are thousands of feelings available to us.
When we think a thought, it generates a feeling in our body.
For example, the thought “she shouldn’t talk to me like that” can generate the feeling of anger. For others it may generate the feeling of sad. For still others it may create the feeling confused.
What we think about something creates how we feel.
Growing up we often learn that other people cause us to feel upset. That other people can hurt our feelings. It’s just not true.
Here’s an example, someone can say something about us and we will have no idea it was said, and we will not feel any kind of way about it.
Once we find out we feel hurt, or mad or disappointed, and we tend to think it’s because of what they said. Because what they said was hurtful.
If that were true, we would feel hurt the moment it came out of their mouth. The actual act of someone talking about us doesn’t make us feel bad.
It’s the thoughts that we think once we find out that something was said, that make us feel bad.
Thoughts like:
“That’s not very nice.”
“They shouldn’t say things like that.”
“I would never say that.”
“That’s the rudest thing I ever heard.”
“I thought they were my friend.”
These thoughts (and others) then generate our feelings.
The good news here is that if you are creating the feelings, that means you can also stop creating them.
This gives you 100% license over your emotional life. When we allow ourselves to believe that our emotions are caused by others actions or words, it’s such a disempowering place to be.
Why? Because it takes things completely out of our hands!
When we take full responsibility for how we feel, we are operating from a place of what’s called Emotional Adulthood. When we believe that others are causing our feelings, we’re operating from a place of emotional childhood.
Where in your life are you giving your personal power away to others? Where do you feel at the mercy of what someone else says?
When we feel a negative emotion, we’re likely to get a negative result. When we feel a positive emotion, we’re likely to get a positive result.
The first step is just to become aware of what it is that we’re feeling and why.
~Shaun
If you’ve been thinking about booking a free consultation and haven’t yet, let’s do it. Learn how to stop the feelings of overwhelm, procrastination, bored, unfocused and generate more useful feelings for yourself. It’s not easy, but it’ll be worth it.
