Tune in for a special edition episode where you will be getting a taste for what it will be like inside the Becoming You Again Membership. In this episode you'll hear the lesson on emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions. You'll learn the key skill of emotional intelligence that is the least understood but most valuable. I'll walk you through what you've learned to do with your emotions that is keeping you immobilized in life, exhausted and overwhelmed and you'll learn the skill in a simple, easy to follow framework.
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Do you find yourself overwhelmed and exhausted at the end of the day, but it's from something more than just living your life. You try to sleep and toss and turn your mind spinning from the anxiety and worry of what the future will hold. The next day is more of the same and you're constantly seeing your life as one crappy turn after another that feels heavy, hard and too much to deal with? You're lacking some emotional intelligence because no one has taught you how to manage your emotional life. I can help you and teach you how. Schedule your free consult by clicking here.
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Full Episode Transcript:
I’m your host, Karin Nelson and you’re listening to Becoming You Again, episode number 80.
Welcome to becoming You Again. The podcast to help you with your mental and emotional wellbeing during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the trauma of your divorce by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life so your life will be even better than when you were married. I’m your host Karin Nelson.
I have a treat for you with today’s podcast. As many of you know I have been working on creating and putting together my divorce course called Becoming You Again, of course. And I haven’t talked about it in a while on the podcast but it’s not because I’m not doing it. I am still writing it and recording it all and putting it together and it will be coming out sometime next year. I’m not quite sure when but I promise you I will give you updates as things come along. So that’s going to be very exciting but today’s podcast episode is kind of a sneak peek inside one of the lessons that is going to be included in the membership. And you get to hear it today. It’s short, it’s too the point. And this will kind of give you an idea of what the course will be like. There’s going to be different modules in the divorce course and each module is broken down into several lessons with workbooks worksheets to go along with it so you get the most out of what you’re learning. There is also going to be bimonthly group coaching calls seeking comment coached by me and get the most out of your membership and heal from the betrayal and really take care of yourself when it comes to your mental and emotional needs as you go through your divorce. I have kept most of the lessons to about 10 minutes or less because I know that as divorced single mom our time is very precious and I want you to be able to get right to the point so you can be working on awareness and implementation in your own life. And so what you’ll hear today is a little taste of that.
Now if this gets you excited about what the membership is going to be like or if you’re already chomping at the bit to get access to the Becoming You Again course then I want you to know that you can join the waitlist if you haven’t already and know before everyone else when the Becoming You Again course is open for access. You can click the link in the show notes to get on that list. Alright, I hope you enjoy this episode on emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence was a concept coined by researchers in the 1990s and it basically means the ability to understand and manage your own emotions. Depending on who you are learning from there are several key factors that determine your level of emotional intelligence but in this lesson I’m going to be focusing on the key skill that I think is the least understood when it comes to emotional intelligence. This is the skill of processing emotions.
Here’s why I believe this is the least understood skill when it comes to understanding and managing our own emotions. Because we are not taught to process our emotions – at all. Processing emotions is when we open ourselves up to them, allow them to be inside of us and a part of us and we breathe through them. But we are taught the opposite. We are taught to be afraid of our emotions, to ignore them or to not allow in what we’re actually feeling. Sometimes this teaching is very forceful and in your face like someone might be saying, why don’t you just be happy. Why can’t you just be happy? Why don’t you just smile more? Just suck it up and push through. Stop crying.
And sometimes this teaching is a little more gentle and we think it’s coming from kind of a more loving place. And it sounds like, don’t be sad. Don’t be scared. It’s going to okay. I’ve got you. Don’t worry. And we kind of try and talk people out of feeling the emotions they are feeling.
Now listen, I’ve said all of these things to myself or to my kids or someone I love many times throughout my life because I didn’t know anything different. Because I hadn’t been taught the skill of processing emotions and allowing whatever emotion I was feeling to be present. I didn’t understand that it was okay and valid to feel what it was that I was feeling and that it’s okay and valid for other people to feel what they are feeling as well.
So learning to process your emotions is a way to validate what you’re feeling and to open yourself up to it. As you just learned in the previous video, when we feel negative emotion we are taught to act out or hide from them. But the reality is, our body is creating every emotion that we feel. Our body knows what to do with the emotions and instead of hiding from them or acting out on them, we can allow our body to do what it already knows how to do.
When we have thoughts and then have the instantaneous emotional response, what’s happening is our brain and our body are instantaneously flooded with chemicals and hormones that have been released into our body. Those chemicals and hormones (you know things like cortisol, adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin lots of other scientific names that I don’t know all of the names too – those are just a few that I’ve heard here and there, but I know there’s many, many more) those then trigger a physiologic response within our body that we label as emotions. When we open ourselves up to allowing the physiologic response to be present and to breathe through it, our body knows exactly what to do with those chemicals and hormones and the physiologic response.
It’s not like we’ve been bitten by a snake and poison has now entered our body and we have to go get the poisonous negative emotion out before we can function again because our body just doesn’t know what to do with that poisonous negative emotion. It’s not like that at all. Our body created those chemicals that are showing up as negative emotion, it knows what to do with it.
So how then do we allow the negative emotion to be with us? We open ourselves up to it and process it. The first thing you’re going to do is when you feel a negative emotion is name it. Naming the emotion, even if you’re not 100% sure what it is, you can always just take a guess, but naming the emotion has been proven to lower the intensity just by recognizing what it is that you’re feeling. So name the emotion. Remember it’s a one word descriptor. Like sad, frustrated, anxious, worried, depressed. Then take a breath in and let it out and then focus on your body. Where do you feel it? What do you notice about your body? Describe where you feel the sensations in your body in very physiologic terms. Don’t get super poetic here and don’t go into long descriptions that take you back into your thoughts. Keep the descriptions physiologic.
For example when I feel sad, I say, I’m feeling sad. Then I take a deep breath in and let it out slow. Then I begin to focus where I feel sadness. I feel sadness in my chest. My chest feels tight and heavy. My heart beats louder and faster. My breathing becomes more shallow. My eyes close tight and get wet from tears. My cheeks get hot. My throat closes a little and it’s a little harder to swallow. My arms and hands feel tight. I feel pressure across my nose and sinuses. And the whole time I’m focusing my attention on the physiologic changes in my body that I am noticing, I’m also breathing. And what happens is, my body allows the chemicals and hormones to be active and then to dissipate. My body reacts in the way it was made to and handles and releases all of those chemicals and hormones exactly as it knows how to do.
What we tend to do when we feel a negative emotion is we try to think our way out of it. We try and think positive or pretend that we are not feeling what we’re feeling or to stop feeling it all together. But when we tell ourselves not to think about something or that we don’t want to think about something what happens? We continue to think about it, which continues to create that instantaneous chemical and hormonal release over and over again because we’re thinking thoughts that are creating sadness and our brain is responding. When we don’t get in our body and process through the emotion, it continues to pile up negative emotion on top of negative emotion and our body feels depleted and overwhelmed and exhausted physically, mentally and emotionally.
The answer to emotional overwhelm and emotional exhaustion is to process through your emotions. You can do this. You are capable of doing this. Your body knows what to do with negative emotion. Open yourself up to it, allow it and breathe. In the next lesson you’ll see the action of actually being guided through processing some negative emotion so you can visually see what this can look like.
Alright my friends. I hope you enjoyed that little taste of what the Becoming You Again divorce course is going to be like. Again if this peaks your interest then click the link in the show notes to get on the wait list. Otherwise, I will talk to you next week.
If you like what you’re learning on the podcast and you’re ready to create lasting change and results in your life then you need to be working 1:1 with Karin as your divorce coach. This is where we take everything you’re learning in the podcast and 10x it with implementation and weekly coaching where you start to see change in yourself and your life immediately. To find out more about how work exclusively with Karin go to www.karinnelsoncoaching.com . That’s www dot Karin nelson coaching dot com.
Thanks for listening. If this podcast episode agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give it a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure to check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.