333. Why You Can’t Control Your Emotions (and How to Be Their Boss Instead)

Hey, I'm Amanda Hess.

I'm a certified life coach.

But what you need to know is I'm a sensitive woman just like you, and I'm going to help you understand yourself better so that you can approach your life differently and feel really good about it.

Let's go.

Hey, there.

All right, today I want to talk about something that happened to me.

All right?

A few weeks ago, maybe a month ago, I got a note.

Okay.

I applied for something that I really wanted, something that would have been a big deal for me and my business, and I didn't get picked.

And I'm not going to tell you what it was because it doesn't matter.

But I do want to talk about what happened, because no matter what the situation is, no matter what the circumstances, the way that we.

It.

Experience it, and the way we want to deal with it is going to be the same.

So when I received this note, when I got the email, I felt that feeling drop into my body, that heavy, hot, sinking pit in my stomach.

And really, within about four seconds, my brain was off and running and telling me all the things about me that were wrong, that I wasn't good enough, that I'd never be good enough, that I didn't have what it takes, that I should doubt my abilities.

It really wanted me to just pull back, and it wanted me to make myself a little bit smaller so that this never happened again.

And that is the moment that this whole episode is going to be about.

Because here's what I did not do.

Not the.

No.

Not hearing.

No what happened when I felt the emotion and what happened next.

Because here's what I did not do.

I did not pretend it didn't sting.

I did not go clean the kitchen or scroll for two hours or call three people to validate how great I was.

And I did not let it run the rest of my day.

I said out loud, okay, I feel rejected.

This is what this feels like.

It makes sense that this is here.

I wanted that.

And then I asked my brain the only question that matters.

Okay, what do I want to do next?

And the answer was, I want to go record this podcast.

So here we are.

The truth is that most of us know this feeling.

We know the feeling of fear before we go and do the thing that we've said we've always wanted to do.

We know the feeling of dread before we have a hard conversation.

We know the feeling of shame after we did something that we recognize we may not have wanted to do.

And then what we do next is we scroll.

We Eat, we clean, we reorganize the pantry.

We argue with somebody in our own heads.

We do anything but sit with it.

And that's what this episode is about.

Not getting rid of the feeling, what to actually do with it.

We have been told a lie, and that lie is that emotions are something that you can control.

And the truth is you can't.

And you don't.

And nobody does.

Your body just drops adrenaline, whether you sign off on it or not.

So every plan that starts with, I just need to stop feeling this or get rid of this feeling or change the feeling is going to be problematic.

It's not going to work.

And then you will move on to making that mean that the fact that it didn't work means something is wrong with you or with your situation that needs to be completely changed.

And I want to offer you a reframe today that I think is really going to help you, really going to help you, which is your emotions, your feelings.

They are employees that you don't get to fire.

They are always on the team.

They show up to every meeting, whether you hired them or not.

So you are their boss.

But that has never meant that you get to get rid of them.

So if you can't get rid of them, what can you do?

This is the part that we want to focus on.

So if you think about your feelings as being your employees, which in a lot of ways they are.

They are showing up.

However they show up, they are being influenced by you.

They are being influenced by the world around you.

And sometimes they have their own agenda.

Okay.

Just like a real employee.

And we just really want to look at this from this perspective because of what it's going to give you.

Ultimately, if we think about a person that is a part of our life, that is working with us that we can't fire, that is the one thing we can't do, then we have some choices.

I think choice number one is deciding whether or not you're going to respect the feeling, just like you can decide whether or not you're going to show respect for an employee.

The truth is, is that respect is not earned.

I don't believe that.

I honestly believe that respect is always owed.

Yeah, I know.

Crazy.

Not for the other person, though, for you.

But when it comes to this particular scenario, when we're talking about our feelings, when we're talking about our emotions, respect is something you want to give to the feeling because of how it's going to change your interaction, which is the same with people.

If you are always respectful, then what happens is you're not ignoring anybody.

You're not shutting them down.

You are not pushing them away.

You are not gaslighting them.

Now, respect can also go the other way.

So we're also not just letting them drone on incessantly.

We're not letting them do the wrong thing forever and not correcting them.

We are respecting them.

And what that means is we need to acknowledge them.

We need to see them.

If I think about, like, what is.

What is required, if I want to show respect, it's acknowledgement.

I want to acknowledge that the feeling is here.

In order to acknowledge that the feeling is here, you are going to need to know its name.

So we need to get a better emotional vocabulary to be able to show respect to the feeling.

And this is something that you can do on your own.

You really can.

You can simply pick up an emotions wheel.

You can Google it, you can AI.

It doesn't matter.

I'm sure you can buy them.

And what you want to do is you want to look at that wheel.

And the beauty of an emotions wheel is that you get to see the big emotions that are in the center, which is like angry, sad, mad.

Angry and mad are the same, but angry, sad, happy, surprised.

I think those are the four.

And then from that place, it starts to expand outwards and there's flavors of emotions and they just continue expanding.

We want to be able to call our emotion by name.

What we tend to do is want to say everybody's name is John that starts with a J.

Every guy that starts with a J, his name is John.

And that's not true because his name might be Jason or Jeremy.

Right.

So we can start looking at emotions in this way.

What is this emotion name?

I want to move beyond the realm of I feel anxious or sad or mad.

And I want you to be more familiar with the name of the emotion.

Then we need to understand where the emotion is coming from.

Now, that doesn't mean that we need to go down a deep dive into the story of what has created this emotion.

What we do need to understand is that the emotions that we are experiencing are created by the thoughts that we're thinking.

That does not mean that we should always think positive and we should always have positive emotions.

And I always like to give the example that if somebody that I care about passes away, I sure as hell do want to feel sad about that.

There's no version of me that wants to feel happy about somebody I love no longer being with me.

Right?

So it's not about being always Happy.

It's about understanding the thoughts and the beliefs that create the feeling that we have.

This is a really important step in being able to be the boss of your feelings.

If you think about being somebody's boss, if you don't understand where they're coming from, it's very difficult to lead them.

And we do want to be the leader here.

Okay, we can lead somebody without controlling them.

We can lead our emotions without controlling them.

And so in order to lead, we need to understand where it's coming from, what are the thoughts and the beliefs that create it.

The other thing we need to understand is we need to understand what the emotion feels like in the body.

So when I think about taking this to the employee analogy, right?

If we think about being the boss and leading employees when it comes to what they're experiencing, we need to really see what's happening for them, and we need to really see what's happening for us.

So in this particular experience, what we need to do is we need to know what feelings feel like in our body so that we can see when it's happening.

So we know, oh, I can see what's happening here when you do this.

This is what's happening.

So when I shut down, that's because I feel intense fear in my body.

That creates this pit in my stomach, and that pit in my stomach makes it hard for me to act.

We want to know that about our employees, AKA our feelings.

We want to ensure that we see them, that we really get what's going on for them, that we can understand them so that our employees feelings feel seen, heard, valued, understood.

This is a feeling.

Feelings aren't thoughts.

So thoughts create feelings, but feelings are created in our body, and that means that they need to be seen and understood.

We need to know what they feel like.

We need to know their name, and we need to understand what that looks like inside of us.

That's part of being the boss of your emotions, the boss of your feelings.

Once we have that in hand, we can also look at what are we going to allow and what are we not going to allow?

And this is a really important piece of the puzzle.

The way that I like to teach it is teaching it through a less serious example.

So, for instance, I'm a figure skater, an adult figure skater.

I'm sure I've talked about this, maybe last episode even, but I want to talk about it again today in relation to this topic, because I want to show how we don't let the emotion become the boss of us, right?

Which happens a Lot with emotions like fear, dread, anxiety, rejection, anything like that.

Guilt is another one.

So when I figure skate, I feel fear.

When I go to go out for a competition, I feel the adrenaline dump in my body.

This happened recently for me, like, only less than a month ago.

I felt the adrenaline drop in when I felt that adrenaline.

Adrenaline.

My body went into we need to run away mode immediately.

It always does.

It always does.

And so when I feel that feeling, it's understanding.

Like, oh, fear is here.

I feel afraid.

That is normal.

And that's a big piece of the puzzle, is it's normal for your employees to show up to work.

Okay, all of them.

And fear is one of your employees, and we expect her to show up to work.

So fear here, fantastic.

What I've learned through, honestly now, years of competition and doing this work, obviously, is if I can just understand, first of all, that fear is supposed to be here, I can use it and I can channel it.

So the one thing that I don't do is do the thing that fear wants me to do, which is get small, run away, freeze, don't perform, shut down any version of that.

I don't want that.

Because what I want is on the other side of fear.

I know that the thing that I want to create is on the other side of this emotion.

And this happens for all of you all the time too.

I see this coming up for my clients when they're dating.

They go through the fear of it not being the right person, of them liking the person and them not liking them back.

The fear of all the things that could go wrong.

But what's really happening?

What's really happening?

Emotion in the body.

Emotion in the body.

Just like me jumping out and doing a figure skating competition, right?

It is exactly the same.

It feels exactly the same.

And so when we start doing it, it's understanding.

I want what's on the other side of this.

So my employee is like, oh, my gosh, you might be in danger, but I'm the boss.

I'm the boss.

So it's my job to lead.

It's my job to channel the fear and say, okay, this energy we have here, we're going to channel it.

We're going to use it.

Now when I'm figure skating, I'm channeling it into the excitement of the performance.

I'm letting that be part of what I do.

I'm like, of course you're here.

Let's go.

This adrenaline is going to fuel my jumps and make them bigger and make my spins better.

If I Use it for my benefit.

I am going to allow for this fear to be here, and I am going to keep going anyways.

Not riding over top of it, not ignoring it, not pretending it's not there.

It's more like a conversation of, thank you so much for bringing this to my attention, but I'm the leader here, and this is what we're going to do.

And so when I'm figure skating and I do that, I go and I perform my performance, and the shaky arms show up and the shaky legs and things go wrong, and my brain wants to devolve, and I'm picking it back up.

I'm going, no, baby, let's go.

Dig in.

Where's the music?

What's next?

Breathe in, breathe out.

Perform.

Where are the judges?

Look at them.

Right?

That's what's going on in my brain because I'm the leader.

And so when I do that, I get to get through the end of that experience, and I get to have the full satisfaction of completing the assignment.

Now, I don't know what's on the other side, right?

I don't know if I'm going to win that competition, if I'm going to get the worst score of my life.

I have no clue.

But I know that the job I have in front of me when the fear shows up is to move through it so that I can get to the place on the other side.

And then I also need to remind myself when it comes to fear, that what's on the other side, no matter what happens, is for my benefit.

It's getting me closer to where I want to go.

And so I have to be very on top of my emotional experience to be able to create that.

I need to be on top of what my brain is going to think.

I am going to need to be on top of what I'm actually like, experiencing inside of my body and how I'm going to navigate through it.

If you look at your emotions as being employees, if you look at my emotions as being employees in this way, what I'm doing is I'm saying, I hear you.

I understand.

But I'm the leader, and we're going to do it anyways, because I know what I. I know what I want, and I know what's on the other side of that, and I know that I want to get that.

Now, do I want a gold medal?

Sure, of course.

But I also want the experience.

I want to be able to go through that and be the person that can get to the other side and be so Proud of myself and know every time I do it, it's going to get better.

Every time I do it, it's going to get easier.

I am the boss of my emotions, and I use them for my benefit.

And what I want for you is for you to hear this podcast and really think about how do I use my emotions for my benefit?

Even the ones that are hard.

This is the assignment.

This is what we're doing.

All of those emotions that we experience come from a very real place inside of our brain.

Our brain is certain they mean something very important.

That's why they're showing up the way they do.

But if we understand that even as sensitive people we have spirited emotions, then we can just love and respect them.

And if we love and respect them, we don't have to rush them through.

We don't have to push them away.

We don't have to shut them down.

We don't have to react to them.

We can simply be like, okay, we're here.

Here's the agenda.

This is what's on our plate today.

And I am going to listen to every single one of you, and then I'm going to direct you as I see fit, not to get rid of you, but to be very sure about giving the respect that each one deserves, while also being very mindful of the result that we are trying to create.

And I would say to you that this is the difference in coaching.

So being the boss of your brain is very much a coaching concept, but being a boss of your emotions is also a coaching concept.

This is something that I haven't experienced in any other modality because it's just not taught in this way in any other modality.

That we can be this directive, that we can actually not go around our emotions or shove them down or get rid of them, but actually look at them and be like, okay, yeah, this makes sense that this feeling's going on in my body.

Now listen at the beginning, you might not have a lot of capacity for this.

That makes sense.

Especially if you are going through circumstantially difficult things in your life right now.

Your capacity will be reduced.

That does not mean that anything's going wrong.

Instead, what we want to be doing is we just want to be looking at, how do I be the best boss I can be for my emotions?

And it's a great way to look at it, because if you look at it from that place, then what you can do is you can start understanding that in order to be a good boss, I need to be getting enough Sleep right.

In order to be a good boss, I need to be making sure that I'm regulating my nervous system.

In order to be a good boss, I need to make sure that I have tapped into the things that are grounding and pleasurable for myself, that I am getting the help and the support that I need in any area that I need it.

That's how I become a good boss.

So this, to me is just in a nutshell, how we handle emotion.

We respect it, we understand it, we recognize it, we call it by name.

And then we decide whether or not what it's offering is what we're going to use in the way that it's offered.

And if not, we decide how we're going to redirect it.

And we do that again and again and again on repeat.

And the more you do it, the better you get at it.

You can become a better boss.

All right, so listen, I hope that speaks to you.

It was so powerful when I thought of it driving in my car.

I really wanted to share it with you.

Come on over to Instagram, it's theamandahess and message me and tell me what you took away from this episode.

Let me know if you have any questions.

I would love to answer them.

I also want you to know that right now I am doing a weekly class that you can sign up for for free and I would love to invite you to that class if you are experiencing overthinking and stress.

That class is at amandahest Ca Overthink all one word.

I am going to teach you this concept and several others to show you how you can start being the person that feels at home in your own brain.

I would love for you to show up for this class, but otherwise I will be here next week with another episode.

I love you so much.

I'll talk to you next time.

Bye for now.

Thanks so much for listening today.

If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review.

It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you.

I'm excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode.

Until then, take care, friend.