Emotions: Your Guide to Freedom

Our emotions play an integral role in every aspect of our lives. They are our guidance system. Listening to them and understanding their important messages help us live a more fulfilling and meaningful life.

We spend a lot of time reacting to our emotions rather than listening to them and this is what often creates the habitual patterns we find ourselves in.

Habitual patterns like indecision, procrastination, perfectionism, people pleasing, overthinking, hyper-achieving, hyper-vigilance, victim-mentality, martyrdom, and control.

These behaviors often come from feelings of uncertainty, inadequacy, insecurity, unworthiness, self-pity, fear, anxiety, and shame.

Listening to the emotions with compassion and curiosity, rather than believing the reactions are the only way to deal with the emotions, can provide us with the understanding we need to respond in effective and helpful ways. 

The messages of the emotions sit underneath the behavior so we must find the pause (retrospectively or in the moment) to reflect on what the emotion is showing us we need. 

We often believe that the feeling of inadequacy for instance is telling us that we are in fact inadequate. When we go here, we may retreat which leads to procrastination or we may frantically go into hyper-achieving mode. 

The feeling of inadequacy is an alarm bell to show us how our thinking has strayed away from believing in ourselves and the Truth that we are enough, even if there is more to learn. This feeling is the indicator that we need to get off the thought train of default social conditioning and remind ourselves of how far we’ve come, how capable we are, and how we are more than enough regardless of what we’ve done (or not) or what we will ever do (or not).

Becoming emotionally literate and understanding the important role our emotions play gives us the opportunity to create the changes we want to see in every area of our lives.

Here are some questions to help you begin to explore this on your own:

SELF-EXPLORATION PROMPTS

1. What behavioral pattern is getting in your way?

2. What is the emotion that’s driving that behavior? 

3. What social conditioning message is at play here? 

4. What is that emotion telling you that you need? 

5. What needs to shift in your thinking about who you are and what would be helpful to do moving forward?

Alternatively, If you’d like to explore and be guided through this process so you can begin to effectively help yourself create the changes and freedom you want, sign up using the link below for a free Empowerment Consultation to learn more about how we can work together.

Either way, taking the time to explore your emotions and behavior in a more compassionate and understanding way will lead you to the wisdom, clarity, and desired change that comes from this practice. 

With love and appreciation for you and your courage,