I’m going to share a secret about emotions with you. You ready? Buckle up and listen up.
This is important.
An emotion is simply a vibration in our body caused by a thought in our mind. That’s it. Nothing more. Emotions are the way we experience the world in physical manifestation form and they drive every action we take.
What any of us is really looking for in life is how we will feel when we achieve any particular result. It’s not about the medal or standing on the podium, it’s about the feeling of accomplishment. The emotion always comes first in our quest to complete a result, goal or outcome.
So often we think the goal of life is to be happy all of the time and to experience as much positive emotion as possible. If that were the real goal then we would have to be happy when bad things happen - disease, death, loss, etc.
Why are we on the chase for happiness all the time?
When we stop and think about it in this way, most of us don’t really want that. The true goal of life is to be human. To experience any and all emotion. What a relief, right? We don’t have to be happy all the time. It’s ok to not be ok. Our emotional life is and always will be 50% positive and 50% negative. Because joy doesn’t exist without sadness and success doesn’t exist without failure. There has to be a contrast.
We wouldn’t know what it feels like to race our best race ever without several races going perfectly off plan to compare it to. If you’re like me, you’ve been in the pit of disappointment enough times to truly appreciate the excitement of racing a PR.
We spend so much time, effort and energy avoiding negative emotions, but it’s just a vibration. If we open up to the idea that we’re supposed to experience a wide variety of emotion, then we take its power away. We reduce the need to resist and avoid negative emotion; instead, we sit with it as part of being a human. And I mean all of it: fear, shame, doubt, humiliation, self loathing, worry,
Emotions are simply vibrations in our bodies caused by a thought in our minds. There is always a choice, but sometimes the choice is a negative emotion and that’s ok. The sooner we believe in our ability to experience any emotion, the stronger we become in our emotional health.
INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT WHAT IT TAKES TO HAVE A PERFORMANCE MINDSET?
