Self Reflection – What the heck am I feeling?

Hey, I’m Paul Krismer. I’m your happiness expert and I’m coming to you from Porterville, California. Just behind me is the river that runs right through the middle of this town. It has super flooded this year after a decade of drought. California is swimming in water, if I could say it that way. It’s laughable and it’s tragic for some people, but boy, they sure needed the water. The snowpack is still huge in the mountains around here. There’s a lot of water coming down. Yay, California!

This week, I want to talk to you about emotional intelligence and one specific little aspect of it, self-awareness. You know, emotional intelligence is a huge predictor for both happiness and for success in life. There was an interesting statistic I heard today: 36% of people can’t recognize and describe, identify the emotion that they’re experiencing. This is just fundamental to being able to navigate our emotional lives. Remember that almost everything we experience happens in our hind brain, in our limbic system first, where we experience an emotion, and then later we become cognizant, we think about it, we have thoughts related to it. That’s why most of our decisions are emotionally based and then we rationalize them after the fact. So, self-awareness of emotions is hugely important. It’s hugely important for our relationships, for our own self-awareness, for our growth in life, and for our happiness, and ultimately our success. So, this video is going to talk a little bit about a very specific exercise that’s proven to increase people’s emotional awareness, their self-awareness, and therefore become a building block to greater emotional intelligence. So, stay tuned, it’s coming right up.

Yeah, so there’s this amazing research that’s being done on emotional intelligence, really over the last 25 to 30 years. But the research is accelerating and we’re learning more and more and more about what makes us successful, not just in terms of the career and income and all that kind of stuff, but the discipline, the motivation, the self-regulation that keeps our relationships going well, that helps us achieve the goals that are important to us, that are just fundamental to our well-being. There’s one very simple technique that I want to show you here today. I think anyone can benefit from it, even people who are quite self-aware already.

Have a random time set up in your phone, or some other calendarized way of reminding you, where four or five times a day you get a little alert to say, “What are you feeling?” Then, the exercise is to stop everything that you’re doing and become aware. Hopefully, it’s not frustration saying, “Why am I getting interrupted by this alert?” But let’s assume that we go one step back from the interruption that’s experienced and say, “What was I doing when this interruption or this reminder came to me? What was I feeling?” Maybe it’s something that you’ll be well aware of, and if that’s true for you, then look for nuances. If there was a second emotion, for example, I’ve been traveling today and enjoying my curiosity, taking me to all kinds of wonderful, fun places. But I, and I’m enjoying it, I’m having fun, and then there’s another little element that I want someone to share it with. So there’s an aspect of loneliness which I often feel when I’m on the road. I can see these nuances, one predominant emotion and another emotion underneath it.

So if that’s you, if you see an emotion readily and say, “I know what I’m feeling,” then investigate more deeply. And if you don’t recognize any emotion at all, don’t know what you’re feeling, well then there’s some obvious pause there and we need to think, in a thoughtful way, “Well, what are we feeling?” I’ve said this before: we’re basically feeling our emotions from our chin to our crotch. They’re embodied. I can feel the tightness in my throat or an expansiveness in my chest or something in my gut. We feel our emotions in our bodies. And if that doesn’t help you identify your emotion, maybe you can say, “If I were to describe my emotion with a color, what color would it be? Or if my emotion were an animal, what animal would it be?” These different ways of trying to key into something that often feels intangible can get our brains identifying with what’s going on in our body and our emotions, and maybe the language that most readily comes to us. And then we can say, “Oh yeah, that’s what I’m feeling.”

That exercise in and of itself is brilliant. It makes us aware of what’s actually navigating our lives, or dictating our lives. It’s our emotional well-being that is key to successful lives, and it’s also emotional wellness when it’s not well, and not doing so well. It’s the thing that deteriorates our life. So we have to be aware of the emotions in order to kind of manage them. And of course, I’ve talked about this a million times before, but any kind of mindfulness practice: yoga, meditation, breathing exercises, you name it, they are another basic pause. Try to get our minds to quiet long enough to experience what’s going on elsewhere in our experiential existence on Earth, including our emotions. And then we go, “Oh okay, that’s what I’m feeling.”

If we do this exercise, four or five reminders every day for a couple weeks, and you do it dutifully, I promise you, at the end of those two weeks you’ll become more emotionally aware. And if you keep practicing as you just go through your day-to-day life, these are skills that can grow. And one of the most critical skills in the whole ray of skill sets that emotional intelligence is all about is that self-awareness piece. And this very simple exercise will help carry you along, no matter how great your emotional intelligence is presently. Thanks for watching. See you next time. Bye for now