Self-confident women have a secret weapon up their sleeves. It is this, knowing they are able to FEEL any feeling that comes there way.
Now, don’t get me wrong, they don’t want to feel rejected, failure, or disappointment. But they know they can do it. And that makes all the difference in the world. Because women who wonder if they can handle rejection, avoid it. Women who are afraid of failing actually fail ahead of time by not putting themselves out there and trying something they haven’t done before.
See self-confidence is what is needed to do something you have never done before. So asking all of your friends to set you up on blind dates would take someone who is self-confident. Creating an online profile takes self-confidence. Going by yourself to a singles event takes self-confidence.
A self-confident women is someone who knows:
who she is
that she can trust herself
that she has her own back
that she can feel her feelings
We will focus on the last one today.
Do you know what feelings are?
They are just vibrations we experience in our body that comes from our thinking. So the best way I describe this is when I am about to get in front of a large group of people and speak I think a thought like, “Don’t mess this up.” To which my body feels nervous. I might think that the reason I am feeling nervous is because of the crowd of people, or the way the lights are pointing right at me, or the stage that I am on. But, that is not true, it is actually coming from the thought, “Don’t mess this up.” What I feel inside my body when I am nervous is my heart rate goes up, I get goosebumps, I start to sweat in my armpits. Those are the vibrations and chemical reactions in my body. Those are all coming from the one sentence in my brain.
Now sensations are different than feelings. The sensation of hunger actually starts in your stomach and travels to your brain. Feelings are the opposite. They start in your brain and go into your body.
Emotions and feelings are the same thing. They are typically one or two words and after looking into it there seems to be 8 primary emotions and some 34,000 total emotions.
So understanding that I might really be sad but I am also feeling, disappointed, frustrated, and hurt has been really good for me to expand my vocabulary and learn the difference of these emotions.
So how do we learn the difference between emotions?
Well, each feeling has a different vibration in your body so actually sad feels differently than frustrated.
Let me explain. When I am sad and really present with the vibrations in my body I notice that it feels like a 100 pound weight is on my chest. It is so heavy, it is hard to breathe deep. I feel it behind my eyes like tears want to well up and sometimes they do. Today the thought that is making me sad is associated with my mentor of 92 years old that passed away in July. I have a thought which is I wish she was here. And from that thought I am feeling sad. It is a feeling I want to feel. I am working on allowing the feeling to be in my body and for me to be present with it too. I used to only push sadness away but really I only created anger for me because I wasn’t willing to feel sadness.
Feeling my feelings is a new thing for me.
Normally we resist, react, or avoid our emotions. Feeling them is something that we need to learn because we are taught by media, and social conditioning to escape them. We have even been taught that having the positive emotions is really not enough, we should then purchase something to make it even better.
Resisting them looks like trying to push the door shut. It seems productive, but it really creates more tension and only perpetuates the emotion. We think that resisting emotion is the same as feeling it, but it creates no relief.
Reacting looks like releasing something. It may seem like we are feeling them but really we are acting them out and not processing or feeling them at all. So screaming, yelling, or punching something is not feeling your feelings. Feeling doesn’t look like “acting” — feeling is something you can do sitting in a char and experiencing a subtle vibration.
Avoiding emotions might be the easiest and most acceptable. The two most common ways people avoid emotions is by overeating/over drinking and working. Typically people don’t know that what they are doing is avoiding. They are so used to an emotion coming over them that they don’t want, that they know how to not feel and instead eat, drink, work…. avoid.
So how do we allow emotions?
This is a skill that you learn and practice. It is not the same as reacting, resisting, or avoiding. It is feeling.
You observe the vibration with compassion. (What in the world is that, you ask)
The easiest way to do this is to describe it in detail. Write it down or tell a friend. Ask yourself, “What am I feeling? Where is it at in my body? How do I know that I am feeling sad instead of anger? What is specific about this?”
Instead of running from this you go towards the vibrations. You breathe it in. You allow it by opening up to it. You know you can handle it and you get super curious about where and what is going on in your body.
You are staying present with your emotions. When you master this skill you aren’t afraid to feel anything. Because you know this is just a feeling that is created by your thoughts and it is just vibrations in your body that aren’t going to harm or kill you. They will be there for like 90 seconds and they actually want to move. The vibrations want to flow through you and be released out. They don’t want to stay stuck, they want to go.
But if you don’t honor the feelings that your brain so wants you to have, you just keep pushing them down like a beach ball into the water, and it will eventually BLOW and then you react to them.
That used to be my cycle big time. I would stuff, not deal with it, then eventually lose it. Be embarrassed that I just acted that way. Pull away to journal, pray, confess, feel bad. and I always asked myself the same question that I could never answer. “Why is this so hard.” This being life. It was really me saying why is feeling your feelings so difficult. It was because I didn’t know how to do that.
I knew how to avoid them for sure, can anybody say Starbucks Frappuchino?
I knew how to resist them and push the negative emotions away. I am not feeling alone, I will just plan my life so I am so busy I will never feel alone.
I knew how to react, yell, blow up or literally melt down in a total mess of “I can’t handle this anymore”.
This was the cycle of my life. No wonder I was 30 pounds overweight, couldn’t figure out my dating life, always overworked, and 100% people pleased. Not only did I not know how to feel my feelings, I didn’t really understand my feelings and why I had them.
So, why do we have feelings?
Feelings are the reason we do everything. The reason I wanted a husband was because of how that would make me feel. The reason I wanted more money is how that would make me feel. The reason I wanted to be thinner was because of how I would feel in my size 6 jeans.
Feelings are what you are wanting in your life. And on top of that we do everything because of the way we feel. I overate last night because I felt frustrated. I slept in this morning because I felt tired. I wrote this blog because I felt excited to share with you.
Knowing that we do everything because of how we want to feel, and we do everything because of how we currently feel, has been a game changer for me.
I want to get this blog done and feel accomplished. To get this blog done I have to feel disciplined, focused, and not distracted. The thought that makes me feel focused is, “I am doing exactly what I need/want to do right now to get this done.”
Ask yourself how do I want to feel right now in my life? What am I believing will make me feel that way? We think it is the actions that make us feel things but really it is just the thoughts you are thinking that make you feel that way.
What feelings are you trying to avoid in your life? Why? What do you think feeling those feelings would actually do for you?
Understanding how your feelings work, how to actually feel them, and how to use your feelings to create the life you want is exactly what my clients are doing each and every week. They are feeling their feelings. They are creating self-confidence because they are seeing themselves feel their feelings and know they can feel any feeling that comes their way.
You can feel your feelings too. It takes practice for sure, but this is a skill worth mastering!
Feeling instead of eating,
Angie
