Every single thing you do in your life is because how you want to feel or how you think it will make you feel.
Sounds simple, but…
THIS. IS. REALLY. BIG.
All your behavior is motivated by your desire to feel a certain way.
Love.
Happy.
Sexy.
Beautiful.
Successful.
Confident.
Powerful.
Accomplished.
Respected.
Intelligent.
Responsible.
You get the idea.
Every decision you make, every dream or goal you pursue or let wither on the vine, every relationship you nurture or end is driven by how you want to feel.
Every choice you make, both major and seemingly insignificant, is motivated by the desire to feel something.
Your feelings are the barometer that tell you whether you’re having a good day or a lousy one.
Whether your marriage is satisfying or disappointing.
Whether your career is challenging you to reach new heights of professional achievement or is unfulfilling.
It’s only natural that you seek out positive emotions and try to avoid negative ones.
Your survival instinct is strong.
Your brain is wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
And it does this, often without your conscious understanding of how your emotions happen to you and why it matters that you understand how they emerge.
Or how you can intentionally create the emotions you want to feel.
Life is 50% positive emotions and 50% negative emotions.
And nothing has gone wrong.
Negative emotions are part of the human experience. Normal and natural.
It’s the contrast of positive and negative feelings and experiences that allow you to relish the positive ones.
So when negative emotions beset you if, instead of allowing them to sit with you, you fight against them and strive to subdue or banish them, your behavior choices then reflect this desire.
In an effort to dull, disregard or disconnect from negative emotions, it’s tempting to over indulge in food, alcohol, technology, social media, shopping, gambling, sex, drugs, and the easiest ones to justify, work and exercise.
We are all ninjas at avoiding discomfort. Substituting behaviors that give your brain a pleasurable dopamine hit.
But this avoidance keeps us from reaching our full potential as human beings. When we avoid discomfort, we minimize challenging ourselves to do more and become more.
The difference between an emotion and a sensation
An emotion is, at it’s core, merely a vibration you can feel within your body.
It is caused by a thought in your mind. Sentences that describe your
Let’s not confuse feelings with an involuntary sensation. Feelings are caused by what we think and sensations are involuntary bodily reactions. You can think of like this: Emotions start in the brain and travel to the body. Sensations start in the body and travel to the brain.
- Emotions surface with your conscious awareness. You aren’t aware of what you are thinking or have thought many times over in the past that is causing the way you are feeling. When you feel emotions coming from this level, you assume that some circumstance in your life is causing this feeling. If it’s a negative circumstance, you blame the circumstance. If it’s a positive feeling, you credit the circumstance with having elicited the emotion
- Emotions surface and you are aware of the thought, which you might also describe as the reason. But, the thought is not deliberate. If the emotion is positive, you will embrace it. It it’s negative, you may resist or not allow it to be present.
- Emotions surface because of a deliberate thought you are thinking. You are aware of your thought. It which could be creating negative emotions or an intentional thought creating a wanted or positive emotion.
Thoughts create your emotions.
You have more than 60,000 thoughts on an average day.
They form your beliefs, judgements, prejudices, values, That’s a lot of potential for creating a lot of feelings.
But not always conscious or intentional thoughts.
Your mind is teeming with default, unintentional thinking. Sentences in your mind which you have thought for years.
Many of them you’ve never stopped to reconsider or examine to decide whether they are serving you or hampering you.
Your feelings determine your actions, reactions and lack of action.
Your thoughts and feelings drive your behavior.
Your behavior determines your results in life.
Can you see how critical it is to be able to interrupt default thinking that’s causing emotions and behaviors that lead to results you don’t want?
So, here’s a questions for you. How do you want to feel?
Once you identify the feelings you want to feel about any situation or circumstance in your life, you can create them.
You can identify believable thoughts to think intentionally to help you generate those desired feeling.
I can help you figure out what you want to feel and thoughts that generate those feelings about any circumstance in your life that you want to approach differently.
Let’s start a conversation right here.
