Cultivate Emotional Agility To Make Weight Loss Easier

As you surf the wild waves of life, emotional agility can make weight loss easier.

Have you ever heard of emotional agility?

The Harvard Business Review coined this phrase. It’s a kissing cousin to the concept of emotional intelligence.  Yet, they are different in nuanced ways.

Emotional intelligence is defined as your ability to recognize, understand and manage not only your own emotions, but are that you are also able to recognize and understand the emotions of others.  It includes your ability to empathize and sympathize with others.

Think about emotional agility as your ability to approach your inner emotions mindfully and productively.  It includes your ability to manage your difficult or uncomfortable emotions without losing your equilibrium.

Emotional intelligence is the foundation of emotional agility.

Emotional agility allows you to recognize the power of your emotional life in determining successful weight loss.

Emotional agility is the skill you need to navigate life’s turbulence, twists, and turns with self-acceptance, clarity, and an open mind.

It is a process of allowing, not ignoring or resisting, difficult emotions and thoughts.

When we define being “in control” as the ultimate goal, rather than being in awareness as the ultimate goal, we set the stage for trying to suppress negative emotions or, when discomfort inevitably sets in, push them away.

Suppression often takes the form of buffering against them to shift our emotional state.  Way too many of us buffer with food.

If you label yourself an emotional eater or often seek out your favorite comfort foods, you are using food as a buffer against feeling difficult or negative emotions.

Emotional agility makes it easier to tackle new challenges and underpins your willingness to try new things.  And this is a very critical skill when you decide to lose weight for the last time.

How To Become More Emotionally Agile.

The cost of remaining emotionally rigid makes weight loss much harder than it needs to be. But good news, it’s never too late to develop develop your emotional agility.

Here’s how:

Practice Acceptance

Instead of fighting or hiding from negative emotions, first accept them.  Allow yourself to fully feel them. Having the expectation that you should always strive for a sunny disposition and encouraging outlook, makes it harder to allow negative emotions.  Allow for down days.  They’re just part of our human experience.

Take Actions Based On Values Rather Than Emotions

Of course, there’s a difference between accepting emotions and acting on them.  Just because you accept your negative emotions doesn’t mean you have to act on them. Before responding from an emotional place, take a time out.  Examine whether that reaction will further serve and support your own goals or reflect your values.

Become intentionally aware of your feelings to make sustainable weight loss easier.

Isn’t it about time to allow all your feelings, about all your relationship, especially those with food, your weight and your body?

If that’s too hard to contemplate right now, let me help you unwind all the years of conditioning and thinking that have convinced you it’s unsafe to allow all the emotions you have resisted for so long.

Let’s take a closer look at the role emotional eating may be playing in your life.  I bet you’re ready to conquer that habit once and for all.  I can show you how.

Please take me up on my offer for your FREE Strategy Call.  Then you can see for yourself how it’s possible to jump start weight loss by intentionally increasing your acceptance of your emotional life.

This exploration can help you reach your weight loss goals with a lot less stress and drama.

It’s totally possible to make 2022 your year to create the healthiest you.  No matter your age, stage or past disappointments.

Jump start your fresh start.  A year from now you will thank yourself you reached out to me today.