#381 Snippets of wisdom: Embrace your feelings of stress, anxiety and fear.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION
___
Please note that while an effort is made to provide an accurate transcription, errors and omissions may be present. No part of this transcription can be referenced or reproduced without permission.
___

Agi Keramidas  0:02  
You are listening to personal development mastery, the podcast that empowers you with a simple and consistent actions you need to master yourself and create a life of purpose and fulfilment. This is another snippet of wisdom, where I select my favourite most insightful moments from previous episodes. Today's snippet comes from my conversation with Richi Watson, who is the creator of for deep transformation and feeling focused coaching. This snippet is about embracing our feelings of stress, anxiety, and fear. And I hope it's as insightful for you as it was for me. Before we dive in, if you enjoy listening and appreciate what we're doing here, the simple quick favour I would like to ask of you is to click the subscribe button. Now let's get started.

Richi Watson  1:01  
Yeah, I think it's a bit of a conflation with the idea of regrets and opportunity, because they're not the same thing I think better would be, take your opportunities, don't miss an opportunity, you know, be willing to experience challenging and scary things. So that you can be and become more and discover things you might not already have. But what what we really want, and this happens so, so much is what we want from the idea of don't have any regrets is use regrets properly. Because if you're using regrets properly, that's how you end up not living with regret. And for me, that process is one that I describe as acknowledge and use. When you acknowledge and use the emotions that you're experiencing your relationship to the experience that you're meeting, if you acknowledge and use that, then you come to peace, then you then it's an it's an integrative process. And, and we were either we're in spectrums of resistant denial, or include to transcend. So this is the solution. Orientation, I would say it's like you include to transcend that means everything means willingly include all of it, because that's how you transcend it. And if you're not willingly including it, you're in some degree of denial and resistance. And the moment that we come into that willing inclusion, so it can it can happen. You know, the miracles that happen in my emotional transformation work again, it's just what I've experienced personally. Switching from wishing the experience away, having a relationship with our emotions, which is one of an enemy dynamic. And again, we see these ideas, I see this, I see this meme shared endlessly. It starts with your anxiety is lying to you. Your anxiety is lying to you. And after then it says all these things which seem good, like you're safe, you're supported, you're okay. All these things, that seems okay. But the premise of this idea your anxiety is lying to is a recipe for anxiety. It's creating an enemy dynamic with your own emotions. And it's not true. That's not how things work. Your anxiety isn't an enemy, it's a, it's a friend, it's trying to inform you, it's trying to bring your awareness to something you may need to know. But if your relationship to it is such and that's being compounded by these kinds of means, and these ideas, it's my enemy, it's trying to get me I needed not to be here, I need to wish it away, you know, it's not going anywhere. Because it will become fortified in that resistance and denial. But if we instead go well, my anxiety is my friend and I'm willing to experience it when I need to, then you're coming into an embrace with the emotion rather than a resistance and I are coming into it include to transcend. And it is extraordinary how swift transformation can happen when that switch is made. Okay, you know, it's all working for you. Everything's working for you, not against you, nothing is all your internal matrix is been a physical or psychological is working for you to bring you to wellbeing, to survive you to help you live and thrive. So, okay, so welcoming feelings of stress, anxiety and fear. Being willing to just feel that be willing to experience and be able to hold even the spike east and pricky list of emotions. This is the direction we need to go. And if we're going to actually experience meaningful transformation I'm working with people currently are in very difficult circumstances. I've been in them, you know, nothing. Everything I'm saying is coming from a deep personal understanding but also professional. It's and it's not, this is never to trivialise what people experience. It's never saying, Well, you know, you should be able to do this. It's just pointing that this is the direction we need to be able to go in and, you know, I love love I often use it. It's a dictum that that you'll popularised which is to paraphrase, that which you most need to find will be found where you least want to look And that's a significant part of things IV, it's a really significant part of things. And while we see things like follow your bliss, we don't see what else Joseph Campbell said, which is to to counterbalance that and add context, which is follow your blisters. They said I should have also said, Follow your blisters. And you'll see the follow your bliss meme endlessly because people will like and share that forever. Not so many people have seen follow your blisters, and that meme doesn't get made. But it's really significant parts of it most of what we see in here, some form of don't feel bad. Yeah, don't feel bad. And that's, that's a bad idea. It's a bad solution. And because like, it's the premise is feeling bad is itself bad. Feeling bad isn't bad. Feeling bad itself can be good. Because this is how you learn from your mistakes. This is how you grow. And we learned early on, early on that feeling bad was something we'd rather not do. So what we've done is we've spent a lifetime evolving coping mechanisms in order not to feel bad, and most of them are invisible to us now. We don't want to feel bad. We want to avoid feedback. How do we avoid feeling bad? Well, it feels bad to be the one that's wrong. So I guess other people being wrong is helpful. So if I blame other people, then I don't have to be the one that's wrong. And if I'm always the one, that's right, and I need to be right to be safe and feel good, then other people need to be wrong. So if they don't agree with me, they have to be wrong. And then that goes so deep that eventually the people that are wrong are just wrong. They're immoral, and they're evil. And they're the worst people imaginable because they are holding a different space to us. A blame centricity is one of the most prevalent coping mechanisms in our culture, to not feel bad, and to try and feel safe. But it's a false sense of safety. That's not my safety comes from safety comes from safety doesn't come from comfort, safety comes from strength. That's true safety. The stronger you are, the safer you are. And so how do we become emotionally safe, we'll become emotionally strong, how to become emotionally strong and we need to hold. We need to be able to hold the heavy emotions that difficult motions, the ones we'd rather avoid. And that didn't exist. Because if we're not doing that, we are weakening ourselves. And those things are just going to keep coming. They're going to happen. And so I say that when we when we avoid feeling bad, we inherently create a life to feel bad about because we're not doing the things we need to do. Because of the things we feel bad about.

Agi Keramidas  7:32  
Thank you for tuning in. You can listen to the full conversation with Richie Watson in Episode 58. The link is in the show notes. He has also contributed one of the insights in my book 88 actionable insights for life, which you can get on Amazon. And until next time, stand out, don't fit in!