What would change if you were honest with yourself?
Do you feel frustrated or disengaged at work and blame yourself for your “lack of patience” of or for wanting “too much”? Do you feel triggered by certain people’s behaviour and then call yourself “too sensitive”? Do you feel bored at a party and then decide to have another drink or two, just to engage with others more?
What are other emotions that you feel, but decide to ignore to get on with your day?
In education and work environment, we are told not to be too emotional, to put ourselves together, to get a thicker skin. As a result, once we are about to experience an emotion that society considers “negative”, we ignore it, or push it back and tell ourselves that something is wrong with us to experience these emotions in the first place.
But all our emotions carry essential information about who we are as a person – what is important to us, what is missing, which of our values are being stepped over. Ignoring our emotions leads to underlying frustration, and its origin gets very difficult to identify.
What would happen if you learned to acknowledge your emotions and accept them as a source of information? What could you learn about yourself? And what would be the impact on the level of your self-awareness?
How would that feel to tell yourself: “I feel frustrated at my work because I don’t feel challenged at all and I don’t see any point of what I am doing. I feel angry when people act selfish and inconsiderate about the needs of others. I feel bored at this party because I don’t feel engaged by the type of conversations people are having here.”?
What would open up if you accept your experience as valid?
And what would become possible if you allowed yourself to act upon the information that your emotions offer you? If you started looking for more challenges in your professional life? If you stopped blaming yourself for being triggered by other people’s inconsiderate behaviour? If you just left the party, you are bored at and read a book instead?
What would that it to start accepting and respecting yourself, just as you now accept and respect things that society teaches us is “normal”?
I challenge you to want more for yourself. I challenge you to give yourself as much space as you need instead of trying to shrink yourself to fit that tiny box.
Originally posted on July 16, 2019