The Worst Most Helpful Way to Deal with Your Big Life Things

Well there’s good news and bad news here.

The good news is, if you read this post and apply these steps when you’re dealing with a Big Life Thing, you will feel better.

The bad news is, you have to feel shitty first.

Because the secret to feeling better about anything is to actually feel your feelings.

Very barf, I know. Sorry, I’m not here to tell you what you want to hear, but I can commiserate with you because no one hates “feeling the feelings” more than me. I promise.

I hate big feels. HATE. I would rather do pretty much anything (and I have) than deal with them - run marathons, eat my entire kitchen, drink every cocktail in a major metropolitan city, watch the same episode of Grey’s Anatomy so many times my Netflix account has been flagged, annoy every friend to the point of breaking, sleep for days, not sleep for even more days….The problem is, of course, that feelings have an annoying way of continuing to show up even after all the sleeping, running, eating, drinking, and Greys-ing is done. Remember when you were a kid in the pool and you pushed a big plastic ball under water - and eventually it popped back up and usually hit you in the face? That’s what your feelings are doing. You can busy or numb or push them around as much as you want but eventually, they pop back up and smack you in the face….

In other words, the only way to deal with your feelings is to actually deal with your feelings.

No matter what Big Life Thing you’re dealing with - whether it’s about your career, your money, your health, your partner, your kids, your parents, your pets, whatever - you’re going to have feelings about it. It works like this:

You have a Thing —> you have thoughts about that Thing —> those thoughts create feelings, and then those feelings drive your actions, and your actions create your results around the Thing. That’s how it works. And in coaching we talk a lot about changing your thoughts to change your results, because that’s also how it works.

Except sometimes it’s not so easy to do that, because if we haven’t first dealt with those annoying feely-feels, they will pop up from under the water again. The feelings don’t go away just because you change your thoughts; you have to deflate that ball first so that it doesn’t smack you in the face.

How do you do that, exactly? How do you “feel your feelings”? It’s not that hard, honestly. You basically just sit and, well, feel them.

• You notice them (“Oh, I feel bad…”)

• You name them (“I feel bad” is not a feeling, FYI…..Anger, frustration, fear, jealousy, sadness, shame, embarrassment - those are. Be specific)

• Then you focus and describe the feeling. Where is the feeling in your body? Describe it like you were explaining it to a 5 year old - is it big or small? Hot or cold? What shape is it? What color? Keep going until you have identified every marker of this feeling….

• Notice how the more you focus on it, name it, describe it, and sit with it, the less it starts to actually feel like anything….

This is how you feel the feelings. You FEEL them. And when you do, they start to actually fade….for a while anyways . They will come back, but now you know what to do. Notice, name, describe, feel….rinse and repeat. The whole thing takes about 90 seconds. You can do anything for 90 seconds. Even feel your feelings.

And after that? Well, once the feelings have faded a bit, you are then in a place to change your thoughts, which will then create the domino effect you need to change your feelings, actions and results. Your Big Life Thing gets a lot easier to deal with once you’re deflated that big ball of feelings. It really is that simple.

All you have to do is feel it.