How do you feel most of the time? What do you notice in your response to your day to day life that feels like a consistent companion? Do you feel overworked and exhausted everyday? Do you feel inspired daily? Do you feel joyful? Do you feel dread? Do you feel like you are a slave to your life & kids? Have you ever considered how you feel when you wake up in the morning? Has the way you feel become an unconscious state? Meaning do you think about how you feel, or just feel what your feeling and believe that is how it is supposed to be?
Have you ever wondered how to change your life?
If you want to change your life you must change how you feel. In order to create different outcomes in our lives we actually have to change our feeling states – meaning the way we feel on a day to day and how we unconsciously respond to our world. We can fill our minds with endless positive affirmations, but if we feel empty, lonely, financially broke, hurt, broken on the inside, no amount of positive self talk will change those experiences. The only way to change those experiences is to start with how you feel.
It is not easy to change an emotional state. I know how hard it can be to change, especially if you have been living within a certain feeling state for a long time. I am regularly checking in with certain responses I have to friends, work, financial and more that are clearly not the way I want to feel about those things. But I continue to respond in emotional states that don’t feel good.
In order to manage myself, and help create ease in my life I figured out that if I followed three key practices then I can progressively create a new feeling state. The 3 practices I use, and continue to use are:
1) You have to witness the emotional state. Which means you need to stop, take 3 deep breaths and pay attention to the automated emotional response that is happening. Meaning, instead of sliding down the reactive slide, you must (there is not way around this) stop yourself, decide to watch what is happening. I have found that when I am really tuned into paying attention I can learn to stop reacting and slow down.
2) Choose a different response. An example would be – you are used to never having enough time, ALWAYS rushing around, playing catch up on time from the moment you leave the house in the am. However, if you watch yourself and slow yourself down from the moment you witness that immediate urge to start to stress about time. Then choose to move slower, and decide that you are not late. In fact you can leave the house 10 minutes earlier then you normally do, and actually arrive early. All of a sudden you have switched out of the emotional state of stress from being late.
3) Be attentive enough to stick with it the entire day. Watch yourself. Every time you have the automatic urge to respond with stress (as my example), choose to slow down and move your mind into a different emotional state. Such as the feeling of knowing you have plenty of time, and you use your time to leave early and enjoy the benefits of driving slower, arriving early and moving slower once you get out of your car.
These steps can be applied to any emotional state. Such as arguing with your kids (feeling state of frustration), agitation with people at work (feeling state of helplessness in creating change at work), feeling stressed about meeting new people (feeling state of anxiety when in new situations), public speaking (feeling state of embarrassing yourself ), working your butt off so you can be recognized at work (feeling state of incompetence) , deciding to say no instead of always yes (feeling state of always spreading yourself too thin and not being appreciated). Do you see where I am going with this? There are endless emotional states we end up in every single day. Yet, we have the privilege of choosing different in any given moment.
How are you going to shift how you feel today?
with love
Noelle