Why “I'm Bad at Emotions” Is a Lie You Tell Yourself

If you're successful and disciplined and you've got the receipts to show it, but you also want to be an emotionally intelligent leader and you're convinced that you're uniquely bad at handling emotions, then this video is for you. Maybe your business is totally on fire and you're handling what other people would say is an inconceivable amount of pressure and risk, but then your most important employee sends you a text that's like, Hey, can I talk to you after work? And before you even know what this conversation is about, you spend the rest of the afternoon with your chest tightening, your mind spinning. Instead of just noticing the fear, handling it like every other difficult thing going on in your business, you start judging yourself. In this video, I want to make one point: emotions are hard for everyone. And if I can convince you of this, Hopefully you'll stop making handling your emotions even harder by judging yourself on top of feeling the emotion. If you don't know who I am, my name's Luke Murray. I'm a former physician. I've been an entrepreneur for about 20 years. I've done about $100 million in revenue in that time. Currently, I've got a portfolio of a few businesses that does about $3 million a year. And I make these videos because I would like to have ambition without the bullshit. And I'm guessing you would too. And today's bullshit idea is that because an emotion feels uncomfortable or awkward or hard to express, it means that you're bad at emotions. I started noticing this pattern when I was teaching a class about feelings and the expression of those feelings. As I brought up the topic, one of the students chimed in and said, I'm just not good at expressing emotions. And I recognized that I'd heard that a lot from other people, and I'd also had the thought myself, I'm just not good at this. But what I was more interested in was that I realized I'd never heard the opposite. I mean, I've heard people say, I'm good with numbers, or I'm good with people, or I'm great at building systems, but I had never heard someone say, I'm really good at expressing sadness. And fear and anger. And I think part of the problem is how we define being good at something. I mean, if you're good at piano, you can play piano without the same difficult internal experience and effort or discomfort as someone that's bad at piano. If you're good at spreadsheets, you can build a really good spreadsheet without sweating through your shirt and questioning your entire identity. That's usually how we measure being good at something, how much we feel the effort inside of our bodies. You can execute successfully without breaking a sweat. I mean, that's literally a phrase that we have, but emotions don't work that way. Being good at feeling fear doesn't mean that fear stops feeling like fear. Being good at sadness doesn't mean sadness suddenly becomes convenient and comfortable. Being good at anger, again, doesn't mean anger comes out like a well-formatted Google Doc. Most people don't mean, I am objectively bad at emotions. They mean, this feels weird, well, I don't like it, and I thought emotional maturity would feel a lot more graceful than this. And that's just a different thing. One version turns discomfort into the identity, I'm bad at emotions. The other version is just more honest. Another place I saw this was with the team at one of my companies. We read a book called The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, and there's a section that talks about expressing emotions, taking the internal sensation you have and expressing it externally, not explaining it, not philosophizing about it. Usually you don't use words at all. You're literally making sounds, shaking, Just expressing them, and that's how emotions typically show up. They let your body make noise and and move in a way that feels authentic. It's kind of like how a baby would cry or an animal would whimper and shake and shake it off and then go back to being alive. Humans, of course, we've got to add a whole TED Talk on top of it. One of my employees was talking to her manager about that idea and asked something like, "Does anybody actually do the whole like and shaking?" thing. And the manager said, the only person I've actually seen do that is Luke. He's made weird noises and stuff before. And that's true, I have made weird noises, but I also remember expressing these emotions and feeling like, gosh, this is super weird and not compatible with my LinkedIn profile picture. And I remember after I heard that thinking, yeah, I was uncomfortable as hell. So how the hell would I expect people who are more socially inhibited and like lower on the org chart to feel comfortable doing something like that? And again, I'm already a weird dude. If you feel weird expressing emotion, welcome to the club. I don't think that means you're uniquely bad at it. I think it means you're doing something that almost everyone finds uncomfortable. Lastly, I saw this pattern. with a group of about 30 people at the same time during a week-long experience called the Hoffman Process. It's like a 24/7 group therapy session for like a week straight. One of the ideas is that you recognize an emotional pattern, recognition, then you express the emotion underneath it, then you have compassion for whatever caused it, and then you choose a new way of being. And that last phrase sounds like something from a retreat center brochure, It actually probably was on the brochure, but the underlying idea is useful. In any case, where people like me try to cheat is that we want to skip this expression part. We want to recognize the pattern like, oh, this is me projecting my daddy issues onto my boss. And then when we can explain where it came from, we then have compassion and forgive all the people involved. Like, yeah, Dad was just doing his best. And then we think we can move on. Into this new way of being. Really, we just want a new way of doing and like pretend that we're now an evolved adult who definitely doesn't need to cry into their pillow. But awareness is not the same as expression. And I can understand a pattern perfectly. And if your emotions are stirred up by your employee's text that she wants to talk and they're still trapped in there, you haven't done the expression part, Then you're actually not processing the emotion. That's what processing is. And yes, it's uncomfortable, and yes, it's weird, and that feeling is normal. Why do we skip it? Because we judge it. We think it's dumb. We think it's actually— we just think it's not normal. We think it's either beneath us or immature. But if we were really mature, or at least what we think, we would be able to understand the feeling, And just think our way through an emotion. We wouldn't have to make a sound or cry or shake or do anything that would make us look like a poorly supervised mammal. But emotion is not logic. Emotional expression isn't philosophizing. It is your nervous system being activated in a real primal way. That is why it doesn't usually look clean. Sometimes it looks like crying or yelling into a pillow or shaking or breathing or making noise that you'd prefer not to see replayed in slow motion on a Jumbotron. That does not mean you're doing it wrong. That might be the work. So if there's one thing I actually have to offer in this video, it's not a fancy technique, it's not an emotional processing framework. I'm not going to pretend I have some clean 3-step solution for something humans have been struggling with since we were drawing weird animals on cave walls. The main thing I have to offer is normalization. Emotions are hard. For everyone. The expression part is awkward for everyone. The fact that fear still feels like fear does not mean you failed. It means that you're human. So the next time you notice an emotion and immediately judge yourself for it, slow down. The first layer is just awareness. Like, this is fear, or sadness, or anger, or shame. Just becoming aware of the emotion is already a huge move. Then ask, can I accept myself for being where I am? That question matters because if you're fighting the fact that the feeling exists, then you're probably not going to process it. You're going to process your judgment about the feeling instead of the feeling itself, and you may not even process your judgment. And maybe the answer is no. Maybe you can't accept yourself yet. Fine. Start there. I feel fear, and I'm judging myself for feeling fear. That is still more honest and compassionate than I'm bad at emotions, because emotions are hard for everyone. The problem is not that they're hard. They're supposed to be hard. The problem is when you make this is hard mean I'm bad at this, or everyone else got the emotional regulation software update and I'm still running Windows 95. And remember, we all choose made-up stories we want to believe, so make up some good ones. So what do you think? Have you ever told yourself, I'm bad at this emotion stuff? I'd love to know what kind of effect that's had on you and how it's held you back from actually processing the emotion that was there. Thanks for watching.