How to BREAK FREE From Negativity

If you want to gain emotional freedom, master your body. A question I'll often ask myself is, what is my role? Right now, you're generating feelings and moods that are awful. You need to connect with your body again. You need to move. You need to eat good things. You need to sleep. Babe, I want you to teach yourself to forgive more. The higher the degree of perfectionism, the higher the anxiety. I'm literally giving you the shift for the rest of your life. You'll never forget that I just told you this is your world. Loose or strict? This is important. Loose versus strict. The higher the degree of your perfectionism, the higher the anxiety. The higher the degree of perfectionism, the higher the anxiety. Like, we can cultivate feelings and emotions that we'd call negative. Highly stressful, highly anxious, high worry, high fear, high overwhelm based on our expectations for perfection. If we can be loose, let's use another word, flexible. If I can be flexible, I know that the higher level of flexibility. Psychologists might call this like a trait of openness. The higher the level of openness that I have, the more positive range of emotions I tend to experience. Because, you know, I don't judge everything so instantly. This is what I tell people all the time. I'm like, I can guess your ratio of positive to negative emotional range versus very quickly. And people never agree. I say, I can give you one phrase, I can give you one distinction. And I can tell. Are you a person who holds grudges? If you are a person who holds grudges, you experience a lot more negative emotions than most people, and it shock. Like what? Because I know a lot of people hold grudges. And so why? Because when you hold grudges, the reason you're holding grudges is because you're holding strictness. They didn't do something that was strictly within your expectations. So you're mad. You're going to hold a grudge, right? Even perfectionism is a level of strictness, isn't it? It's more strict than flexible. It's got to be like this. And so people who hold grudges against others and themselves, because you can hold grudges against yourself, I can share with you. It is so clear and so obvious to me that when it ends up happening is that you end up experiencing a lot of negative emotion. So be aware. Oh, wait, maybe my negative emotions are coming because my high expectations caused me to hold a grudge against people. So now, because I hold grudges against me and other people, these negative emotions have been conditioned and trained to be more impulsive and fast, Right? I'm mad at this. I'm mad at this. I'm mad at this because I'm holding something. I want you to teach yourself to forgive more. Forgive the bad day, forgive the dropped ball. Forgive that person only if anything, for your own mental health. Because if you carry along the idea of a grudge or the idea that people should be punished all the time for every mistake, including yourself, you're conditioning those negative emotions over and over and over again. You're generating feelings and moods that are awful. Too many people punish themselves. You've heard me say on stage before, like, I'm off in a hot mess. You know, things are happening so fast in my life. I'm doing a lot of things. I don't get everything right. I'm teaching, like, this extemporaneously. I literally have five words in front of me as I'm teaching. I'm drawing from my experience. I'm drawing from my expertise. I'm drawing from my research. But I'm here dancing with you in real time. It's super hard. You can see me. I hope you can sense, like, wow, Brendan's talking slower today. It's because steam's coming out my ears. I got a lot of words to get right. I got to make sure that I'm describing things clearly enough. It's hard. It's a long session. I'm not going to get everything right. But I don't finish this thing today and go, oh, I got all those things wrong. I'm terrible. I'm like, instead of giving myself grace, I'm like, okay, did I prepare? Yes. Did I try hard? Yes. Did I show up for the people? Yes. Those are wins. Instead of going back and go, here's all the things I did wrong and punish myself. So what can we do about it to summon more positive emotions? Okay, now we're going to get right down to it, and I hope these will be practical things first. I think the most important is whatever emotions you are sensing and experiencing, run it through the four Ds, right? Just learn, like, write down the four Ds. Maybe carry it in a card. Okay, I'm feeling emotions, and what am I doing with them? Denying, detaching, debating, driving. What do I want to do with this emotion? And sometimes you just go, like, I'm just going to sit with it and let it pass. Because emotions, like I said, it's kind of like a cloud in the sky kind of appears, and it swiftly moves like a big wind, you know? It's like going to stay, but it's not going to stay very long. Right? There's sunshine on the other side of that emotion when it's negative, just in a few minutes from now. But we have to learn to understand the connection of what I shared earlier. There's emotions. They're often automatic, reactive, impulsive, based off a situation that is happening. And it's physical. Like, it literally can change our heart rate, change our breath. And when we understand that, we go, oh, what if I reverse engineered that? What if instead of the emotion always driving my breath and my heart rate, I learned biology So I could use my breath, my body, in such a way that I could affect the emotion, change it, shift it, or experience it. Some emotions I love a joy. So when I feel joy, I breathe in and I want to feel the joy throughout my body, right? Feel that gratitude across my body, feel love across my body. You can amplify an emotion in your body, can't you? Right. But you can also take your body and use it to get you in the state of an emotion or a feeling. You can think about things that you're grateful for using your body and your brain. Okay? Thinking about things I'm grateful for. I can breathe in gratitude. I can feel and sense and ground my body into gratitude and appreciation. And bam, I'm in a different emotion. So biological control for emotional regulation. Right. If you want to gain emotional freedom, master your body, master your breath, master how you move, master the temple. When you master your temple, when you get great physical health, and now you use your physical health to shape how you feel, more positive range of emotions are happening. The way I breathe throughout the day is making me feel great. Right. The way I take walks after every teaching makes me feel great. When I take a walk after I teach today, I'll think of all the things that were like, aha. Moments that I had in my extemporaneous speaking today. I'm like, oh, that was cool. That happened. I said that that was cool. Oh, I'm appreciative. Oh, look how many people showed up today. Oh, that felt great. Oh, that teacher did that. And I'll like, I'll feel so, like, connected to what I did today in my mission. That's like, wow, no wonder I feel connected and present with my work all the time. Because I took it in physically. I went on a walk, I thought about it, I breathed in it. Does that make sense? I'm breathing and feeling and moving in the emotions and the thoughts that I want of life. Maybe Sometimes emotions happen. Oh, I didn't do that. Right. I suck. I didn't get right. Okay, sense it. I see you. But maybe I did my best debate it. Maybe I don't want to be driven for that. I want to drive in and create the experience of emotion that I want. Right. I want to feel that positive range and that state of being. I'm going to shift my state of being with my breath and how I move my body and what I use in my brain. Make sense. Your brain, body connection is real. So I'm like, use that brain. Think good things. Walk in gratitude. Breathe in gratitude. Walk in gratitude. Breathe in gratitude. Over and over and over and over and over. No wonder my emotion is of appreciation when I get to meet you. I'm so happy to meet you. I want to hug you. I'm excited to see you because I appreciate the fact that you're in my world. Here we are at a growth day event. How amazing is this? Hope to see you live, by the way. Come to one of our live events. But you get the idea. I've used my body brain connection in such a way. My emotions are conditioned to follow that. That's important, right? So that's that power of taking your biology in a way. Another thing I want to teach you is that your mood is so much driven by your last 72 hours. I know you've all heard me teach this, but I cannot emphasize enough how you slept, what you ate, what you drank, how you process your days, what intentions you set, who you hung out with in the last couple days. All of that is generating states of being, feeling and emotion. And too often we get mad at ourselves that in the moment we feel bad, our emotion is bad. Something seems triggering to us. Well, guess what? That's heightened. Because last night you ate three bottles of wine. You know, drank three bottles of wine. Think about that. It's like, well, no duh. Your emotions are all over the place because you poisoned yourself last night. Stop being so shocked. When you poison yourself, you feel bad. Don't be shocked. Make the correlation feel bad. Oh yeah. Two days ago I had 17 pizzas. No wonder it's. This should not be hard to connect, but people do. And so what do you do? You guilt yourself your emotions today versus changing your behaviors. 3 days ago. I know that what I do today is going to add to a mood three days from now. That's why today I'll work out even though I don't work out because I want to feel good three days from now. I don't work out just because I feel good right now. Sometimes I don't even like a workout. But I'm going to do it because I know it's going to increase my mood three days from now, right? I don't want to go to bed. I'd rather watch that extra season. But if I watch that extra season on tv, I'm going to feel like crap tomorrow. And then guess what happen the next day. You feel like crap. Your brain goes, I feel like crap. I don't know why this is awful. Life sucks. Or you go, I feel like crap. I did something yesterday that was making me feel like crap. Let me change my behavior in the future. I know you all know this, but it's so important. Mood is driven by a lot of what happened last three days. How you slept the last three days has as much to explain your emotions than what happened to you when you were 15 years old. Babe. A lot of people are like, oh, it must be my child. I'm like, no, I think you need to sleep and maybe work out and blow off some stress. Okay, let's take care of those two things first, right? We're learning that mastering and taking care of your temple is as effective as many other interventions that are traditional. Pop this pill, you know, process the situation from this. It's like some people, they genuinely just, you need to get a hold of your body. You need to connect with your body again. You need to move, you need to eat good things, you need to sleep. Babe, you're stressed because you're so tired. Get some sleep. I'm not saying that these are one or the other, that you have to choose this or this one's better than that. There's lots of research on that. Go explore that. But my suggestion is realize the power of your temple. Realize the power of your last 72 hours. Realize when you feel something, you can question it, debate it, detach from it at night. Okay, let me move on to another one. Another big idea for today. When I have an emotion and it's confusing or upsetting, a question I'll often ask myself is, what is my role right now? Role. R O L E. What is my role right now? What is my role right now? And it will shift my brain into a different place, right? Because emotion, instead of trying to process the motion, I'm like, what's my role right now? So, for example, I might be angry in a meeting, and I feel the anger. Instead of trying to jump into the anger, deal with the anger. I'm like, I'm almost leap over and go, what's my role? Oh, I'm the CEO here. I'm the leader here. Right? Okay. Because as a CEO, I'm going to handle this differently than just a person feeling impatience. Does that make sense? Let me give you another example. You're in traffic, somebody cuts you off, right? You feel all these emotions. If you can stop and go, what's my role right now? And your brain. And the truth is you go, oh, I'm a police officer. Well, guess what? A police officer in the role of being a police officer driving a car in traffic and getting cut off is going to react very differently than Joe Blow driving down the road drinking his coffee. It's a different role, Right. He's not going to ram his car into this person, hopefully. Okay, you get the idea. The role can shift the experience. CEO and meeting having negative emotions is very. I'm going to act differently from the role, right? If I'm a father and I take that role seriously, as I'm supposed to inspire and be an aspirational figure to my child. As a father, even though I'm angry about something, I'm like, you know what? In this role, in this relationship, father, child, I'm not going to react the same way I would react, you know, if I'm on the racquetball court, person versus competitor. Does that make sense? Same emotions can be true, but when you shift your role, it shifts the whole lens. This is advanced, right? I'm literally giving you the shift for the rest of your life. You'll never forget that I just told you this. When you feel an emotion, if you check in with your role, you're more likely to take the next right action of integrity. If you don't check in your role, you're just a pissed off person. But if you're a loving mom, you do differently. Don't you see? Our emotions and our actions can be shaped by our roles. I want you to take the higher role. I want you to be the role model. I want you to learn to act as the role model and through the role model mindset. Because the role model mindset is going to make the next right actions happen more often. That will summon the better emotional ranges. Does that make sense? It's profound. The second you go, oh, as a role model, I'm not going to act like that from that feeling as a role model, I'm going to be more intentional. Shifts everything. Emotional freedom comes from looking at your role is this powerful. Shifts everything and just shifts everything. When I think about my role. Oh, I'm a coach. See, someone might say something to me. I'm coaching them all the time. They'll say something to me and my emotion will get like, insensitive. It'll be like judgmental. The emotion of judgmentalness will come up and my brain goes, that's stupid. Someone will have just said something to me and my brain will go, that's stupid. Now, I don't act out from that idea that that's stupid. Because I go, what's my role here? I'm a coach. I need to be compassionate. And we need to explore this together. Different actions stem from different roles, right? Guess what? Different emotions also stem from different roles. If you. Again, all I'm trying to do, I'm telling you from the very beginning. Emotions are automatic and reactive, but they can be conditioned more. I can summon more positive emotions over a period of time as I summon a higher level of role for myself. Life changing. When I feel an emotion, I'll often ask, not just what's my role. Often ask, what's the judgment here? A lot of emotions are driven by judgment, and that's where the blend from an emotion to a feeling really happens. Judgment is in between. That's really the difference, right? Judgment, meaning placed onto something, takes it from an emotion, automatic, impulsive, physical, into more of mental feeling. Write this down. What was the judgment I just made? If you want emotional freedom, when you experience emotions and you ask, what was the judgment I just made? My trick in becoming a high performer at the level I've become, where I have to deal with extremely stressful situations. In locker rooms, in boardrooms, in people crying, in divorced couples screaming at each other. I have to do all this all the time. The way that I do is no matter what my emotions are, I'm like, what's my role here? And if I have an emotion, what's the judgment? Where's it coming from? Those two moves I want you to write down as the two moves. Two moves. Roll judgment. Now watch the magic. Roll judgment, breath and movement. Roll judgment, breath and movement. These are my levers that are immediate and they can really shift my emotional state. What's my role here? Oh, I'm a loving parent. Okay. What's my judgment? Oh, I was thinking that this can't happen. How am I breathing? Oh, I'm not breathing. How am I holding myself? Oh, I'm holding myself terrible. Oh, how do I sleep? Oh, okay. And now I start to understand my world. But I'm able to build my world when something Comes up for me and I'm not sure what the feeling or the emotion is. Because sometimes you don't know, right? I tell myself, but I also tell my clients, I say, describe that to me in three more ways. What's three other ways you could describe that? Well, I'm mad at my wife. Okay, you're mad at your wife. Help me understand that more. What's three other ways you can describe that? Could you guys take a note on this? Please write this stuff down. Don't just listen to me. You'll forget this stuff. You'll forget role, you'll forget judgment, you'll forget breath, body, but you will also forget this one. What's three other ways to describe that? Well, yeah, I'm feeling lazy today. You're feeling lazy today. Okay, help me understand that. Describe that in three other ways and it will force the three is not arbitrary. I have found in these coaching conversations, if they describe it in one way, well, you know, I'm lazy. I just don't want to do anything. Okay, you just don't want to do anything. Great. What's another way you would describe that? Well, you know, I'm just feeling angry about that last email. Okay, feeling angry about that email. Okay, what's another way you would describe that? Well, I'm feeling. See, as they describe it to me, I understand it better. But so do they. And in describing it more, you understand different perspectives on this is the power of a talk therapy or talk coaching. When people have or in a condition or a situation or forced to describe it in different ways, they see it differently. Remember, see, see it differently. Summon something different, see it differently, summit different. So I have them describe it in three different ways. So next time you feel like stuck emotionally, start describing it. Like, force yourself to describe it in three different ways and you might find an access point there that really shifts things, that really does shift you. Okay. Another big concept in conditioning better emotion and finding emotional freedom. You knew I was going to go here. I waited kind of as one of the last pieces here. And that is daily journaling. Daily journaling for all the reasons you don't journal. I'm going to give you one reason to finally start emotional freedom. Better quality of emotions, a higher level of energy emotionally and spiritually in your life. And no, it's not an opinion. I'm not saying it just because Growth day has the world's best personal development journal, which we do. I'm sharing it because when you journal, you start to not see. Most people think journaling is debriefing I'm going to write down the things that happened to me today and how I felt about them. That's one side of the journal coin. The other side of the journal coin is generative. To write down what you do want, why you want it, what you see, what you want to experience. It's generative. It's building. So part of the journaling is visioning. It is your verbal vision board. That's what a journaling is. So many people I don't like to journal because I don't want to think about what happened at 9am that stupid meeting. I don't want to deal with it again. I'm like, no, no, no. I want you to process. That's part of journaling. Processing the emotion, the day, the experience. The other is generative. Like, okay, tomorrow I want this to happen. Tomorrow I want to experience this. You're writing the next chapter when you're journaling of your life, of your day, of your week. So I want you to shift your whole mentality of like, oh, I'm actually going to learn to describe and generate the life, the feelings, the emotions, the relationships, the actions, the behaviors that I want of my life. See, I started journaling so much that, you know, tomorrow I want to experience joy when I go see my nephews. I want to have a good time. I want to play in the yard. I want to laugh. So that is a journal entry is different, isn't it? It's casting intention and yes, casting emotion into the future. See, most people are slave to their impulses and their emotions because all they've ever been taught is to feel it, experience it, and then in a therapeutic culture, analyze it. Let me just analyze all this stuff. Analyze, analyze, analyze, analyze. By the way, very powerful. It's why I always recommend getting a therapist for everyone. Everyone should have a therapist at some point and a coach. But one of the major differentiators is how much a coach spends on the generative. It's about having you think through, talk through, see, visualize, describe a more positive outcome and really living, sensing and experiencing that. Daily journaling is so powerful that. And they found in journaling, if we could take you from just descriptive analysis into generative, what I often call casting. I'm casting the future. I'm casting out the emotions I want to experience. The intention has already been set. With the intention, summons the emotion. I'm going to have the best time. Daily journaling in growth day will change your life. Some of you don't know what to journal about. You don't know how to cast a vision. You don't know how to think through these things. So when you go into your journal on growth day, you'll see a thing. It says growth prompts. You can just press that and we will generate sentence stems or questions for you to ponder out, to write about. I want you to develop a daily practice in growth day. I want you to give yourself a 30 day challenge. I want you to journal every single day. But I want you to teach yourself to do this journaling differently. One part of the journaling is appreciating, seeing, debriefing the day this happened. This is what I sense. This is what I experienced. This is what I wish I experienced. This is what's going on. This is what I appreciate, this is what I'm grateful for. The other side is describing tomorrow, describing a vision. Describe how you're going to feel and experience that and it is going to change your life so profoundly by doing this. Why? Most people have emotional freedom because they don't have access to the language and the visions of different emotions. They're stuck in a very narrow range of just a certain levels that they think about, you know, from their childhood or from this moment. They're reactive, but they're not generative. Being a high agency person, a high performing person, a high achieving person, a high conscious person, it's all the same. We're looking to the future and we're building it. Make less harsh judgments. Breathe through it, think through it, feel through it, breathe through it. And we're going. And finally and last but not least, journal, future cast. Describe the future. Cast out the emotions. What do you want to experience? Tomorrow you're going to dinner with your spouse or your partner. You're going to experience affection, love, joy, fun, humor, blessing. That is a choice. And those choices give you emotional freedom.