How to Stop Being a Victim to Your Emotions

How many times in your life have you felt terrible and you didn't know what to do about it? Most of us lack not just emotional intelligence because we've never been taught anything related to where our emotions come from. You have way more control in this area of your life than you've ever imagined. If you are constantly pulled by stress or overwhelm, I'm just going to say you haven't done the work enough. I don't want you to be victim to your emotions anymore. I. I don't want you to be victim to anything. So today I'm going to go there because we have a lot to talk about. How many times in your life have you felt terrible and you didn't know what to do about it, or you were unsure what your emotions even were or where they were coming from, or you've got a toddler at home and you're learning a whole lot about emotions right now. Maybe at some point in your life, you realize that sometimes when all of the stress and all the overwhelm and all the upset feels a little bit like you're manufacturing it and it's time to get a hold of it, and other times you're like, I wish I could just have more emotions of grace and beauty and love and appreciation, gratitude, joy, happiness. The funniest thing is we simply do not have a very good educational system about emotions. Most of us lack not just emotional intelligence because we've never been taught anything related to where our emotions come from, how to process them, how to manage them, how to work through them. But also, we don't even understand how dramatically we can condition ourselves to experience a better, more helpful, productive, and, yes, joyous range of emotions. I want you to hear this. You have way more control in this area of your life than you've ever imagined. We've been taught and told and lied to that our emotions just happen to us and there's nothing we can do about it. And we just need to learn to sit with them and fully, radically accept them. And there's, you know, it's just human nature. We just. You feel these things. It happens for everybody. And the truth is that's a poor level of default living. This is about tactical ways to understand your world and to better shift the dials to where you need them to be, to meet the moment, to appreciate the moment, to drive the moment, depending on what you're trying to experience in the moment. I'm going to start by jumping into this topic of emotional freedom with something I think is so unique Obvious. And then I want to give you the four Ds framework. The thing that I think is obvious is that you need to consciously choose that you want emotional freedom in your life. Because if you haven't done the work in this area, you haven't chosen. If you are constantly pulled by stress or overwhelm, I'm just going to say you haven't done the work enough. If your life feels like it's driven by anxieties, frustrations, old hurts and dramas, it's time to do the work and to do it joyously. So many people think about this topic, and it just sounds like a bummer. You know, it's like, ugh, emotions. I got to deal with them. I'm like, but your emotions can give you such access to beauty and appreciation and grace and spirituality. Your emotions can start to help you experience such a much more joyous and happier range of life. And so I'm really happy that you're here. I'm honored that you're here, and I cannot wait to serve you in this way. I really believe that we are in a culture right now that has overly emphasized the importance of everyone's emotions. All of your emotions are valid. They're all important. They all matter. They're very, extremely thin. You need to process all of those for hours and hours and months and months with therapists and everything else like that. And I want to let you know, full disclaimer. I'm not on that train. I think you have a lot of passing emotions that aren't that important. I think lots of things happen to us in our lives that we need to see that sucked and move on. I think that when we don't understand the difference between emotions and feelings and moods and intentions, we can really get stuck in a swirl of negative experience in life that we feel victim to. I don't want you to be victim to your emotions anymore. I don't want you to be victim to anything. Feelings, moods, bad choices, bad habits, bad addictions. And yes, I did use the word on an emotional freedom conversation. Bad. So that's how you know I'm not a therapist. I really believe it's important to understand, hey, some things I feel, it's okay. I don't want to feel that I can acknowledge that. And yes, some emotions are bad. The emotion I feel to go cut off the other guy in traffic and ram his car, probably we can call that a bad feeling. So I feel like that we don't have to be walking on eggshells together here today. I'm not going to do it with that approach. I'm going to do it with some edge. As a high performance coach, I want you to be in command of this area in your life again. And I want you to feel that, that drive and that impulse to be in greater command. Too many people live by default. We got to get you back in the driver's seat of how you feel and how you experience the world. Because I know that it's so important for all of us to live the best life that we can and to learn the things that we have to learn in order to be able to do that. Allow me to push, allow me to tease a little bit. Allow me to have some fun with you today because we have a lot to to talk about. I'm going to teach you the 4D concept. I think once you get them, everything can shift forever in your emotions. Your emotions right now, your emotions yesterday and last year were all part of this 4Ds framework. You did something with the emotions. A very casual explanation of the differences between emotions, feelings, moods and intentions. So make sure you take some notes. So very simply, what are emotions? Emotions tend to be a sense. And that sense can come from our five senses. But it's a sense that's automatic. It's usually reactive based on a situation or a circumstance or even a thought. But it's almost automatic, right? It just happens. The emotion kind of happens like a cloud appears in the sky and floats through it, right? It's automatic and impulsive. Like you just feel and sense an emotion. And it's really important for people to realize is that emotions kind of happen, right? They just kind of happen. It doesn't mean you can't condition better ones to happen, but they just kind of happen. You might be driving along and get impatient, right? You just all of a sudden that emotion of impatience comes up and you're almost like, where did that cloud come from? Right? But joy is also an emotion and it can just happen. You see your toddler playing and they're smiling and having a good time and you smile, you feel good. Emotion comes into your life of joy and love for this child like this, right? It just, it's automatic, it's reactive, it's impulsive, it has a physical result. Too often you can measure physical changes in the body, in the brain based on an emotion that people are sensing at any given time. And here's what's important too. An emotion is also short lived. This is what we've lost in the last couple years. We think we're all living in, you know, a long term emotion. Most people are not living in any long term emotions at all. Most emotions are very brief. We're talking like 90 seconds to maybe three minutes. Most emotions are very brief. So it kind of happens to us. We sense it, we feel it, and we get it because of something that just happened, something that crossed our mind. It's often very reactive, very impulsive, very automatic and very physical.

Hey guys, it's Brandon. I'm jumping in here real quick. First, I want to make sure you've gone to progressmode.com to join the newsletter because I have a resource for you related to this episode and I I have an upcoming meetup with my private group, Ultra. If you've ever liked to be in a private group with me where I help you get more progress towards your passion projects or to build your business or your brand in a bigger way, just go to progressmo.com, click on Private group to apply to see you can get into Ultra and we can take.

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Just go to progress mode.com okay, now, a feeling is different. A feeling is more meaning driven. Meaning. You sense something and now you're putting meaning on top of it. You're telling yourself a story. It doesn't just happen to you and you feel it. It's like you have more thought going into it. You have more meaning applied to it. And now it's, let's use the word or the phrase, an ongoing feeling. I know you've all heard me talk about these differences before, but it's important. A lot of the feelings that you have are you cultivating your mindset about it. For those who've been in growth day before, you've heard me teach that difference between the two with the haunted house metaphor. You know, you go to a haunted house and you know, on Halloween and you go around a corner in a haunted house, someone jumps out to you. The emotion is immediate fear, right? It's impulsive, it's automatic, it's physical. We can measure. There's fear. But then as you continue going through the haunted house, look, that fear kind of drains out of you. The emotion goes away a little bit, doesn't it? By the time you leave the haunted house, you go have a couple hamburgers with your friends, you finally end up going home. That emotion, that fear, it's gone. And you even actually do what? You laugh about it. You actually laugh about the experience that scared you now think about that. How could you do that? Well, the emotion was fear. It was automatic. The feeling later that takes it light, that thinks it's funny is because you use your mind to go, oh, that wasn't that scary. That was actually fun. You've told yourself a story, you've applied thought to the emotion, and later on it's a feeling like, that was fun. I feel like going to the haunted house with my friends next weekend again. That was great. Now, if that emotion doesn't pass of fear, let's say you're at your house later on and you're at your house, and it's late at night, you're walking through the house, and all of a sudden you have this feeling that something you know is lurking around the corner. And you start telling yourself, oh, my gosh, there's somebody in the house. Like, there was somebody in the haunted house. And you start telling yourself. And you worked yourself up into a big scary feeling. That's right. You're generating the feeling, aren't you? Before someone jumped out, the fear was there. Now you're ruminating, oh, my gosh. And you're worrying and you're generating a sense of a feeling. And I think that's a great way to have a distinction between those two things. Sometimes emotions happen more often. They're automatic. And a lot of feelings, they're generated by thought, storytelling, how we sense something and what meaning we apply to it. A mood. Well, a mood that lasts much longer than an emotion or feeling. In fact, a mood can be made up of lots of different emotions. Right? You ever have a day where you just in a bad mood all day, inevitably you had lots of emotions. You had several different feelings, lots of different meaning going on, but just throughout the day, you were just kind of in a bad mood. Maybe your stomach hurt, you didn't sleep well the night before, just like cognitively not going on as much up there, and you're just in a mood. It's longer. Right? Moods can last days, weeks and months where emotions and general feelings are generally much shorter. Emotions literally just a couple, you know, seconds or minutes. Feelings a little bit longer, maybe a couple hours. But moods can be days, weeks and months. That make sense. Okay. On top of all that is something that can override all of it. Intention. Intention. This is where we become conscious, agentic adults, where we go, what is it? I want to see? Sense experience and drive meaning to. We can enter that haunted house with the idea of I'm going to have fun and everything. It might get me Going for a second, but I'm going to reset myself. This is going to be a great time, right? You've had this before, right? You went. You were fighting with your partner or your spouse. You decided to go on a date night, and you decided, you know what? I'm going to have lots of feelings tonight, but I'm going to make this an awesome night together. You overrid everything with a higher level of cognition, a higher level of conscientiousness, a higher level of control over self. Your intention set the stage for how you are going to feel. Does that make sense? And I really believe most people never get into intentional living. They're stuck in reactivity, and they're reactive about their emotions, they're reactive about their feelings, they're reactive about their moods, and all those things are happening by default, and they feel victim to them and unaware of them. I want you to live in a higher level of consciousness and intention. I want you to have an intention. Like, you know what? I'm going to learn to master this ship. I'm gonna learn to drive these emotions, feelings, and moods to experience the life that I deserve. And that does take some self mastery. And I think today you'll discover a lot of tips and frameworks to help you do that. But that is my intention for you, is to live that much more conscious life where you get to drive these experiences. Everyone's always like, brendan, how do you. How do you have so much fun and joy? And how do you do what you do on stage? Aren't you ever in. Everyone always asks, aren't you ever in a bad mood? I'm like, no. A bad mood. Bad mood lasts the whole day. Often. Bad mood lasts a week. I'm like, no, I don't let myself get into a bad mood. I don't want to do that. I know everyone's gonna go, well, Brennan, you're making everyone feel bad if they're in a bad mood. I'm like, well, that's not me making anyone feel anything. One of the big lessons as a mature adult is to realize no one's making you feel anything, that you get to generate your states of being and experiencing over the world. And the more conscious and the more practice you get at this, the better you get. We see it from meditative studies, we see it from psychological studies. We see it from sociological studies. Everybody can learn the tools and the skills to experience a better quality of life mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. And that's why we're here today. I know, you know, it's Sam.