Warning Signs You Might Be Suppressing Your Emotions

Today I want to talk about emotional intelligence and how I had this concept very wrong for a very extended period of time. And I do this because I believe that it's foundational when you think about your self esteem, your self worth, self love and confidence that comes with you throughout your life into all situations. Getting emotional intelligence right is pivotal. And if you don't, it can undercut all of these things. So to start, I actually looked up emotional intelligence this morning in the dictionary. And what I found is that it's roughly the ability to, to be self aware, to express and to have control over one's emotions and to be able to do that in an interpersonal context as well. And if you're like me, the part of that that is most appealing is the control aspect, because, yes, okay, it's nice to be aware of my emotions. I feel sad, I feel happy. But really what I want to do is feel nervous and snap into confidence or I want to feel depressed and snap into feeling excellent. That is the part that is most appealing. And, and that's why on this channel and in your own life and in my life, there's a lot of ways that we do that, right? There's gratitude exercises to condition feeling more grateful. Early in the morning. You can use reframes to take a negative situation and shift the perspective so that it feels like a positive one. You can shift your language. So then rather than saying, oh my gosh, I'm so pissed right now, you say, you know what? I'm feeling peeved right now. And that makes it a little bit less intense and less negative. And using these techniques and lots of others, I would have said that my emotional intelligence was amazingly high and so would just about anybody who interacted with me. I almost never got angry. I never lost my cool. I experienced sadness, sure, when things in my life were bad, but not at all as a constant underpinning of what my life was. I truly almost felt like a superpower. Like, I just felt really good most of the time. The problem is a that was true, but that it was unsustainable in the way that I was doing it for a couple of reasons. The first piece that I've come to recognize, and I believe is that your emotions are not like a machine where you can do an input. You can get out the emotion that you would like. It is more, as the authors of Thinking Fast and Slow put it, it's more like an elephant. You're the rider on this elephant and you can cajole it, right? You can get it to go in this direction, you can get him to make a left and right. But sometimes this is a wild elephant and he's going to go left when you want it to go right. And there's nothing that you can do about it. That is a guarantee. And so this concept of control as being something that you have absolute control over is one that gets disruptive. Now this sounds good. In theory. We all go, oh, I get it. You know, emotions happen. That makes sense. But when you look at the things that we say, the way that we treat ourselves, the way that we treat the people around us, that doesn't seem to be what we actually believe. One of the first things that you will hear parents say to their children, and maybe you heard growing up, is say you're sorry. And the underpinning logic of that is that you can a fake it, right, Learn how to fake this or that you can just snap into feeling empathy for this person that you wronged, which isn't necessarily the case, especially not at a young age, but we get that message. You grow up, you go to school, maybe there's a presentation that you have, and you know, this isn't a big deal. I shouldn't be nervous. It's just a little presentation. But you're nervous. And you tell yourself, I shouldn't feel this way later in life. This is one that I experienced. It's a beautiful day outside. You walk outside, you go, you know what? It's so gorgeous. I should feel grateful. I should really do my gratitude exercise. I should feel better about this. And you tell yourself, and you say the words and you go, wow, the sun is shining. But you don't really feel your heart swell. You don't feel the gratitude. You're just kind of aping it. And then one that has become huge for me as a person that never got angry, never lost control, is this feeling of, you shouldn't be angry about this, right? This person didn't insult you. Somebody cuts me off while I'm driving, you know, they've probably got somewhere to go. Shouldn't get angry about it. And so I didn't get angry. The problem is that you're going to experience things that don't fall under the category of effectively being able to be faked till they are made. You cannot fake it till you make it all the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't work, you're left with a split. There's the part of you that you know, I should feel this way, I shouldn't Feel this way. This is what I can handle. And this is actually what's happening. You know, I should feel confident, but I'm nervous. And what happens is you get, boom. The nervous experience that you have, if it can't effectively, you can't fake it till you make it. It gets pushed away into your subconscious mind and it gets repressed. If you feel like I should feel sorry, when really you're frustrated and angry, all of that frustration and anger gets pushed away. It gets repressed. And the problem with this is that it works, right? You don't experience that anger, you don't experience that nervousness in the same way, it kind of goes away. And this feels like a plan that works. And I tell you, it works for me for a long time. The problem is that as a long term solution, it will come back to you because those emotions are still there. They might not be conscious, but they are existing inside of you. And they're looking for justifiable ways to express themselves. You know, anything that they can latch onto. And the classic example is the person who's in the office, the boss yells at them, they don't say anything, they come home and they kick the dog. This is what we all do because there's things that we don't feel like are proper to be felt in certain situations that. So we express them elsewhere. For me, one that I recently came to, which was embarrassing and sad, and I was still. I'm like, oh, man, I can't believe this happened. Is that about two years ago I made a video. I was going through a breakup. I was really sad. My friends were there for me while I was doing this. And there's came a point in time where I'm like, I don't know if I could do this. I want to get back with her. I did in fact get back with her and my best friend Ben. And I sat down for at least an hour and he told me all the reasons that it wasn't a good idea and I shouldn't do it. And. And I listened and I said, I'm probably gonna do it anyway. And at the end of this conversation, he said, well, I guess we just have to understand that if I was in the situation that you're in, I would never make the decisions that you're making. And I sat there and I felt incredibly judged. I felt like this was the most insulting thing that could have been said to me. But very quickly I went, wait a second, he didn't actually insult you. He might be telling the truth right here. This could all be true. Maybe he would handle it differently. And if you are, in fact being really sensitive and you're not going to be proud of the way that you behaved, maybe you'll appreciate this down the line that he had the courage to tell you the truth. So you shouldn't be angry. And I wasn't angry at all. The problem is, it's been two years since then, and I've only recently realized that I was furious. I seethed inside of myself when I heard that. But because it didn't make sense for me to express in that situation, it came out in. In other ways, not immediately after a long period of time, it would just sort of seep out. And it didn't come out as anger. It came out as not laughing at a joke that he said. It came out as not giving him a call because you know somebody else was going to call him. It came out in these very subtle ways. And the problem is that that anger, if I had been able to experience it, not just control it, but truly experience it, would not have been as destructive as it was just leaking out over the course of my life and never actually going away because I didn't deal with the root of it. And I've come to realize that just about every emotion that I thought was a superpower because I didn't experience it right, I don't really get guilty. Therefore, I can go travel the world and not worry about what other people think of me. That's amazing. That's one that I've repressed. Anger. I don't get angry. I never lose my cool. Guess what? Just found out. That's a big one that I've repressed. So if you're sitting here and you're going, this isn't quite making sense to me. It's oftentimes those emotions that you experience the least of that you think you have the most handled, that are the ones that are so corrosive and destructive in your life. And it takes a tremendous amount of introspection to do so. So here's what I would recommend shifting if you're still with me. First off is internally, you need to just recognize to begin with and create space to be honest instead of proper. And sometimes that means being ugly. That means being hypocritical, vindictive and vicious. Not necessarily to other people, but allowing yourself to experience that. People call this in psychoanalysis, your shadow side. Right? These are the parts of yourself that you wish weren't there. These are the emotions, the experiences, the things that you have Sought that you just want to bury. And what you often do is you trick yourself. You say, oh no, I think negative things all the time. Haha. Those are the negative ones that you're okay with. The ones that you can't even experience run so deep in you that you will shut them off completely. So creating space to free write, right? There's meditations. I created an entire course while I was going through this called Emotional Mastery. I'll link to it. There's a ton of different ways, but internally you need to just create this first realization that you can feel whatever you feel and it can be honest. You don't need to express it immediately. Unhinged in the moment, like a toddler. But having some time to do it, I have come to believe is critical. The second thing that I've just recently added is external. And it's the ability to process these emotions, feel them in their full intensity, and then constructively deal with them socially. So what this has meant is that Ben and I sat down and I didn't even know this was in me, quite frankly. This came out of this exercise that we did. We sat down and we said, let's do an exercise. And I'll start. I'll just say I resent you for. And I'll tell you all the things I resent you for. I'm going to be petty, I'm going to be vicious. You don't have to defend yourself and I don't have to be justified. I can be as hypocritical as I want because the process is not to solve anything or to change anything. It's just to be honest and real. And as I did this, I started small. I started small. And about halfway through I hit on this feeling of like, oh my God, this is huge inside of me. And I said it and it shook me. I mean, it made me cry. And I was like, I didn't even know that I had felt this. And it's been two years. So if this is something that you're interested in, sitting down with the people in your life, creating a space where you can be safe, safely honest with them and just be the shadowy part of yourself that you are, is hugely useful. Now why would you want to do this? Because it can be a difficult conversation. Well, the reason that you might want to do this is because when you turn down other emotions like anger, like guilt, like jealousy, whatever they are, you don't have a choice to just go, I'm just going to take these colors down. You have to turn all the colors down. And pretty soon it's like your life is on mute. You're not feeling the highs that you can feel. You're not feeling the intensity of gratitude. Gratitude becomes an exercise in a book rather than something that makes you cry because you're just so touched. So it's incredibly useful. And if you're interested in this exercise, I highly recommend a book called Radical Honesty. This is where I got it. We have. Audible has been a sponsor of this channel. They are not for this video, but we have a link. And if you want to check that out, you get a free audiobook with that link. So you can check that out in the description, Check it out, whatever format you want. But at a high level, what I have started to realize is that creating space in your life to be authentic and honest, even when it is not proper, even when it is vicious and hypocritical and the antithesis of who you want to be makes you whole. And when you can integrate that part of yourself that you're like, oh my goodness, I hate this, and bring it into your life in a way that isn't as destructive, even though it might feel like it could be. That is when there's a degree of self love and self esteem and you smash your microphone, that really can take over and become something highly positive in your life. It's almost like I focus too much on the control aspect of emotional intelligence and not enough on the experiential aspect of emotional intelligence. So I hope that this video has been useful. I know it's a little bit higher level. Just a few announcements. Thank you, guys. We got like 400 plus applicants for language channels. It's a lot to go through. We're going through them. We will be reaching out to the winners and I'll announce them on the channel. I don't think we can get back to everybody, but I will try to make that announcement so that you know how it went. But regardless, thank everybody who applied. That is so overwhelming and I appreciate it tremendously. The second thing here, a lot of you guys asked. I feel funny talking about this. A lot of you guys thought that I was very young. When I told you that I was 31, you asked for a skincare routine. Short answer is, I actually don't have one. I'm lucky in many ways, but in other ways, I think there are a couple things that I have done that if you're interested, you can do. First off, I stopped drinking when I was about 24 years old. Except for an occasional glass of wine. That's huge. Second, I never smoked in my life smoking. The people that I see who tend to age fastest do that. And third, I have never in my life pulled an all nighter for work or for school. And, and I get a lot of sleep now. I know that isn't the skincare routine that you wanted. You wanted to hear what moisturizer I do use. It's like there's an Olay regenerist which I'm going to link to. But I truly think those are the biggest things. If that's something that you're curious about. And I appreciate, I guess, the compliments of saying that I look like I'm 22. Anyway, that is it for this video. I hope that you guys have enjoyed it and I will see you next time. Sam.