Embrace Your Feelings: Unlock Authentic Business Success #innergame #founders #business

How so many of us have learned to, first of all, that emotions are messy and not useful in business and bad, and the need to unlearn that. And because we actually are human beings and we don't stop being human when we go to work, it's important to understand the role of emotions, to learn to recognize them, and then ultimately to accept them as they are because they are. Like so many other things, you know, we'll probably talk about throughout this podcast, uh, the, the difference between being kind of at our best and in flow and in presence and not is much of the time is simply whether we accept and allow what is or resist it. But emotions are a particular flavor of that, which a lot of us learn in early years like this certain emotion is bad or it's not safe or it's not okay to feel this, you know, whether that's anger on the one extreme or excitement on the other, right? A lot of us, you know, when we get loud as kids, our parents are like, "No, no, no, calm down. That's too much." And we learn, "Oh, I don't want to be too much. I don't want to be too excited." Or, you know, like I shared in my case, you know, there wasn't much anger expressed. And so, I just learned, "Oh, okay. Anger is like a bad thing. It's something that less civilized people do." So it's really useful to recognize which of the emotions you tend to repress, deny, because sometimes we, you know, we get so, um, practiced in repressing and denying that we're not even actively doing it anymore. It's not like, oh, that's anger, I don't want to feel that. It's, it's, it's, you know, our defenses are so, uh, well-formed that we don't even recognize it's happening. So there's a whole process of learning to become sensitive again, which is funny for me. You know, I'm, I'm a particularly, I think, sensitive human, um, which may be why I do what I do. And I think I learned early on, both through some messages around being a, you know, a boy, and like, you know, oh, boys don't cry, boy, you know, not, not even like explicit, but just sort of implicit, you know, messages from around. I don't think I heard that from my parents, but there's a You know, there's— yes, society, gender biases. And then I think it was just painful. Like, there was a lot, you know, divorce, there was a bunch of stuff that, um, felt at least painful and overwhelming to feel. So I think I just learned to kind of tamp it down and shut it down. And I've had to go through a real process of, um, unblocking feelings and learning to feel them again. Helped me get more clear about what I want and