In this final installment of a four‑part crossover series between his regular "Voices in My Head" podcast and the "Welcome to the Neighborhood" Mr. Rogers tribute podcast, chaplain Rick Lee James explores the "F" in his STUF framework—feelings. He explains why generic answers like “good” or “fine” miss the nuance of true emotions and introduces the Wheel of Emotion/Feelings as a practical tool for naming and locating complex or mixed feelings. Drawing on Fred Rogers’ principle that “anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that’s mentionable is manageable,” James describes how he uses the wheel with hospital patients to help them move from thoughts to the underlying emotions, uncovering fears, anxieties, and even simultaneous positive feelings. He encourages listeners to seek out free versions of the wheel online (e.g., Instagram) and to incorporate it into daily self‑reflection. The episode closes with a reminder of each person’s uniqueness and a preview of an upcoming interview about Jonathan Rausch’s new book.
Chapters
Welcome to the neighborhood of Mr. Rogers Tribute Podcast, and also, uh, welcome back to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. And I know it's, uh, the, the final crossover, at at least for this little series that I've been doing for both episodes of both Voices in My Head, my regular podcast that I try to put out every week, and for my semi-regular podcast, Welcome to the Neighborhood, a Mr. Rogers tribute podcast. And the reason I wanted to do it on both of these podcasts together is they're short little episodes, but they're about things that are close to my heart as a person who works with people's emotional health in a hospital as a chaplain, but also because I think it very much applies to the work that Fred Rogers did in his life and on his television show. So here I am once again from my car, and actually I have an interview coming up this coming weekend with Jonathan Rausch that I will be recording about his new book Cross Purposes, which is soon to be released. It's excellent. But for today, it's just going to be another short episode. I've been talking in the last 3 episodes, and this is the 4th and final installment of this crossover, about stuff. Looking at our sensations, our thoughts, our urges, and our feelings. And by the way, if you hear a little noise in the background, again, I am in my car and it is raining, so you may hear some windshield wipers and things like that going from time to time, maybe some rain on the roof. But getting back to the subject at hand, when I say stuff, if you haven't heard the previous episodes, STUF is a 4-letter word, not a 5-letter word. S-T-U-F. And it stands for sensations, thoughts, urges, and feelings. And you can listen to the last 3 episodes if you want to hear more about that. But the final one is feelings, and it's probably the one that I enjoy talking about the most because it might be the one I have the hardest time with, actually. When I ask a person, or when I used to be asked how I am feeling, or if I ask someone else how they are feeling, I will often get answers like, "Good," "Fine," "Okay," but those are not actually feelings. Those are short little descriptive words that usually are trying to move the subject along. But I have this thing that I really like to use. I actually have a wooden one on my desk called the Wheel of Emotion or the Wheel of Feelings. And on this wheel, right in the middle, it has all of our major emotions. There's happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, different things, fear, like that. Those are kind of our major emotions. Sadness. And then branching out on this wheel from these different emotions that we feel, there's different things that we also feel based on the emotions. You can feel multiple things at once. You can feel contradicting feelings at the same time, contradicting emotions that we're having. I'll give you a for instance. If you're feeling insecure, I often feel insecure, I often I feel like I'm inadequate for the task. Those are fear-based emotions. So if you were to look at a wheel of emotion, you would see the word fear. You could branch it out. You can actually find where it eventually goes to those words like inadequacy. And they are based out of fear, which are not great emotions, but it's things that we do feel. The reason I think it's important for us to actually locate our fears and what we're going through is something Fred Rogers said actually sums it up. Anything that's human is mentionable. And anything that's mentionable is manageable. When I see people in the hospital day after day and I ask them how they're feeling, a lot of times they do immediately go to their head. They give me their thoughts, they give me what's going on right now, and they'll tell me about situations happening in their life, but it takes a while before I can actually hone in on what they're actually feeling. We find that there are different anxieties, there are different sadnesses, there are sometimes things that they don't even know they're experiencing. And I will often use something like the Wheel of Emotion as a tool. And oftentimes it doesn't necessarily fix anything for a person when they are able to locate the feelings they're experiencing. But what it does do is it helps them to make sense and sometimes even meaning out of what it is that they're experiencing. They may discover why it is they're feeling this way. Well, no wonder you're feeling fear and anxiety. You're facing something really big underneath all of that. But then also to focus on happy emotions and pride. Like I say, you can feel several emotions at once. You don't have to limit yourself to just one. But sometimes even acknowledging the good emotions, the good feelings, are ways to help us cope throughout the day. I very much think that this was something that Fred Rogers was keyed into, not only on his show, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, which he would try to communicate ways to help feelings help children get in contact with their feelings, but he also wrote a lot about this. If you ever read any of his books, both for children and for adults, they often focus in on these feelings that we're having. Every feeling that we have, it's human, it's mentionable, and it's manageable. And that is a very Fred Rogers thing. I wanted to just deal with this as in this last part today, one of my favorite parts, because it's something I have to deal with a lot in my own life, in the lives of people that I encounter day after day. And I want to encourage you to look up the Wheel of Emotion or the Wheel of Feelings. See if it helps you in your day-to-day journey. It has really helped me. It's something I use every day for myself. I have one sitting on my desk and I actually use it. But you can find free copies online. You can find them on Instagram. Just look up Wheel of Feelings or sometimes it's called Wheel of Emotion. I think it'll be a help to you. Well, I hope you've enjoyed this short 4-part series on knowing your STUFF— your sensations, thoughts, urges, and feelings. I'll see you back here next week with an interview on voices in my head. But until next time, remember, you make each day a special day just by being you. There's no one else in this whole world exactly like you, and people can like you exactly as you are. Thank you for listening both to Welcome to the Neighborhood, Mr. Rogers Tribute Podcast, and to Voices in My Head, the Rick Lee James podcast. I'll see you back here next time. God bless.
