Shawn Ellis describes emotions as energy in motion and maps an energy ladder from resistance and resignation toward allowing and creativity. He shows how adding "while it is" to "it is what it is" shifts you from fighting reality to accepting it, which releases physical tension and reopens your brain for problem-solving.
Chapters
Emotion is really energy in motion. It's feeling that energy through our body. But at the bottom of the ladder, when we encounter obstacles, when we encounter difficulty, at the bottom of that ladder is the lowest level of energy, which is an energy of resisting, right? Like, no, this can't be happening. Or maybe it's an energy of requiring that, hey, I really, I need this to be fixed. If this is fixed, then life is good, then I'll be happy. Or sometimes we just get to the place of just is just being resigned, like, okay, well, just, it is what it is. I'm just gonna have to deal with that. And as a picture of that, one of my coaching clients, I just wanna share what this looks like in real life because I think you'll be able to relate to it. This is a fellow speaker and early in the pandemic, I was doing some coaching to help people rise above and find a way forward to work through a lot of what we're working through here today. And this speaker emailed me, he said, "Since my last gig on March 12th," and this was in mid-July at this point. "So since my last gig on March 12th, I've gone through several stages. At first I was defiant, I am not going to do virtual programs. I need a live audience all together in a room for me to succeed." There's the requiring, right? "Nope, I'm just going to wait it out. I'm just gonna get through it." He said, "I think my next stage was denial. This will be over relatively soon. Then it became, okay, maybe not the fall, but definitely by next year conferences will be up and running again. Then as the picture became clearer for the prolonged delay of live events, the next phase was frustration and sadness. Well, this just sucks. There aren't going to be any live events, at least for a year or two, maybe longer." Can you relate? I think we all went through something of this sort, right? No matter the industry, no matter the business. I've spoken with trucking, I'm here with you guys, I've spoken to education, healthcare. No matter the industry or the profession, the experience has been similar. So if we're at the bottom of the energy ladder here, in this place of resisting or requiring, anything below this red line is us just trying to get through this moment. Like, let's just wait it out, let's, let's hope that it gets better. As I said, we don't have to go all the way to joy. The next step from getting through to being in is just to simply move up to just allowing it to be what it is, which can be as simple as adding 3 words to that. I said if we're resigned to it, we just say, "Well, it is what it is." If we just add 3 words to that, "It is what it is while it is," we can get to a place of allowing. That doesn't mean we're happy. It doesn't mean I like it. It doesn't mean I want to live here forever. But it's like, it's like taking a rope and if we, if you stretch a rope, right? If you've got on one end, you've got the expectation that this would be something different. On the other end, you've got reality. And if we're constantly pulling, then there's this tension in the rope, right? That's the resisting energy. But if we can just get to the place of just saying, okay, I'll allow it. The tension goes out of our body, the stress response switches off, and now not only can we get back to a place where we feel better, but we can get back to a place where the, the brain, the learning centers open up. We can tap into creativity. We can find a way to get, to get through this. But it just starts— the first step sometimes is the biggest one, just to go from resisting to allowing.
