Encourage Your Brain: Fake It 'Til You Feel It, Feel It 'Til You Figure It Out

Hey everyone, Susan here. I ran across a study at sci-post.org recently, and it talked about how deep acting improves interpersonal work relationships and work progress goals. So deep acting means that you try to actually experience the emotions that you're wanting to display. So basically sort of shifting from just a head assent to a body felt experience. For example, I can say I'm grateful for a difficult situation, but if I don't feel grateful deep down, I'm not deep acting. And that's the point of, of this study. So what I love about it is that it offers a more brain-friendly proof that we can regulate our emotions to improve relationships and our business goals, or any goals that you might have. So here's the danger though that I see with deep acting, and that is that if we don't go deep enough then what can happen is that we just start faking it, and then we're in denial and burying stuff that shouldn't get buried. And we know that burying things that needs to be addressed is not a good thing. So question then becomes, how do you find the right balance? How do you know that your deep acting is working and not just burying stuff, right? So I'll speak from my own experience. What I've noticed for myself is that deep acting is, is balanced when I see a change in my behavior. So, for example, being at the helm of a coach training business, in addition to casting a vision to change the world for good, I also have to pay attention to the numbers. And so if the numbers don't look great, and there have been several months over the last year that the numbers have not looked great given the year of COVID that we've all lived through, and I go on just deep acting and being grateful about things, but I don't make any changes, that's when I'm in denial. So on the other hand, if I tap into the deep acting and I am truly grateful for the circumstances, plus I start doing things with new ways of behaving, so communicating more frequently with my team or marketing in new ways or amping up some operational things that need to be tweaked or need attention, then the deep acting accomplishes what it should. So I shift from perhaps being in denial to deliberately learning and engaging and growing. So bottom line, we can't slap a smile on a situation, simply fake it. We have to fake it till we feel it, and then we have to feel it till we figure our way through. So sending you light and love, fellow humans.