Who's in the Driver's Seat?

It is easy to let our negative emotions drive the car of our lives. But they often take us places we really don't want to be. And they are really terrible drivers. So, how can we let the negative emotions be in the car without being in the driver's seat? Listen in to find out.

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Transcript

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I'm jamielynn Stephan. And this is what to want at episode number 72, who's in the driver's seat. Welcome to want to want it a podcast for women of the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints who are ready to ignite not only their sexual desire, but all of their desires to create a more fulfilling life and marriage. I'm jamielynn Stephan. I'm a certified life coach, a wife, and a mother of seven children. I'm excited to share my personal journey to desire with you and teach you how to desire more as well Hello, everybody. It is the end of June. I cannot believe it, but truthfully. I'm so happy. I don't know where you're listening from, but here in Canada and Alberta, our kids go to school, right. Till the end of June. And so they're not even technically done yet when this is going to come out. But they're close. And honestly, I have to tell you. By the end of may. I'm ready for everybody to be done in school. I just feel like summer is here. Let's just not go to school anymore. And apparently I don't get to have a say in that unless I homeschool my children, which I'm unwilling to do right now. So here we are. So way back in 2018, when I went and did my life coach training, I was taught about emotions in a way that was new to me at the time. So I remember I've done a podcast on emotions before emotions are just vibrations in your body, which is different than a sensation. Okay. Sensations are physical feelings that result from something that happens to or comes into contact with your body? K a sensation is involuntary. If you haven't eaten anything for a long time, several hours, you're going to begin to have that sensation of hunger. If you touch a hot pot, you're going to feel the burning sensation. Okay. So Sensation start in your body and send a signal to your brain and then your brain interprets what's happening to your body. Okay. That's how sensation works. An emotion on the other hand. Emotions start in your brain. And then they are vibrations you experienced in your body. So when I think a thought that thought creates a feeling and the feeling manifests as a vibration in my body. Now because our goal as humans is to feel good. We really love that. We want to feel good all the time. We are always seeking ways to make ourselves feel good. We want to feel happy. We want to feel peace. That is our goal. And so then we're always avoiding the things that we think are going to make us feel bad, which is really useful a lot of the time, but we are human. And so we actually can't avoid all the negative emotions. It's just impossible. And as I've taught before, we actually don't want to avoid all the negative emotions. Besides the fact that they are part of our human experience and by having negative emotions, we actually appreciate the positive. Even more, some negative emotions are actually very useful. Courage doesn't feel great. Doesn't feel good at all. But it serves us really well. Patients feels pretty crummy, but it serves us well. Too often we stuff our negative emotions, like pushing a beach ball under the water. We shove it down and then we try and hold it down there, which takes a lot of work. But the trouble is that that emotion is going to eventually come bursting out of the water and hit us in the face. And be even more painful than it would have been if we had just allowed it to be with us. Now I have shared this idea before on here and I taught how you can name allow and process and emotion. Okay. So it would be like I'm feeling anxiety. I feel that at the base of my ribs, right in the middle of my chest, it's heavy. It feels like a steel ball about the size of a baseball. And it's really kind of a dark gray. This is anxiety. And guess what anxiety is. Okay. You can be here. Hey, and I just let myself feel that emotion. That's an example of naming it, allowing it and processing that emotion. And the idea is that you don't let yourself go back up into your head while you're processing that emotion. You're going to want to like your brain's going to do that, but you have to redirect yourself back into your body. So when I'm processing anxiety and just, you can be here. It's okay. This is what you feel like. I don't want to be in my head saying, oh my goodness, I have so much to do today. I'm never going to get it all done. I've got to do this. And then this. It's never going to work out. That just feeds the anxiety. The idea is that I want to focus my brain in my body. I want to focus actually on the feeling in my body, because then I'm going to stop feeding it. And I'm just going to start feeling it. And then it can have it say and move along out of my body. Now there's a lot of value in learning how to feel emotions in this way. You become way more confident, like I've said before, if you feel like you lack confidence, allowing yourself to feel all your feelings will increase your confidence a hundred times over. Remember our worst fear is what we will feel in any given situation. We're always, always concerned with the feeling. When we remember that the worst that can happen is a feeling, just a vibration in our body. And we can handle any feeling because we know it's not going to kill us and we know how to allow it and process it suddenly we can do anything. Another reason that you should allow yourself to feel all the feelings is because it helps you experience the real, amazing human life. You start to feel like this is very authentic and real, and it feels good actually. And the third reason is that feeling emotions actually teaches you how to create those emotions on purpose. When you allow all of the emotions. Then you can create what you want on purpose. So I just wanted to do this quick little review of emotions because we understand that our emotions drive our actions. But what do we do when we don't want them to be in the driver's seat? How do we allow the emotions to be there, but not in control. So recently I have found myself feeling really impatient. I want to say that this feels new to me, but I think in patients has been something I have obviously thought often in my life, but it is really keenly apparent to me right now that I am feeling really impatient, especially about timelines. Things just are not happening in the way or at the speed that I would like them to. So I have actually been really kind of unconscious about the impatience. And so I've found myself behaving in really impatient ways. And so I finally stood back and was like, okay, why did I just do that? Why didn't I just say that I've just added to the problem, what is going on with me. And so, as I finally was able to take a step back, I was able to see, oh, I am feeling really impatient right now. No. Of course, I understand that the reason I'm feeling impatient is because of the stories I'm telling myself. So I was like, okay. It's time to shake these stories loose. So I don't feel impatient Anymore. And then I can act a little more rationally. And so I was able to find some thoughts that brought me kind of some calm and peace. But when you know what. Those other stories kept coming up because the circumstances were just so good at facilitating them. And I found myself back in impatience and acting a little bit like Aluna tech. Oh, that may be a little bit dramatic, but honestly I kept doing these things that was making everything worse. So I was battling for a while with myself, and then I remembered something that I use all the time with my clients. My inpatients could stay if it needed to right now. It just couldn't drive the car. So I want you to think about driving in your car with your family. Any of you who have kids, or maybe were a kid in the car at some point, you know what this is like. So maybe you've got a teenage daughter beside you in the passenger seat. Who's crying about how lonely she is. And in the back seat, your two boys are beating each other up and your toddler's crying and your little girl keeps asking, when are we going to get there? Now, none of these people are in any state of mind or qualified in any way to be behind the wheel of that car. And even though you hear them and see them, your job is to safely navigate the car to your destination so you can get where you want to be. Sometimes we need to do this with our emotions. It's okay. That I'm feeling impatient. I mean, it actually feels really uncomfortable and I don't love it, but it's just a normal human feeling and nothing is going wrong. It honestly only becomes a problem when I put it in the driver's seat of my life. It makes wild turns. It slams on the brakes. It goes way too fast. It's crashing me into things. So I have to tell it that it is welcome to come along for the ride, but it has to be in the backseat. And then I choose which emotion I actually want to drive my car with. And my impatient sometimes wines in the backseat. Like when are we going to get there? That honestly is what it is saying to me all the time. And sometimes I think to myself, I honestly wish I knew. But faith and patience, they're doing the driving now. Does that make sense? Anxiety's another emotion I see in the driver's seat of our cars a lot. It was in the driver's seat of my car for a long time. And sometimes I catch it there again. Now there are times when I can honestly just kick it out completely and tell it to walk home. Sorry, anxiety. You just are unnecessary right now. And I can change my thought and focus on something else and I'm fine. But other times I just have to catch myself and tell my anxiety that you know what, you're welcome to come along for the ride, but you don't get to drive. You make too many decisions that I don't like. So you're in the backseat. What about anger? Anger's a really strong emotion for people. I recently coached someone who just didn't want to feel anger anymore. She hated how it felt. She hated how she behaved. She just hated it. But she was so focused on trying to not ever be angry. that she was just shoving it down. Like the beach ball I talked about in the beginning and then cusp. Oh, it would just explode. Which just gave her more evidence that she needed desperately to find a way to stop feeling angry. So we talked about this and I offered her the idea that maybe anger was going to be with her for a time. She was well-practiced at this emotion, you know, she is a human and that it may take more years and she actually has on the earth to completely, never feel angry again. So if anger was going to be going with her. I was like, how can you allow it to be with you to process it, but not let it control how you're acting. So I shared with her the idea that anger wasn't actually the problem. The problem was that she let anger drive the car. And I offered her the option to allow anger to get into the car, but just telling it, you're not allowed to drive. It had to be in the backseat. And I think what this idea did for her was take her out of her all or nothing mentality about it. Right. So instead of thinking, she could never feel angry. Or. She would feel angry and go totally bananas You know, swinging wide on the pendulum, right. This all or nothing. It's either. I never can feel it, or when I feel it, I'm going to be a I helped her. See, there are other options. She could actually feel the anger, but not act on it. And the best way to do that was to verbally name the emotion. Tell it, it was welcome to come along for the ride, but it wasn't allowed to drive. And then she was able to decide which emotion she was going to let be behind the wheel. As humans, we actually do this all the time. Think about something you did, even though you were afraid. Maybe it was going off to university or even getting married and having a baby. I know that scares people. Maybe it was speaking in public or like I shared last year on a podcast, hiking in the mountains in the middle of the night. When you do something you want to do, even though you feel afraid you are putting fear in the back seat and letting courage drive the car or determination. So you do this, you have done this in your life. I want you to take this idea. Of who is driving the car. I want you to ask this question of like, who am I letting in the driver's seat, just more consciously for other emotions. One last example. I want to give you because there are so many negative emotions that we could go through and we really don't want to be driving our car, but I want to talk about doubt. Now I hear all kinds of ideas about doubt. As a member of a religious community, some people feel like having doubts about your faith is a crisis. And some people feel like it's completely unacceptable. You just don't doubt. And some people just feel like, no, this is just inevitable. Now I have done a lot of work on doubt over the last few years and it has taught me a lot about our ability to actually choose belief instead of choosing doubt. And I'm not just referring to belief in God versus doubting that there is a God I'm talking about how doubt is offered to us. Almost constantly, either from people around us or from our brains. You can't do that. Who do you think you are? That's never going to work. They won't like what you have to offer. You can't succeed at that. That's impossible. You're just not cut out for that. You don't know what you're doing. You're not smart enough for this. K like, do you see what I'm saying? These are the kinds of thoughts that fill us with doubt and are offered to us every day. All the time. Now in my own experiment without I can tell you that it is actually possible to not choose doubt. There are times when I choose belief instead. And honestly doubt leaves me. But other times, doubt is coming along for the ride. And if I'm not careful doubt drives my car. And like I said before, we are offered a constant diet of doubt. So it is easy for doubt to be in the driver's seat a lot. But what would change for all of us, if we recognize the doubt, but made it sit in the back seat. Like you can be here, but you don't get to drive. And instead we would let faith drive. Now admittedly doubt can be a noisy backseat driver for many of us, but I want you to try on the idea that it's just like you're crying toddler, actually. No, here's a better example. It's just like your angsty teenager. It just has to share all of its Debbie downer worry and the thoughts and the warnings and the dread, like I'm just being realistic kind of thoughts. Right. It's just going to share those. It's going to be your angsty teenager in the backseat. But you are the adult. You are the one with the ability to choose to believe, and you are driving the car with your belief. I promise it feels so much better, but more importantly, it produces so much better. It gets you somewhere. You really want to be when doubt is behind the wheel, it more often than not just pulls over the car. So I want you to watch for doubt and don't let it drive. I want you to watch for all of the negative emotions that maybe are driving the car for you that are not serving you. I don't want you to be in a fight with all of your emotions all the time, trying to never feel them. Trying to push them out of your life, especially if you're trying to process them and allow them. The idea of doing that is really saying you can be here, but you don't get to drive. I'm going to drive. I'm in charge and I'm going to drive with an emotion that gets me where I want to go. Just try it on. See how it feels. I hope you have a good week, everybody. Bye. Thanks for listening today. If you like what you hear on the podcast, and you'd like to learn more, feel free to head over to my website. Jamilin Stephan coaching.com or find me on Instagram or Facebook at Jamileh. step in coaching.