51: Why Emotional Mastery Is Not the Goal (and Why It Might Be Keeping You Stuck)

We’ve been told that being calm, cool, and collected is the goal. That if we want to be successful, magnetic, abundant we better get our emotions in check.  But what if that’s the very thing keeping you stuck? What if the self-management you’ve been praised for… is actually self-abandonment?

In this episode, I pull back the curtain on the emotional control myth that so many driven women are living inside without even realizing it. I talk about the sneaky ways we micromanage ourselves in the name of “growth,” how that internal tension shows up in real life (like second-guessing every idea or hanging in the back of the room), and why your nervous system (and not your mindset) holds the key to an abundant life. 

🧭 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why emotional suppression isn’t emotional mastery (and why it’s doing more harm than good)
• The subtle ways “self-control” becomes self-abandonment
• How micromanaging your inner world leads to disconnection, numbness, and eventually emotional burnout
• What embodiment actually means (hint: it’s not just “feeling your feelings”)
• The link between nervous system safety and your ability to receive (abundance, love, ease, all of it)

💥 Key Takeaways:

• Managing yourself isn’t the goal. Being yourself is.
• You can’t mindset your way into safety. Your nervous system will always win.
• Emotional suppression isn’t mature, it’s exhausting.
• Feeling safe to be who you are = the foundation for sustainable abundance.
• Wholeness is about bringing all of you home.

🌀 Take Action:
➡️ Stop trying to be "in control" of your emotions. Instead, notice where you're micromanaging yourself in real-time.
➡️ Join the free masterclass next week: Expanded - The shift from managing yourself to being yourself, so you can hold more of what you actually want. https://tertiariegler.com/expanded-free-masterclass/

📩 Join the conversation:

• DM me your biggest insight! https://www.instagram.com/tertia_riegler_embodiment/
• Email me via my website https://tertiariegler.com/contact/

➡️Watch Free Training Your Burnout Exit Strategy: The 5 Step Path to More Energy, More Money & More Self-Expression - Without Burning It All Down

🎙️ Follow Beyond Burnout for Driven Women so you never miss an episode!

🎧 Loved this episode? Please leave a rating and review and share it with a friend who needs to hear it.

Transcript

Tertia [00:00:00]:
What if your emotions aren't the problem? What if managing yourself is what's actually blocking your capacity and keeping you stuck? This episode is a little bit of a soapbox moment. This morning I came across a quote that read, your ability to hold wealth is tied to your emotional mastery. And to be honest, that made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. And in this episode I'm going to share with you why. So welcome to Beyond Burnout for Driven Woman. I'm Tertia and this is where we go from burnout to abundance and we take your nervous system along for the ride. If you are doing all the right things but you are still not feeling the shift, you are in the right place. Here we explore nervous system work, embodiment and how to be magnetic without going into overdrive or burning yourself out. So as I said this morning, I was scrolling on my phone and I saw this quote. Your ability to hold wealth is tied to your emotional mastery. And that just really rubs me up the wrong way. And probably I was more sensitive to the impact or the delusion that is behind this quote. And I'll share with you in a moment. Why? Because I was also watching some YouTube videos and I noticed, and maybe you have noticed this as well. So many of the videos that are targeting women specifically and are playing in the lifestyle, personal growth, living your next life kind of environment. One of the things that they keep on sharing on these videos is, you know, maintain your cool and don't lose your shares in an argument and stay in control of your emotions. And I think this is the biggest load of crap, and here's why. Because it makes people, women in particular, who are on a self growth journey, who are into spirituality, who are into personal growth. It makes them believe that their emotions are a liability. And if you try really hard enough, you can get really, really good at suppressing your feelings. You get really good at masking your truth and who you are and judging yourself when that mask slips. And this is so insidious, that mask slipping moment. So even if you're in a safe space, you feel so much shame when you get messy or when you get angry. And that by the way, is a big nervous system flag. So yes, absolutely, we don't want to go around like raging headless chickens, but we do want to have a good relationship with ourselves. We do want to have a good relationship with our emotions and allow ourselves to feel anger and express anger in a safe way that doesn't harm others. Okay, but unfortunately, the world sees anger in little girls and in women as a very big negative, okay? So we are constantly constricting ourselves because of this conditioning. And then the personal development world kind of encourages this by pushing us to believe that we should be in control of our emotions, that we should. Should master our emotions, and that if we allow negative feelings to come in or if we allow our vibe to go down, then that affects our ability to call in abundance, to have abundance in our lives. And that's why I started off by saying, what if your emotions isn't the problem? What if it is because you are managing yourself too tightly that you are feeling stuck and that you don't have access to the abundance that is potentially available to you? So I believe this message of emotional mastery can be so, so harmful because what it does leads to disembodiment. So, very quick overview. We are always embodied to some extent, right? Because we have bodies and we are inside our bodies. But embodiment and disembodiment lies on a scale. And so when I say that we become disembodied, what I mean is that we spend more time in our heads. We live in our thoughts, we live in the future, we live in the past, we live in regret, we live in fantasy, we live in I wish, we live in resentment. So we are in our heads more than what we are in our bodies and feeling what is alive for us. And I think four of the biggest giveaways of how high or how low, if I can express it like that, you are on the embodiment disembodiment scale is the propensity of how many S's are in your life. And the S is here. I'm talking about the ways that we distract ourselves. Sugar, sex, shopping, and scrolling. And we. What I see happen is the more we engage in these four S's in a way to distract ourselves from what is truly going on, the more disembodied we actually become, the more we find. Because that's what it is, right? We finding things outside of ourselves to deflect our attention from what it is that we don't want to feel. Another reason why I believe it causes harm is because it leads to micromanaging yourself, which is really the essence of this episode today. And micromanaging looks like constantly editing yourself, constantly contorting yourself, constantly shrinking yourself or making yourself show up in certain ways to be acceptable, to be approved, to be fitting in with the crowd. And I'm using quotation marks here, and I'll share a personal story with you. Many, many years ago, I was in a Relationship where I always had a constant knot on the pit of my stomach. I was always checking myself to see whether I was in line and that I wasn't doing things that might upset my partner. And it was like I had formed myself into this person that he wanted me to be. And it wasn't always like that. It didn't start like that in the beginning. Although looking back now at that time in my life, I can see that the warning signs were there. It happened over a period of time. But here's the thing. I didn't feel safe enough to be myself. Not because of him. This was already something that I had brought with me into the relationship, but because I wasn't feeling safe enough to be who I am. I believe this is what let me stay in that relationship much longer than what I should have. And that's even, I dare say, what caused me to be in a relationship like that in the first place. All right? Because if I look at the woman that I am today and the internal safety that I have created within and, and the relationship that I have with myself, there is no way on earth that I will ever be in a situation like that. So yes, I did bring that with me into the relationship. And here's the thing. When we have this creeping fear that we are doing something wrong, if we have this constant tense tension and if we are constantly bracing ourselves against failure or against a mishap, or against doing something wrong, it leads to a loss of self trust, right? We stop believing that we are worthy. We stop believing that we have a right to take up space and we stop believing our own truth. We doubt ourselves. And often high achieving women or driven women, women who seem to have it all together. You know, that kind of self control, it gets praised for maturity. We commend women on it. I mean, think about how many women in your life do you know that might have gone through a challenging time or they are in a certain situation, but they just seem to handle it and they've got it all together. So there's a certain appreciation that we express towards these women, a certain approval. And that kind of perpetuates this micromanaging yourself, being in control, keeping it all together. But while this is happening, I see it as we are actually suppressing our own truth, our own life force energy. I often use the metaphor of these things about ourselves that we tuck away into the dark recesses of our being. The things that we feel shameful and the things that we don't want other people to know about us or see so that they could potentially judge us. It's like it's one of these big inflatable beach balls. And by hiding these parts of ourselves, you using a lot of energy to keep the ball underwater. Because you know if you're going to let go, that ball is going to jump up into the air. But what about if you let go? Yes, it's going to shoot out like a cork and it's going to pop up into the air, but then it's going to land on the water and it's going to flow without resistance. And this is how we open ourselves to the flow of abundance in life. It's about not fighting against ourselves, not micromanaging ourselves, not trying to control ourselves and contort ourselves and be something that we are not, but by allowing ourselves to pop out, as it were, and to start flowing with life. Another reason that I see that this message of self control is also harmful is because it can lead to emotional burnout. There's enough science to prove that long term emotional suppression can lead to higher cortisol and nervous system dysregulation and eventually shut down. So what happens is we become numb. We start feeling numb. We are flatlining. Life feels hopeless. It feels like we are trying all kinds of things and nothing works, nothing sticks and you're not really going to anywhere. So there's this numbness and this flatness that surrounds and infuses everything that we do. And the problem of course with this, as you would have heard me say on my other episodes, is that when we flatline like this, not only are we numb to any pain that we might experience any emotional pain, but we also lose our sensitivity to experience joy, to experience pleasure, to find everyday enjoyment in the little things in life. Which leads me to say that instead of trying to master your emotions and managing yourself, my invitation is to first heal the relationship that you have with yourself so that you can stand fully in who you are in both your life and your business. And then you see how things start to change. And what this looks like is it looks like spending a hell of a lot of less time replaying emails in your head after sending them. It looks like no longer editing yourself in real time, even if you're having conversations with people that you trust. It looks like no longer second guessing your ideas before you even express them. Think about how many times have you edited and second guessed ideas that you might have and you shoot them down before you even let them out of your mouth and share them with the world. So the second guessing loosens Its grip on us, it looks like no more shrinking, but allowing yourself to take up space. I had a client who shared with me that when she was participating in a group program, she joined this fairly expensive group program. So it was an investment for her. But what happened was when she was in the calls, she never asked any questions. And in her sharing this with me, she said it was because there was this part of her that didn't want to be irritating. She didn't want to annoy the other people on the call. She didn't want to make it all about her. So she had this internal convo going on all the time, meaning that she was always hanging in the back of the room, and she didn't really participate. The problem was that she ended up feeling that she never got her money's worth because she stayed an observer. So she felt like she wasted her money, she wasted her time. And not only that, she was also in judgment against herself for not using this opportunity, for not actually participating in a way that she wanted to. And this doesn't only happen in coaching containers, right? It happens in our friendships. It happens in business. It happens in our relationships where we hide ourselves and we don't ask for what we want or need. Not because we need to work on our communication skills. And not because there's something wrong with us. And not because we should stop being doormats or all of these insults that we give ourselves, but because we don't feel safe to be ourselves. So how do you then heal this relationship with yourself? How do you stop micromanaging yourself? You do that by coming into your body. So this is not mindset work. You can try and mindset your work into eternity with this. It is not going to work, I promise you. And I can tell you that a hundred percent, with 100% conviction, because I know that for myself firsthand. That is my experience. You have to come into your body, and by calling all parts of you that you feel shame for, all parts of you that you dislike, or parts of you that you wish were different, or parts of you that other people told you are wrong about you, all of your past choices that you regret, your inner girl who might feel wildly unsafe, you call all of those parts back to you so that you can come into wholeness. Because wholeness is not about cutting out the parts that we don't like. It's about bringing all of ourselves home. And now, in wholeness, you can hold yourself. You feel safe within yourself, and you feel safe to be who you are. And when this happens, you also feel worthy of receiving. You feel worthy of taking up space. You feel worthy of charging for your services. And you open the channels of flow for abundance. And why does it work this way? Why isn't mindset the answer? Because your nervous system is no longer bracing. And this is the one thing that I want you to take from this. Your nervous system always wins. Not your mind. Your nervous system. Your nervous system has been designed to keep you alive. And it has done a mighty fine job for all of us. And it will do whatever it has to do to make sure that you survive. And so it doesn't matter if saying no to a client who's coming back with a rework for the gazillionth time, even though you're not getting paid for it, saying no to that client is not really a life of matter or death. But if there is a part of you that believes that you have to be in service and that if you say no, you will upset them and then you will lose the job, and then you'll have to close down your business, you will literally be unable to say no, your nervous system always wins. There is no logic in survival. And even though we cognitively can try and reason our way out of this and talk ourselves down, the truth is there is no logic in surviving. And that's why I'm so passionate about embodiment. Embodiment and specifically feminine embodiment, of which I'm a coach. That brought me home to myself. It gave me access to my life force. It gave me back to myself. It made me feel safe to be myself. And it unlocked my ability to call in abundance and hold it in a way that no mindset work ever could. So your ability to hold wealth has got nothing to do with mastering your emotions. It's about feeling safe to be yourself, even when life is happening to you while you are feeling all of your emotions. And just a little side note here, I also often see how people talk about embodiment as feeling your feelings. And that is only half the story. It's not only about feeling your feelings. It's about feeling your feelings and moving those feelings through you. Because often I think we might be mistaken when we hear feel your feelings and we think it means to sit in the feelings, to sit in the dark, clunky ickiness of the feeling, and then we can get stuck there. We keep on reinforcing these patterns of feelings in us. And again, this is why embodiment and feminine embodiment makes such a difference in the way that we heal the relationship with ourselves. Because while we are all about feeling our feelings, it's not about letting the feelings stay where they are. We're moving the feelings through us and out of us. So it's like releasing that ball that you are holding down with all of your might under the surface of the ocean and allowing it to break free so that it can begin to flow and float. We don't need to be more controlled. We don't need to become more controlled. We need to become more connected to ourselves. If you enjoyed what I shared with you in this episode, you are going to love the masterclass that I'm doing next week. It's a free masterclass that I'm hosting. It's called Extended, and it's all about the shift from managing yourself to being yourself so that you can hold more of what you want. The link is in the show notes. I'd love for you to come and join us. Alrighty. I'm going to wrap us up here. I'm so curious to know what your thoughts are on emotional mastery. You can either DM me on Instagram, send me an email. I'll put all of those links for you down in the show notes. And if you enjoyed this episode, I would so appreciate it if you could leave me a rating and a review. So if you're listening on Apple itunes, Apple podcast, you can leave a rating and a little review. Or if you are listening on Spotify, then you can leave a rating. Thank you so much for tuning in. I appreciate you so much and I will speak to you in the next one.