Bloom Your Mind

Ep 121: Expanding Emotional Capacity

• Marie McDonald

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Let’s go back to emotions 101. Your emotions ARE your superpower.  

There are three ways that we naturally deal with them; we stuff them down, we act them out, and we buffer (put something else on top of them like work, sex, tv or scrolling, food or booze, or even thinking a lot!). All of those things make our feelings expand and deepen- like pushing a beach ball down underwater, so that eventually it pops out with a lot of force. 

The only thing that actually works to move through a feeling, is to get curious, and allow the feeling to exist. 

So that’s feelings 101. 

In today’s episode, we’re going way beyond feelings 101. Today we’re talking about expanding the limitations of what emotions we’re capable of feeling, and willing to feel. 

That’s what happens when we increase our emotional capacity.   

Because here’s the deal. 

Sometimes, we SIGN UP for increasing our emotional capacity. 

We do that because we want to put ourselves out there in the world. 

We have an idea we want to make real, a change we want to make in ourselves. We want to grow or expand. When you’re doing that, you’re on two parallel roads of growth. 

In one lane, you’re taking new actions. But right there next to it. On the other parallel track, the other growth is happening. You’re expanding your capacity to feel. 

What you’ll learn on today’s episode: 

  • The two new skills you’re building anytime you do something new and different 
  • Why expanding emotional capacity is essential to forward momentum 
  • The external signs that will tell you clearly when you need to expand your capacity to feel 
  • What the payoff is of doing the work to learn to process deeper, harder, darker emotions 
  • The one question that will reveal the capacity expansion that you need next 

Mentioned on this episode: 

  • Your Feelings Are Your Superpower 
  • Be a Time Whisperer 

How to connect with Marie:

JOIN THE BLOOM ROOM!
We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Bloom your Mind podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified Coach Marie McDonald. Let's Hello, everybody and welcome to episode number 111 of the Bloom your Mind podcast. Today we are talking about one of, if not the primary skill that it takes to make ideas real in the world, which is the capacity to feel, expanding our emotional capacity, because as we put new things in the world, new things happen as we put ourselves out there in new and different ways. The challenges that we face are bigger sometimes, or different, or harder, and with them come feelings, our emotional reaction to whatever is happening. And it is so easy to see those emotional reactions, those big, hairy emotions that come with failure or with just putting ourselves out there and then being like I just did that it's terrifying With trying anything new, it's so easy to feel those things come up and turn back, and that is what will happen unless we develop the capacity to feel those emotions. We will turn back or we will develop habits that are not healthy for us, so that we won't have to feel those feelings and we can keep moving on. Those are basically the two things that happen. So let's not do those, let's not turn back, let's not develop unhealthy habits that we like slather on top of our feelings, so we don't have to feel them, and let's also not become like raging beasts, you know, and act them out, take them out on other people. Let's instead choose the hero's journey of expanding our emotional capacity.

Speaker 1:

Because challenges have come up recently for many of my people and for me and we've been working on this I wanted to share this skill in this episode with you. So challenges, you know, I like to start with a story. Challenges have been coming up recently for me that are newer to me and, in many ways and on many levels, bigger than what I've faced before. They're real adult problems, the most adult of adult problems, and they're kind of freaky, deaky. I've been dealing with that over the last few months and a couple nights ago I was feeling real crappy. You know I've been going, you know, like dealing with the ups and downs of these very adult challenges that are happening and having some high highs and low lows and just working through it using the tools we talk about on here, right, but the other night I was feeling like real low, just icky. And then in the middle of the night my kids woke up and when I woke up, there I was feeling icky it's not normal for me Kind of some anxiety, some like dense, dark heaviness, just feeling ick, and it was there every time I woke up in the night, which was happening a lot because my kids were waking up.

Speaker 1:

Then I wake up in the morning and I felt horrible, not physically, I felt emotionally horrible, and this is not common for me. I don't always feel like, you know, rainbows and unicorns, but I felt real bad. So I woke up and I got up. I get up at real early and I made my coffee and I did some stretches and I was getting ready to exercise and I sat down to meditate a little bit. Really early in the morning it's still dark out and I realized that I was doing all of these things getting up early, making my coffee, doing some stretches, getting ready to exercise, doing the meditation that are all actions that I'm taking. They're great, they're self-care, they're super important to me, but they're not feeling the feeling that's there and I was like head slap though, because this is like what I coach everybody on all the time. Right, and this is also what I tell everyone that no matter how good you get at developing your emotional capacity and managing your thoughts, you're always going to need to work at it. Hopefully, you will always have people around you to support you, to coach you. I think everybody needs a coach. Everybody needs thought partners to support you, groups and people around you to help you, because the teachers of all these things every teacher that I've had still has to work at them. So here I am like, oh my gosh, these are the literal things that I am coaching people on.

Speaker 1:

And I did not realize that I was buffering, which is a term we use to describe doing things so that you don't have to feel a feeling. So then I realize it. This is what's wrong with me have to feel a feeling. So then I realize it. This is what's wrong with me. I'm trying to figure out why I feel shitty. Instead of feeling shitty, I'm trying to work out and meditate instead of feeling shitty. I'm buffering and not realizing it.

Speaker 1:

So I sat down on my cushions with my candle and my coffee and I just allowed the feelings. And when I did, I was like, okay, these are big and new. So I did what we do. I got curious about them. I was like, hey, I can do this. What's this all about? What's this feeling that's visiting? And in reminding myself this feeling is here, I'm able to remember I am not my feeling. In reminding myself this feeling is here, I remember it's not going to always be here. I remember it's not going to always be here so I can walk towards the feeling and look around, allow it, get curious about it, feel it in my physical body. It was like a big dark cloud that I was literally like walking through and kind of sifting through, and it got lighter and lighter. As I sat with it and just wondered what it was doing there.

Speaker 1:

I expanded my emotional capacity and this is what we're talking about today. So as we take on new things, as we expand in the world, we have to expand with the things that we're doing in our internal world. We have to expand with the things that we're doing in our internal world. We have to expand our emotional capacity. And some of this happens automatically-ish in life.

Speaker 1:

When you partner with someone long-term, like have relationships of longer and longer duration, you have to expand emotional capacity to deal with all the things that come up in being with another person, right, it gets more complex, more intense and you have to sort of evolve your ability to manage your emotions. That when I first got pregnant with my first child, the day after I found out I was pregnant, I got a marketing postcard in the mail that said Parenthood is the fastest road to enlightenment, and I read it and I was like huh, you know and I never forgot it because this is so true this, this like having children, just really thrusts you into this world of bigger, deeper feelings and you either got to deal with them or you do some of the other things we talked about. You develop bad habits, right, when you take on responsibilities like financial debt in home ownership or roles at work or otherwise that have more responsibility. When we do these things, we organically kind of increase our ability to feel the things that come along with all that newness, or I hope we do so. Some of the new things, the new emotions, are positive emotions and some of them are hard things. If we're talking about having kids, you know like they're all the things. They're the rainbow of emotions With relationships, it's all the things. And when those new emotions do come up, we have different options for what we do with those new levels of emotion. So I'm going back to emotional capacity 101. And if you want a deep review of this, you can go to the episode your Feelings Are your Superpower.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to do a brief recap here that with any emotion, whether it's a new, big one that's coming from expanding our horizons, or just the emotions of life, we have a few ways of dealing with them and most of these happen automatically until we learn this, to become fluent in emotions and identify what we're doing. Number one we stuff them down, pretend they're not there, ignore them. Number two we act them out. So if we're yelling and screaming at someone, we're not feeling the emotion, we're acting it out. We buffer, which is to put something on top of it, like work or sex or TV or scrolling or food or booze or, in my case, thinking a lot about it. And all of those things, all of those stuffing it down, acting it out or buffering, it all makes the emotion worse or bigger or more intense, like pushing a beach ball underwater, and the only thing that actually works to relieve the pressure is when we allow the feeling. That's emotional capacity 101. And in that episode you can also get some tools, and in other episodes that deal with feelings, you can get some tools to actually allow your emotions.

Speaker 1:

Today we're talking about actually pushing up the ceiling on our limits of which emotions we're capable of feeling, or the intensity of emotion that we're capable of feeling, the frequency of our ability to feel those emotions, or whether we're willing to feel them. That is what it means to increase our emotional capacity. Because here's the deal Sometimes we actually sign up for increasing our emotional capacity. That's what I'm doing, that's what everybody in the bloom room is doing. We do that because we want to put ourselves out there in the world in new and different ways. We have an idea, we want to make real A change we want to make to ourselves, we want to grow, we want to expand, we want to like, create and put things out there.

Speaker 1:

When we do that, we're on two parallel roads of growth. On one lane of that road maybe it's one road with two lanes In one lane, we're taking new actions, we're doing things, saying things differently, we're putting ourselves out there, we're failing forward. We're taking action. Some of the things that we're trying are working and sometimes they're not working, and that's all happening. On that action track we're growing and learning and evolving, but right there next to it, on another parallel track, simultaneously, the other growth is happening. It has to happen in order for us to be successful in our actions. On that other track, we are expanding our emotional capacity. When we're trying something new out in the world and it doesn't work and we fail, the fail is new and it's bigger and we care a lot about it. And most of the time it's harder. We have to be willing to feel the feelings that go with it not working out Sometimes bigger feelings or more intense ones, sometimes new ones or harder ones or more intense ones, sometimes new ones or harder ones. They're all expanding our emotional capacity Because when we're putting something out there, we care more about it. Or maybe it's a more public setting that we're acting in, we're creating in. Maybe there's more fame or notoriety, more exposure, more responsibility, or maybe our heart's in it more, more responsibility, or maybe our heart's in it more. We have to develop our emotional capacity as we grow. So here are some examples One of my clients is starting a local meetup community.

Speaker 1:

That's really important to this person. They created a post, they wrote all about it, they got feedback on it and they emailed out to invite everyone. People said yes and it's scheduled. And my client said people said yes and it's scheduled. And my client said, okay, now I want to barf, like that day is coming to me and now I want to cancel it. Can you tell me what's happening? And I said yes, you have to ask yourself what is it that I need to be willing to feel Okay. So we worked on it together, closed our eyes, went inside. What is the feeling that goes with that desire to cancel it? It was a dark feeling, pressure, and we got curious. My client went into it, checked it out, told me about it. It got lighter and lighter and then it dissipated and my client remembered God, I'm not alone, I can do this. That feeling was a little bit new, a little bit wacky, but, like if I just got curious about it, it lightened up.

Speaker 1:

One of my clients is thinking about starting a family and, even though that time is pretty far away, there are emotions coming up all over the place. One of my other clients is writing a very public memoir and that client had doubt coming up. That started to ripple out all over the place, impacting their sleep, impacting their mood, and these little flags all over the place. So when that happens, when flags come up in the world around you, you're starting to be grumpy. You're forgetting your keys on your car or, in your car, your coffee cup on top of your car. When these little flags and signs come up around you, it's because the feeling that you're not feeling is rippling out of you through your actions, and all these little flags that you see around you are telling you to pause and to ask yourself what is the feeling I'm not willing to feel? What do I need to be willing to feel in order to move through this? What do I need to be willing to feel in order to move through this? So the client starting the group moved through the feeling and realized that they're not alone. My client's thinking about starting a family. The emotions actually when that client processed them lightened and they realized they're okay and super supported and that self-doubt comes up when they care a lot about things. When one of my client who's writing the memoir had that doubt come up, that started to ripple out all over the place. They realized they're surrounded by people that want them to succeed in the bloom room and in other circles that are supporting that.

Speaker 1:

Author. It takes getting still and being willing to feel it to find that out. Increasing emotional capacity is a lifelong journey and when we skip this step we either turn around on the path, we develop really unhealthy habits or we turn into somebody that we don't really like because we're acting our emotions out all over the place, we're stuffing them down and getting really weird and pent up. So as you try new things, as you follow more and more of your passions, as you're more authentic and more visible in the world, this is the skill to build. My last episode being a time whisperer. It's all about doing, about planning time, prioritizing the things that are important to you, getting your actions aligned and working for you and, just as important as that, happening right alongside it is this Develop your emotional capacity.

Speaker 1:

And let me just say going silent, getting quiet, asking for help, taking a couple days, asking for what you need, gathering your forces around you, your support system, literally not speaking for a little bit. All of that is okay. As you answer the question, what is it that I need? To be willing to feel and go in with curiosity to see what you find, without making it good or bad with your thinking. Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. So, just so, just how.

Speaker 1:

It is just the, the feeling that exists. Not good or bad. What do you notice? What's it trying to show you? What's it protecting you from? What does it want you to know? How can you embrace it and know it's there but it's not you? How can you be with it? Get curious and keep walking down that road. That's what I've got for you this week, and I will see you next week to real life, in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real, one idea at a time. I'll see you in the bloom room, thank you.