EP #5 THE EMOTIONAL GUIDANCE SCALE EXPLAINED: Your Inner GPS for Manifestation

Emotional awareness is the key to manifesting. 

 Your emotions aren't "good" or "bad"—they're your built-in GPS system guiding you toward what you want. In this episode, we break down the Emotional Guidance Scale (your emotional ladder) and why you can't jump from grief to joy in one leap. 

You'll learn why anger can actually be PROGRESS when you're climbing out of depression, how to stop judging yourself for feeling "negative" emotions, why burying your feelings only makes them explode later, and how your emotional comfort zone keeps you tethered to the same patterns. 

This is emotional awareness for manifestation—and it starts with understanding that ALL emotions serve a purpose. 

Credit to Abraham Hicks for the creation of the Emotional Guidance Scale.  

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Change doesn't start with what you do. Change starts with who you are. I'm your host, Kendall Keaton, and this is the Identity Advantage. Okay, we are back. And I am finally, after promising you several times, I am going to talk today about the emotional guidance scale, the emotional ladder. And I will I'm gonna refer to it really as a ladder because that's what it is, and it is an analogy that works really well when you think about the fact that you climb a ladder wrong by wrong. You don't jump from the bottom wrong to the top wrong, right? You might be able to skip one step, maybe two at the most, but you're gonna use the wrong sequentially until you get to the top. And that's what this is your emotional ladder, your emotional guidance scale. It is your inner GPS system that we're gonna get into today. The thing about this is that it is a GPS system, right? It is it is built into us. We were born with it. It is what I have called your sixth sense, your five senses, your five regular senses that we're all aware of, and then your sixth sense, your emotions. That even though we know we have them, the reason so many of us, the majority of us, and by us I mean humans in general, are not emotionally aware, are not quite honestly emotionally intelligent as far as understanding what emotions we're feeling and when we're feeling and being in control of them. One of the reasons is that we are not taught to use the system. Not only are we not taught to use the system, but in a lot in a lot of cases, we're unintentionally taught to ignore them. When we're told don't be angry, don't cry, no tears, no tears, you know, don't cry about that. When we're taught that crying is a weakness or anger is unacceptable, don't feel angry. Sorry, but you're gonna feel angry. It's a natural emotion, and there's nothing wrong with it. There is nothing wrong with any of these emotions. Any emotion you feel, there is nothing wrong with it. Your emotion is just telling you something. Your emotions are a signal to let you know that where you're headed is where you want to go, or maybe where you don't want to go. Your emotions are signposts on this journey of life, to paint it that that way. And there is no bad road sign. There are only road signs to let you know of a warning, you're headed the wrong way, do not enter. There are no bad road signs. You don't get angry when you see a do not enter sign. You're like, oh, glad I was there, so I didn't go the wrong way. You don't want to go the wrong way on a one way. You don't want to head towards Arizona when you're trying to get to New York. You're not angry at the road sign. You just recognize that it's there and say, Oh, glad it's there. It's letting me know the direction I need to go. It's letting me know what to go towards, or it's letting me know what to go away from. Go the other way. Maybe you don't want to go down that one-way road. That's all your emotions are. And when we can become very neutral, no matter what emotion we're feeling, especially about those ones that we deem negative, emotions are not positive or negative. There's just contrast. Anytime you are feeling something that you don't like, it's just letting you know what you actually want. It's your source, it's your inner being, it's God, whatever you want to call it, doesn't matter. But it is that higher version of you letting you know, hey, this is the wrong way. This is not where you wanted to go. Now, most of us were taught to ignore this. We were taught, don't cry, no tears, stop crying, right? That crying somehow was a weakness or it was bad. Don't be angry, stop. There's no need to be angry about this. You don't need to be sad about this, stop worrying. People tell us, well, just stop worrying about it. It's not that freaking easy. But we're taught so often just to stop feeling the emotion. And then we don't know how to process the emotion. Now, in their defense, any thought, and I've I am not perfect with my children. My children are teenagers now, and I wish I had known this when they were younger. I'm sure they will have trauma to figure out when they're older. But I do the best I can now to help them process through their emotions. If you are a parent, this will help you with your children. But as a parent, it is very uncomfortable for us to watch our child feel sad. So we say, don't cry, don't cry, there's no reason to cry. Because it's uncomfortable for us to see them like that. But they need to do that. We need to find out where are the tears coming from? What emotion is voted is motivating these tears? What are they upset about and why? These are conversations that need to be had that we have to have with ourselves now. Because how many times as an adult have you been crying and you don't even know why? I can't tell you how many times I used to cry at night and not even know where the tears were coming from. Bawling because I am an emotional wreck and have no clue what's going on. Because I had emotion after emotion after emotion for years and years and years that I buried and buried and buried because I didn't think it was safe to express them. And what happens to something when you bury it? It doesn't disappear. If you take a giant beach ball and you push it under the water and you hold it there and hold it there, it's not gonna stay there. Eventually, you're gonna have to let it go. And when it and when you do, it does not rise slowly to the surface, it explodes through the top. Negative emotions are not bad. They are letting you know what needs to change. And when you ignore them, they don't go away. They become bigger, they grow, they set roots, and then they become harder to pull up. You don't even know where they're at half the time. The roots have spread, and these emotions come up out of nowhere, and you have no clue why they're there. Why you get angry at times where logically your brain is saying, okay, there is no reason to be angry about this, but you can't stop feeling the angry. Or there is no reason to be jealous in this situation, literally no reason, but you still feel the jealousy. There is no reason to be worried about this, but I still feel that anxiety. Because they are deep-seated emotions that we thought were unhealthy or we were shamed for them, and we buried them and then pushed them down. We were taught to ignore our emotional scare. We were we were even taught to hide some of our good feeling emotions. It still feels inappropriate to me sometimes to be happy in front of people who I can tell aren't happy. Like I'm gonna make them feel bad because I feel good. Sometimes it's hard to be happy because you feel guilty about being happy when somebody else is not happy. We are so trained to cover our emotions, to filter them, to put a screen around them so nobody else can see them. And we've done that for so long that we sometimes can't even. If you listened to those first couple episodes and you have tried to go through and determine your thoughts and your emotions, and you've been a little confused on what, like, I don't even know what I'm feeling right now. This is why. So that's part of this work in stopping and sitting for a while and non-judgmentally letting those emotions come up. You might somatically have to sit there and say, okay, where do I feel is in my body? I'm feeling panic right now. Do I feel that in my chest? Do I feel it in my stomach? Do I feel it in my forehead? Do I feel it on my shoulders? Your emotions will come up as physical symptoms if you sit and just let them rise to the surface and stop pushing and pushing and pushing them away. Because they are not going away. More than likely, they're just going to come up out of nowhere and probably at a really inopportune moment. It's that fight that happens because you didn't speak for a year and then things just blow, shit hits the fan. You cry in front of a whole bunch of people when you don't want to do it. That's what happens when we don't pay attention to our emotions. When we don't just let them happen when they happen. And when you get into the habit of doing this, when we kind of let some of those old emotions come up and we start dealing with them, we figure out where they're coming from, they dissipate. Now that beach ball that you had held underneath that has exploded to the surface, it's just sitting on top of the water. Now, what does that beach ball do? It doesn't bounce around high all by itself, it just goes with the flow of the water. It's very smooth. Nothing is erratic or inappropriate or out of place. It might flow to the left, it might flow to the right, might sink a bit and come back up, it might bob a little bit, but it's calm the majority of the time. Once you learn to process your emotion emotions, let them happen when they happen. Anger is not huge. It's a little bit of a ripple that you feel, but you can catch the thought with it. You can separate the two so easily when you let it happen instead of immediately pushing it away. When you feel the anger and you don't get angry that you're angry. Because that's what happens when we first start working with this scale. We know we want to feel good, and then at some point we're working on these good feeling thoughts, these good feeling emotions, and a bad thought comes up. I'm gonna say bad, a contrast, it's contrast. A contrasting thought comes up that maybe's a little doubtful or worry. Worry is not that far down on the scale. And if you if you haven't got a copy of this scale, you can, it's free. Just go to the show notes, you can download it. It might be even helpful to have that, like to come back, listen to this episode and look at those emotions as we talk about them. Because worry is not actually that far down at the scale, it's quite a bit above anger. So when you feel a thought that comes in that has a little bit of anxiety to it, if you will listen to that worry very unjudgmentally, don't get upset that you're worried, thinking a really good thought, and then worry comes in, and then we get angry because we had a worrisome thought. Angry is four steps down from worry. You just made it worse by getting angry about the about the anxious thought. I hope that made sense. If you don't have the scale, get it because the visual really helps. Frustration is being irritated or a little impatient, a little frustrated with something or somebody is not it's kind of mid-scale. It's not that bad. But when we get angry at ourselves because we felt frustrated, we felt frustrated, frustrated with our kid, and we might have raised our voice, and then we get really angry at ourselves because of what we said or what we did. Then we feel guilt. Now we're at the very bottom of the freaking scale, only one of one above a depression. But it all started started with feeling a little bit of frustration. But because we didn't know how to handle it, we didn't know how to separate the thought and the emotion so that we could stop and control that action. We took an action out of frustration, which is not a bad thing, but we didn't stop there. We got worried about what that action did, then we got angry at ourselves for taking that action, and then we feel guilty about doing it. In one fell swoop of about maybe a couple of seconds, we can move from feeling about 10 on the scale, which is not that far away from one, to going all the way down to the 20s. Only because we judged ourselves for what we felt. We got angry about an emotion that really wasn't all that bad. The best thing that you can do, because manifesting is all about how you feel. You don't manifest what you want, you don't manifest what you think about, you manifest what you feel. You manifest not what you want, but you manifest who you are, you manifest what you show up as, and you are showing up as the two to three emotions that you feel on any given day, wherever you're your comfort zone on this scale is where you feel emotionally safe. And your emotions that feel safe are the ones that you are in most often. Your body is wired for homeostasis, it needs sameness, it needs certainty. It is a biological evolutionary safety mechanism that has kept us safe for thousands and thousands of years. Sameness is safeness to your body. So anytime you try to reach out of your emotional comfort zone and you try to reach for something better feeling, there's gonna be a time where your comfort zone is gonna want to pull you back down. If you live a lot of your time in worry, when you try to reach for a hopeful thought, you're gonna be able to hold on to it for a while, but your body is going to say, wait, don't get your hopes up, don't hold your breath, and so you won't, and you'll feel a little bit of relief, honestly, when you go back to that worrisome thought. Because you will tell yourself, Oh, I need to be prepared, I need to stay realistic, I need to make sure that I don't set myself up for disappointment. And you're gonna come back down to worry. And when that happens, don't get angry at yourself, just realize what you did. Realize what happened. Oh, you know what? My thoughts are trying to keep me safe. My body recognized that I was doing something unfamiliar by trying to be optimistic, by trying to be hopeful, and because uncertainty is equivalent to my body, to my biological evolution, as uncertainty means unsafe, it's just trying to keep me safe. That's okay, but reminding yourself that this thought is not dangerous, feeling hope is not dangerous. I'm here to tell you to get your hopes up. Go ahead and hold your breath. The worst case scenario is that it doesn't happen and then nothing changes, and you're right where you are, which you're fine. The worst case scenario is literally already happening, you're living in it. There is no harm in thinking the hopeful thought, in having some positive expectation about something. But if you are not used to doing that, if that is not your default mode, if that is not where your comfort zone lies, there is a rope tied. You are tethered to some of those thoughts that maybe are what your body is used to. You are used to living a little bit impatience, right? You are used to having some worrisome thoughts. Maybe you have some blame, you might have some guilt. Maybe you're somebody who lives in anger, you're just angry all the time. This is not a bad thing. It's just letting you know, hey, this is this is not meant for you. This is letting you know it's time to reach for some better feeling thoughts. And when a thought that feels good only lasts a little bit and you fall back down into your comfort zone, just know that every time you go back and think for that thought, you're unraveling that rope that's tethering you to that comfort zone that you don't want to be in. It's a process, don't quit on it. Keep reaching for the better-filling emotion, keep uh experimenting with thoughts that make you feel better. Keep building the belief that you have in those thoughts. And it doesn't have to be. If you are somebody who's living in a lot of guilt or anger, then just reading reaching neutrality is gonna feel so good. You're not trying to get your comfort zone from the very bottom of the scale to the very top of the scale, you're just trying to climb one rung of the ladder at a time to get to a better feeling emotion. Sometimes anger is good. If a predominant amount of your time is spent feeling grief or guilty or insecurity, then when you feel anger, that's actually moving you up the scale. If you deny yourself that anger, if you get angry when you feel angry because you feel angry, and you let yourself go back down to feeling guilty about being angry, you've just taken two steps forward, three steps back. So being aware of these emotions and where they at are or where they are at on the scale is imperative to being able to move your emotional state to a better feeling comfort zone. Because sometimes anger is good. Don't ever let anybody tell you that you should not be angry. You get to decide that because only you know what you were feeling before the anger. If you are in a depression and every once in a while you feel angry, hold that anger. That anger is a good thing. That anger is three, four steps above depression. I lived in depression for over a decade. Massive, massive depression for almost two, for almost two decades, for almost 20 years of my life. And I would spend a lot of time in anger thinking I was wrong for being angry. And when I did that and I judged myself for it, I just jumped right back into the depression. We've been told that anger is bad. Anger is good if you're coming from a lower state. But we just don't stay in the anger. Now that you know this, you can grab onto that anger and say, hey, that's not a bad thing that I'm angry. I've just pulled myself up out of depression and guilt and beating myself up. From anger, we might have to go to blame. When we're angry, we might be angry at somebody else. Then we might move to blaming ourselves. We might move to blaming somebody else. That is not a bad thing. If you look at the scale and you can see this and you are aware of it, then you could look at that and actually be happy about the fact that you're angry. Chew on that for a minute. You can actually be happy that you're angry. If anger is moving you up the scale. Anger is so much better than being jealous. Anger is so much better than feeling grief. It's why it's part of the process. It's part of the 12-step program from grief, is going through anger, going through blame. It's not a bad thing. It's a signpost, it's a road sign letting you know this many miles to your destination. And anger is a hell of a lot closer to where you want to be than depression. But also, if you look and you feel that you're being angry and you realized that it came from worry, that you got angry at yourself because you were worried. Oh, anger just pulled me down the scale, you can be happy about that too. My God, I'm so happy I noticed that. I am so happy I stopped that anger before it threw me back down into my depression. Because I really don't want to be there again. I will never be there again. But I could only do that because I found a way to be happy when I was angry. Every time you can do that, you're unraveling a little bit of that rope that is keeping you tethered to those emotions that you don't like to feel. Those emotions that are motivating you to do things, to act on, or to avoid things that could be making your life better. Knowing this can change your life. It can make you feel better today. It can make you feel better in a matter of minutes. And when this becomes part of your daily process, when you decide that you are no longer going to feel the way you have been feeling for months, years, decades. When you decide you are done with that and you get this out and you start writing down the thoughts that can create better emotions, and you do it every single day, this will become secondary. Nature. You will still feel angry. I still have moments where I feel angry. I still get road rage. I still will go off on someone. I am not perfect. But I don't get angry at myself anymore for doing it. I don't feel guilty over it. You will become better at grabbing what caused it, understanding it. Don't judge yourself for it. Congratulate yourself for noticing that I just caught myself in a part of the cycle. Whether you caught the thought, the emotion, the motivation, whether you caught the action, whether you caught the result, whether you're noticing the circumstance, does not matter when you notice it, but congratulate yourself in that moment for noticing what's happening. Let yourself feel a little bit of hope about the fact that you noticed it. Maybe I can change this. Maybe I can change this. And then that thought of instead of thinking, damn it, I did it again, thinking, oh, I noticed it. I'm getting good at this. I'm getting faster at this. Maybe I can get even get even better. Let that make yourself feel a little hopeful. Now you're thinking a thought that's making you feel hopeful. And now you have a little bit of motivation to get that journal out and finally write an entry in it to write out a thought-emotion cycle. And that's going to get you a result of feeling like maybe you're in control of your life. Maybe you actually actually can create what you want. But this is the cycle in action. And if you don't have this emotional scale, get it. Print it, put it up. Again, don't take my word for it. Do this work. Start to see, start to notice where this is coming up. And first and foremost, we have got to stop. We as human beings have got to stop judging other people. We have to start judging people, stop judging people, period, because we have to stop judging their actions because their actions are coming from emotions that we don't know anything about. We don't know why they feel angry. We don't know. They may be angry and doing something out of anger, but that person is pulling themselves out of a 20-year depression. And we're judging the anger that they're feeling that's actually making them a better person. We have got to stop judging our own emotions and stop judging others' emotions. Because everybody is on their own journey, and nobody's journey has to affect yours, and your journey doesn't have to affect anyone else's. That right there, if you've heard of it, is a little bit of the whole let them theory. Just let them. Just let them. But we don't want to let them out of a screw you mentality. Let them because I don't know what they're going through. I don't know that that anger doesn't feel so freaking good to them because they've been stuck in insecurity and unworthiness about themselves. Maybe that anger is the thing that's then gonna get them to just feeling a little bit impatient, that's gonna get them to feeling a little bit of contentment, that's gonna get them to being an optimistic person. Let them, because maybe that's what they need to do. So don't do that. It is a fantastic, the let them theory is fantastic as long as you are doing it, not out of screw you mentality, but out of that is your journey, this is my journey. They're going through their own cycles. They have their own motor running them and they're gonna manifest their own things. You come over here and we focus on our ladder, climbing our own ladder, because that's the only way we're ever gonna make a difference in our own lives or in anybody else's. If you go to the show notes and you click on the link to my site, you can go to contact and send me a message directly. I think there should probably be a follow-up to this episode, but I would like to know from you what made sense out of this and maybe what is unclear. If you are trying to work with this, what questions, what struggles are you coming up with that I can help with? I want to help you work through this as best I can. And I am always here for the one-on-one work. Like if you want to work with me, get on my site, book a call. But I'm also here just for the conversations if you have some questions. If I have several people email me in with the same questions over this, I want to address that. I want you to feel better. I want you to have the things that you want to have, the things that you deserve to have, the things that you came here on this earth to experience. And it starts here. It starts with your emotional GPS, the GPS system that you were born with that we are turning on now, and we're actually gonna set it to the right direction and we're gonna follow the signpost and get to where we want to go. We're gonna stop ignoring it. We're gonna stop driving around in circles because either we didn't know we had a map or because we were too stubborn to use it. Whichever one it is, we're gonna stop. We're gonna start using the GPS system we were born with. And if you need to ask for directions, okay, that's the whole email me thing. Okay, get on there and ask me a question. Thank you so much for listening. And if something you heard today made an impact or changed the way you think somehow, then share it with somebody you care about. Because sometimes it's that one moment, that one idea that changes everything. And until next time, remember if you want to do something you've never done, you have to become someone you've never been. That is the identity advantage.