6 Self Improvement Tips for Emotional Fitness

6 Self Improvement Tips for Emotional Fitness

Have you ever noticed how easy it can be to help someone else clearly see the real challenge they are facing (not the drama they have created in their head), and how difficult it can be to do the same thing for yourself? 

If you would like to explore additional support, please reach out to me:
https://bellastjohninternational.com/coaching/ 

In this episode of Success Redefined Podcast, we explore 'emotional fitness' and six self improvement tips to manage the complexities of our inner lives, touching on themes of stress and emotional challenges. 

Chapters:
0:00 Emotional Fitness and Why Capable People Still Struggle
0:48 The Hidden Cost of Emotional Loops
1:42 What Emotional Fitness Really Means
2:21 Practice 1: Name It to Tame It
3:27 Getting More Specific About What You Feel
4:18 Practice 2: Separate the Feeling From the Story
5:36 The Two-Column Exercise: Fact vs Meaning
6:50 Practice 3: Build Frustration Tolerance
8:06 Why Discomfort Leads to Poor Decisions
8:58 Practice 4: Audit Your Recovery Patterns
10:20 What Helps You Recover and What Keeps You Stuck
11:41 Practice 5: Protect Your Inputs
13:04 How Your Attention Shapes Your Emotional State
14:02 Practice 6: Stop Treating Emotional Fitness as a Solo Project
15:18 Why Strong People Still Need Support
16:17 Emotional Fitness as Internal Infrastructure
17:05 Closing Thoughts and Next Steps

~ Bella

MS BELLA ST JOHN
Achievement Strategist, Writer, Artist

*     https://BellaStJohnInternational.com
*     https://ArtByBellaStJohn.com
*     https://www.linkedin.com/in/msbellastjohn/

~~~ Success Redefined ~~~
PS:  No animals were harmed in the creation of this video.  Made with recycled data.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You don't know what it's like to put your emotions out there naked for the whole world to see! I'm sorry, Harvard, but I'm afraid you're gonna have to base this decision on your emotions. Listen, if you ever need to process any of your emotions, I'm here for you. Have you ever noticed how easy it can be to help someone else see clearly and how difficult it can be to do the same thing for yourself? You can talk a client through overwhelm, you can help a team member calm down, you can guide a friend back to perspective. Yet when it's your own disappointment, your own frustration or uncertainty, suddenly all your wisdom can seem strangely unavailable to you. That is the problem with emotional fitness or the lack thereof. Most capable people assume they already have it because they are high functioning. They keep working, they keep showing up, they keep delivering. From the outside, they may look calm and capable and composed, but inside though, it can be a completely different story. And if your conversation gets replayed in your head for hours, or a proposal goes unanswered, and suddenly your mind is writing a dramatic story about your entire future and career. Or a client says one awkward thing and it follows you for the rest of your day. You're technically still working, but part of your attention is now trapped in an emotional loop, and that is exhausting. It affects your clarity, your creativity, and the quality of your presence with other people, not just your clients, but also your family and friends. The solution though is not to become emotionless. That wouldn't make you stronger, and it certainly would not make you more human. The solution is to build up your emotional fitness. It's a skill, you can build it up, which means developing your ability to feel what you feel, understand what is happening, recover more quickly, and choose your response rather than being dragged around by the emotion of the moment. So here's six practical ways. One, name it to tame it. One of the biggest issues with emotional overwhelm is that people often experience it vaguely. They say, Yeah, I'm stressed, or I'm annoyed, or I'm tired, or I just feel off. And those words may be true, but they're often too broad to be useful. It's like walking into a dark room and saying, something's wrong here, without turning on the light. The moment you name the emotion more accurately, you begin to regain some authority over it. Now, this is an idea often associated with Dr. Dan Siegel, the clinical professor of psychiatry, I think, yes, psychiatry at UCLA, who popularized the phrase name it to tame it. And the research behind effect labeling is especially interesting because it suggests that naming an emotion is not just a poetic self-help idea. It can actually change the way the brain responds. 2007, a neuroimaging study by Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA showed that labeling a negative emotion reduced activity in the amygdala, which is that's part of the brain's threat response system. In simple terms, when you put words to the feeling, the emotional alarm begins to quiet. Now the problem is that most people stop too soon. It's like I feel stressed. Well, that's beginning, but it's rarely the full truth. Are you frustrated or disappointed, embarrassed, resentful, overextended, unappreciated, afraid of being judged, or concerned you made a wrong decision. Each of those emotions points to something different. Frustration may point to blocked progress, or resentment may point to a boundary that's been crossed. Embarrassment may point to a fear of how you're being perceived, or disappointment may point to an expectation that wasn't met. The solution, they say, is to get more specific. So the next time you notice your body reacting, like a tight chest or clenched jaw or shallow breathing, pause long enough to ask, what am I actually feeling right now? Not the polished answer or not the socially acceptable answer, the real answer. Number two, distinguish between the feeling and the story. Here is where emotional fitness becomes very practical. Something happens, like a client doesn't reply, or someone gives you a s gives you slightly cool feedback, or a friend takes longer than usual to respond, a launch doesn't perform as expected. That's the event. That's just the fact that happened. But then your mind starts explaining the event. Oh, they they must be annoyed with me. My pricing must be wrong. This always happens. I knew I shouldn't have done that. Maybe I'm not as good as I thought, or now you're just dealing with you're not just dealing with the original situation, you're dealing with the story your mind has built around it. The story your mind has built around it is not fact. You don't know that they're annoyed with you. What you know is they did not respond at this moment in time. This is where so many people lose enormous amounts of emotional energy. The feeling may have started as uncertainty or disappointment or embarrassment, but the story turns it into something so much bigger and heavier and more personal. The ancient philosopher Epictetus observed that people are not disturbed simply by events, but by the judgment they make about those events. And even like modern cognitive behavioral therapy works on a similar foundation. Albert Ellis had an ABC model that explains it clearly. A is the activating event, B the belief, and C the emotional consequence. The event matters, of course, but the interpretation often determines the emotional cost. The problem is that when the story feels convincing, we then treat that as fact. We don't say I'm having the thought that means I've that this means I've failed, we say I failed. We don't say my mind is interpreting this person's silence as rejection. We say they rejected me. That distinction changes everything. The solution is to separate the observable fact from the meaning that your mind is going off and attaching to it. So take a piece of paper and draw two columns. In the left column, write what actually happened. Only the facts, just the facts, ma'am. No interpretation, no mind reading, no dramatic conclusions. In the right column, write what you are telling yourself that it means. For example, it the fact might be the prospective client has not replied to my proposal after three days. The story might be they think I'm too expensive, I probably handled the call badly, maybe my offer is not strong enough. Once you see the two columns, you can begin to breathe again. Because you realize you're not necessarily suffering from the event itself. You may be suffering from the story you've built around it. The reason they've not replied may have nothing to do with you. Emotional fitness does not require you to dismiss your feelings, but it does ask that you examine the story before you hand the keys to your nervous system. Number three, build your frustration tolerance deliberately. Many people have emotional fitness, that means staying calm all the time. And that's not realistic, and this is not the goal. The real goal is to increase your capacity to feel discomfort without needing to escape or fix or numb or react immediately. That capacity, it has a name, it's called distress tolerance, and it's one of the core skills in dialectic behavior therapy, and that is developed by Marsha Lynham. In everyday life, distress tolerance is what allows you to stay steady when something is uncomfortable but not dangerous. And this matters because so many poor decisions are made, not because people lack intelligence, but because they cannot tolerate the discomfort of the moment. They send the defensive email too quickly, or they lower the price because the silence feels unbearable, or they avoid the difficult conversation because the anticipation feels worse than the issue itself. They distract themselves with busy work because the real task has too much emotional charge around it. The problem is not the discomfort. The problem is believing you must escape the discomfort immediately. You may know the most appropriate thing to do, but if you cannot sit with the discomfort long enough to do it, all the knowledge will not help you. The solution is deliberate practice. You build frustration tolerance in small repeated moments. You allow yourself to send the proposal and wait without chasing reassurance. You allow yourself to have the pricing conversation without apologizing for your rate. You allow yourself to receive critical feedback without immediately defending, explaining, or collapsing. Each time you do that, you send your nervous system a new message. This is uncomfortable, and I can handle it. Number four, audit your recovery patterns. Emotional disruption is not the real issue. Everyone gets disrupted. The more useful question is how long it takes you to come back. In physical fitness, recovery matters. A person's condition is not measured only by how hard they can work, it's also measured by how efficiently their body returns to baseline after exertion. Emotional fitness works in a similar way. You may have a difficult client conversation, you may have disappointing news, or you made a mistake, or you feel misunderstood. None of that means you're emotionally adrift. The question is whether you recover in 20 minutes or two hours or two days or two weeks or two years or never. The problem is that many people don't track this. They track income or appointments or sales or engagements or physical fitness, they track their reps, but they don't track the emotional patterns that quietly drain their capacity. A difficult email can sometimes derail the whole afternoon if you allow it. One awkward conversation can affect the next three calls if you allow it. A small rejection can come become an entire weekend of internal noise if you allow it. The solution is to begin noticing your recovery time honestly. After your next emotional disruption, ask yourself, okay, how long did it take me to return to a genuine baseline? Not fake calm, not performing professionalism, not smiling through the next call while you're still rehearsing the issue internally, but a genuine baseline. Then ask a second question. What helped me recover? Or what prolonged the disruption? And this is where people often discover something uncomfortable. Some of the habits that feel like recovery are actually keeping the emotional loop alive. Venting may feel good for a few moments, but if it returns, but if it turns into a repeated rehearsal, like you vent to this person and you vent to this person and you vent to this person, it can keep the nervous system activated. Seeking reassurance may provide a temporary soothing effect, but if you need it constantly, it can weaken your ability to self-anchor yourself. Replaying the situation may feel like analysis, but after a certain point it becomes emotional ruination, dressed up as problem solving. A useful recovery practice is different. It helps you metabolize the experience, extract the lesson, and return to the present. Now that might mean writing down the fact and the story, it might mean taking a short walk. It might mean breathing slowly until your body catches up with your mind. It might mean coming up with a number of different reasons that it could be that have nothing to do with you. The point is not to recover perfectly, the point is to become aware of what actually brings you back. Number five, protect your inputs. No one serious about physical fitness would eat poorly or all day and never rest and never hydrate and never train properly and then wonder why they feel weak and they're not toned. Yet emotionally, so many of us do exactly the same thing every single day. They consume content that triggers comparison. They scroll through outrage, they watch people perform success but then go, oh, why is it not me? They sit inside online spaces where everyone is either panicking or bragging or arguing or yeah, and they wonder why they feel behind or scattered or irritable. The problem is not that we live in an information rich or information overload world. The problem is that many people have no emotional filter around what they do and do not allow into their attention. Your attention is not a minor thing. It shapes your mood and your expectations and your fears and your decisions and your sense of what's possible. Repeated exposure to signal threats, threat signals, or scarcity messages, or comparison triggers can keep the nervous system in a state of unnecessary activation, and that can affect sleep and creativity and focus and the quality of the decisions that you make. The solution is intentional input management. For one week, do an experiment. Pay close attention to how you feel after some of your major inputs. Notice how you feel after watching the news, for instance, or notice how you feel after being in certain online groups, or after you finished scrolling on one of your social media platforms. Do you feel clearer or wiser or more capable? Or do you feel overwhelmed or agitated or behind? That information matters, and that's not meant to be a leading question. Sometimes you might have a really great Twitter feed, for instance, and you only follow people who inspire you. But that information, like I said, that matters. Number six, stop treating emotional fitness as a solo project. Many capable people make exactly the same mistake. They assume that emotional regulation is something they should be able to do entirely on their own. So they journal alone or meditate alone and think alone, process alone, recover alone, and then when they still feel overwhelmed, they interpret that as personal failure. The issue is that human beings were never designed to be entirely in isolation. We are co-regulating creatures. Our nervous systems respond to other nervous systems. A calm voice can help settle us. A grounded presence can help us come back into ourselves. A hug, for me, I think a hug is one of the most wonderful things in the world. A quote by Eleanor Roosevelt: Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. Well my extension on that is nobody can make you feel anything without your consent. Sort of hitting you on the head with a mallet. So the solution is then to create your relational environment with much more intention. It's about identifying the people whose presence genuinely supports your emotional steadiness. It might be finding a coach who can support you in that, who can listen without immediately fixing, who can tell you the truth without humiliating you, or a friend maybe who can hold tension without escalating it, and who helps you remember who you are when a situation has temporarily just knocked you sideways. These people are not just good to have around. They are part of your emotional fitness infrastructure. And it means one of your next self-improvement steps may not be another book or another productivity system, or it may be building better emotional support around you. Strong people still need support. Wise people still need perspective. And people who help others still need safe places where they can feel human and where they can feel supported. So, in closing, emotional fitness is not about becoming perfectly calm and zen and perfectly permanently positive or having an unaffected life. But it is about building a stronger internal infrastructure. It's the ability to name what you feel instead of being swallowed by it. It's about the ability to separate the fact from the story that you've created around it. It's the ability to tolerate discomfort without immediately escaping into it or from it. It's the ability to recover more efficiently after a disruption. And it's the ability to protect your attention from inputs that may weaken your clarity. These six practices are not complicated, but they are powerful when repeated. So I hope this has been helpful. If you'd like to reach out, I'll put my website up and the links in the description. So sending love and smiles to everybody. Until next time, I'm Bella St. John. Thanks. Bye.