[00:00] Welcome back to the Focus B show. This is Katie Suddar here aka the focus b. And on this show, I interview high performers and leaders around the world to discover their secrets on peak performance, productivity, mindfulness, and leadership. So if you want to take your performance and your leadership to the next level, then you're in the right place. Listen up and connect with the magic.
[00:41] I'm really excited to announce that in the upcoming weeks, I am launching my new program to help you to optimize your time and your energy to reach the results and impact you want in your business and in your life. If you want to find out more about my new program, check out thefocusbeat.com program. So in the previous episode, I spoke about physical energy and my anachronym of nest nutrition, exercise, sleep, and time out. And today I'd love to dive into emotional energy. Because here's the truth. If you're working on your physical energy and on eating healthily and going to bed early, but you're not dealing with your emotions, this is going to have a huge toll on how you feel every day and on your energy levels. And you might wonder, but how come I'm exercising and I'm going to bed early and I'm doing all this stuff and I still don't feel good and I don't feel energized? This is because emotions have a huge, huge impact. So let's discuss today how you can optimize your emotional energy, how you can just feel good. And there is a lot to this topic, so I will do my best to summarize it in ten minutes. But it's obviously a very complex and in depth topic. So managing emotions, it begins with a lot of things with your thoughts, so the type of thoughts and triggers that lead to certain emotions. So let's say that in the morning you suddenly think, oh, I'm late, I'm late. And then you feel the urge to rush. And this might lead to certain emotions such as stress or anxiety or nerves or frustration, because you haven't left sooner. In those moments, you can identify that the trigger is the thought about being late, or also the situation where you're late, though these types of emotions can be managed well, a through anticipation, in this case, of looking not to be late. But once you're the situation where you're already late, it can be managed through dealing with your thoughts. And we've already spoken about how to master your thoughts and emotions in general. The idea is to reframe it or to look at it from another perspective. Once you're already late and there's nothing that can be done, it doesn't add anything to the situation to think that way. Instead, you think, okay, I'll arrive at X amount of time. It just means I'll show a plate for the meeting dot and then not going through the pain of having those thoughts in circles. So there's sometimes where we can't escape or reframe. This was an easy example with being late. But when something a lot bigger happens, when you have a huge cause for disappointment or anger or something that really triggers these emotions in you, you might not be able to use cognitive reframing and reframing your thoughts to process your emotions in such moments. The only way is through. The only way is to actually deal with them and move through them. I know that this is something I struggled with a lot in the past. Whenever I had an emotion I didn't want to be having, such as frustration or anger or upsetness or sadness, I would want to avoid it. And this doesn't really work because the emotion is sending a signal to your body. It's saying something is off, something is wrong, something needs to be solved. It's trying to communicate something to you. And if you constantly ignore it or push it aside, it will come back. And I realized at one point that this was counterproductive. So I went through the emotion. What does it mean to go through the emotion? Step number one is to notice where it shows up in your body. Just start to notice is the anger in your chest or your throat. Start to feel it in your stomach, your body, where does it come up? And if you're not used to noticing where your emotion comes up, this might be a bit of a new exercise and you might struggle, so it might take you a while to identify. But the more you start to pay attention where does the emotion show up in your body? The more you'll start to feel it and notice it. This is the very first step. Once you've noticed where it is in your body and how it's showing up, put all of your attention on it. Just really feel it. Don't focus on your thoughts, don't focus on anything. Just really feel where your emotion is in your body and then accept it. This is something else we all have a tendency to do, which is to negate or get annoyed or want to push away that emotion and instead just accept it. Okay, I'm feeling anger. Don't justify it. Don't say you shouldn't be feeling angry or don't say it's normal that you're feeling angry. Just accept, okay, you're feeling sad or angry or disappointed or annoyed and it's showing up in my body here. Those are the first few steps, noticing it and accepting it. And these take practice. Noticing and accepting also takes quite a bit of practice. Once you've done this, breathe, literally, just breathe. Take really deep breath through the stomach, through the chest, and out through the mouth. And do this for as long as the emotion persists. If you're in a situation where maybe you're talking with someone or you're in a meeting and you can't really step away from it, just try and focus on your breath and the feeling in your body and just doing this for a while. Even though you might be in conversation. This might be tricky if it's the first time that you're practicing it, but once you're used to regularly noticing where your emotion is accepting it, breathing, you'll be able to do it even when you're in conversation with people. I know because I've done it, and I didn't used to be able to either. But it's great practice. And once you've able to do it outside of conversations and on your own, then you're also able to implement it in conversations. So once you've noticed, accept and breathe through it, see what happens next. And if it's a huge emotion, it might not go away, so it might stay there. And if that's the case, it means that something quite big is there, or quite blocked, or it's something that needs to be worked on deeper. So to work on your emotional management and energy, like I mentioned, these tools of notice, accept and breathe through, they're good. If something suddenly happens, you suddenly get a shock, or you suddenly get annoyed about something. But if it's something that's bigger, maybe you're going through a whole work transition and you're feeling very stressed about it for weeks, or you're going through separation or something that's just bigger, then to work on your emotions really means to work on them. And that means with a therapist or journaling or discussing it or anything that can really help you to go to the root cause. And it's important to do this because otherwise it builds up. So addressing these sort of long term emotions that are there again, going through them, not ignoring, not pushing aside, but talking through it with a therapist or hypnotherapist or journaling about it until you feel that you have some sort of closure, and the emotion thinks, okay, I've sent out the signal. I've sent out what I needed to say. You understood the message, now we could close the chapter and we can all move on. To summarize, emotional energy is to look at how are you processing your emotions on a daily basis, which is what I said with noticing your body accept, breathe, and then how are you processing your emotions long term for bigger things. And this is where extra deeper work such as journaling or therapy can help you to work on those. And one last aspect regarding emotional management is just start to notice what thoughts, situations, people, events make you feel the emotions you want to feel. If you want to feel more joy, what brings joy to your life? If you want to feel happier, what brings happiness? If you want to feel excitement, what brings excitement? And start to implement more of those things. And on the other hand, if certain things make you feel frustrated or upset or annoyed, like being late, then how can you avoid that? So you don't have those emotions. So it's looking at the root cause and having more of the things that fuel you and less of the things that drain you. Quick, quick overview once more, this time three tools in total. One, how do you manage your emotions on a daily basis? Notice, accept, breathe. How do you manage your emotions long term? The heavier, bigger things that are there journal therapy and other tools. And the last one, which is what fuels you have more of that and what drains you tod to simplify and eliminate that. Hope you've enjoyed this episode on emotional management. Emotional energy is absolutely massive. So I highly, highly, highly invite you to work on this topic because it might be the one topic you need to work on to take your energy to the next level. Thank you for tuning in today. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please write a review. It means the world to me. I know I repeat it in every episode, but it really makes a huge, huge difference, both for listeners who need to find this and for me to continue to work on this show. Thank you once more for tuning in and wishing you a great day.
[11:30] Thank you so much for tuning in today to the Focus Be show. I would absolutely love to hear your feedback, so let me know in an Apple review or YouTube comment what was most valuable for you, and feel free to share this episode with a friend or a family member. Wishing you a wonderful, magical and focused day ahead.