Ep #93: Two Types of Emotions

Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching. Now, your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

Hello, hello, my friends. Hello, my little friends. I just got back from meeting with my coach, Frank Kern. One of my buddies in there, Bruno, is from Brazil. Frank always makes him say in his accent, "Say hello to my little friend." It just makes us all laugh so hard. Frank is hilarious.

Anyway, it was my last ... I know that a lot of you have been listening to this podcast for a while. It was my last meeting with him. I signed up for a year-long program with Frank last December. This was my last meeting with him in our mastermind. What I have learned from then until now is unbelievable and my takeaways and how much I've grown. I am incredibly grateful and gracious to Frank. He wasn't having any of it. I kept telling him how grateful I was and how he really changed the trajectory of my life and he just laughs and makes jokes, which of course, I love.

Anyway, I am so happy to be back and I'm so happy to have had that experience with him and I'm looking for other amazing mastermind opportunities and really thrilled with some of the ideas that I have and some mentors that I'm excited to work with. I know that 2016 is going to be an amazing, amazing year so I am looking forward to it, but also enjoying this moment.

What I want to do here is talk to you all about this idea of there being two types of emotions. There's many types of emotions, but you can categorize them however you want. One of the ways I like to categorize them is energy producing or energy depleting. The reason why I think this is useful, this isn't always a useful categorization, but it's useful when you are deciding what emotions you want to generate in order to create the results you want in your life.

If you are brand new to this podcast and this is the very first one that you're listening to, you might be a little bit lost when I start describing some of this stuff. I'm going to give you a short review. I want to recommend anyone who's listening to the podcast that you go back and listen to the first ten or so where I really review the basics. I think it will help all of this make a lot more sense.

What I want to offer here is that all of our feelings come from our mind. We think thoughts and that creates a feeling. When we discover this, it's very exciting because we realize that we can change how we're feeling. What I notice is that a lot of people would then start creating feelings that they thought they would want to feel, but those feelings weren't necessarily getting them the results they want.

Let me give you an example. Somebody might start generating the feeling of peace. They want to start thinking in a peaceful way and they want to start feeling peaceful. Nothing wrong with that. I'm all for a little peace. Peace of mind anytime. Here's the thing. If you're in the middle of creating a business, if you're in the middle of growing a practice, peace is probably not going to be the fuel for that creation. Now, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't feel peaceful. You should, but that's not the emotion that's going to generate the work that needs to happen to create that business.

A lot of times, what I'll tell my clients to do is to generate three main feelings on a daily basis. If you're trying to build a business and your feelings that you're generating are let's say easy, peaceful, and gratified, you are going to run into some trouble when it comes to that. Those feelings do not create a lot of energy. In fact, they can dissipate a lot of negative energy and have you hold less energy, but they're not going to provide you the fuel to do what you want to do.

You want to think about these two types of emotions: one being an energy generating emotion and one that doesn't generate energy. What emotions do you want to call on when you're trying to create the result you want? The whole idea of this comes from this concept. I teach this quite regularly to my clients when I'm coaching them, but I don't know that this is something that I've really thoroughly explained on the podcast.

Here's what it is. I was just coaching someone on it today. She wants to feel motivated and excited and confident. The way that she wants to feel that is by looking at the scale and having that number go down significantly and then she wants to feel motivated, inspired, and confident. What I told her was that the only thing that can generate emotion is our thought. Although she thinks that the scale going down significantly is causing that confidence, what's really causing the confidence is her thought, "This is working. I'm doing a good job. The results are here now. I'm going to keep doing this." She has those thoughts and then she feels confident. What I explained to her was that the way that results really work is not that we get the emotion after, but we have the emotion ahead of time. If I want a result in my life, I want to lose weight, I need to feel inspired, motivated, and confident before I need those emotions to fuel that result. In most cases, we are waiting for those emotions after the result.

Remember the model, your thoughts create your feelings, which create your actions which create your results. It does not say your results create your feelings. Yet, that's how most of us approach life. We go out there and we try to get the result so we can then have the feeling. The truth is we need to generate the emotion ahead of time. Here's the good news: I know how to do that and I'm teaching it to you. Most of us don't know how to generate emotion ahead of time, so we're constantly trying to create the result without the emotion and then try and get the emotion from the result that we're unable to create because we can't use the emotional fuel to create the result.

Here's what I mean. If my client who's waiting for the scale to go down already felt confident, already felt motivated, already felt inspired regardless of what that number did, she would never quit, she would keep moving forward, she would keep eating, exercising, taking care of herself. She would ultimately get that result she wants. It may not be within the time frame that she would want. Most of us want our time frame to be shorter. We overestimate what we can do in a short amount of time and we underestimate what we can do in a long period of time. If she felt those emotions already, she would never quit.

Most of us quit because we get discouraged. Why do we get discouraged? Because our results aren't providing us with the emotion we want. See what I'm saying? We think the result is discouraging, but really, it's our thought about the result that's discouraging.
When we are committed to feeling our emotions ahead of time, that is the number one indicator of the result we will create. You want to know what you will weigh next year? Think about what you will weigh next year? How do you feel about it? Are you confident? Then you probably know what you're going to weigh. If you're hopeful, if you're discouraged, if you're frustrated, you probably know what you're going to weigh. You hear what I'm saying? If you're discouraged, you're going to create a weight that isn't the weight you want and then you'll blame that discouragement on the weight, but really you will have created it. If you're confident about the weight that you'll be next year, you will think that maybe the weight is giving you the confidence, but really it's the confidence in that that's creating the weight for you.

If you want to know what your results will be, check with your emotions. If your emotions are energy producing, you will create that result in your life. If they're energy depleting, you will not create that result in your life. That is the way the world works, my friends. That is the only way it works. It doesn't feel that way, it doesn't seem that way, but that is absolutely the truth. The best predictor of your results is how you feel right now. I can always tell when my students are going to have successful businesses because they already feel successful. I can always tell when they're going to have successful weight loss because they already feel successful. They don't let any little setback discourage them from generating the emotion that they want to create. Your thoughts create your results by generating or depleting the energy you need to create them.

Here's what I mean by this and this for all of you guys that love the law of attraction and all of you that hate the law of attraction, here's what I want to teach you about the law of attraction. You don't just need to put something on a vision board and look at it. You need to put it on the vision board, look at it, and make sure your emotion matches the getting of it.

I've said many times, "You don't just put something on the vision board and then expect to get it." People say, "Well, I did. I put it on the vision board and then I got it." I say, "You must have felt pretty confident that you would get it. You must have really believed that you would get it. Then, you created that reality in your world." People that they put something on a vision board and don't believe it and don't get it, it's because they didn't believe it would work. Really, you have to go to work, folks. It's not just sit and wait in my room for the helicopter to appear. It's you sit in your room with a laptop and you go to work. Your thoughts create your results by generating or depleting the energy that you need to create those results.

Let's just talk briefly about those two types of emotions. What emotions do you want to create? Now, remember, how do we create emotions? By what we think and believe. I'm going to talk in a future episode of how to practice believing and how to practice thinking the thoughts you want to think that will create the emotion that you want. First, you need to decide what those emotions are.

Here are some of the emotions that I think are energy producing that I like to create: motivated, disciplined, excited, inspired, fascinated, intrigued, curious, engrossed, amazed, attentive, focused, courageous, energetic, optimistic, thrilled, exhilarated, communicative, active, vigorous, earnest, cooperative, productive, in the zone, honored, privileged, adaptable, reliable, dynamic, stable, composed. When I say "stable", the reason why that produces energy for me is because I hold steady through negativity. That may not feel like an energy producing, but it totally is. I'm like, "Bring it." I want you guys to think about a really strong wind coming at you. I got this. That's the kind of energy that I'm talking about. I want you guys to think about energy producing emotions that you want to feel on purpose, that you want to feel ahead of time, that you want to generate within you in order to create the result you want.

A lot of you spend time meditating and that's a beautiful thing to find a way to be present and be at peace. I'm going to talk more about that in the upcoming episodes. I want to also talk to you about just kind of letting emotion go. I also want to talk to you about the option of generating emotion, because I think that generating emotion is an advanced concept, but it is something that is 100% available to us.

When we stop being at the effect of our lives, when we stop reacting to whatever emotion our brain is providing us with, and we start really managing our brain and telling it what to focus on, we can use our brain to create the emotion that we want to feel to generate the result that we want in our lives. If you aren't feeling the way that you know you need to feel in order to get the result you want, do not pretend that you're going to get that result anyway because you won't. You have to create that result with that energy. If you're not feeling that emotion, that's on you 100%. You can feel sorry for yourself or you can feel upset or you can blame yourself. None of those are useful. What you can do is remember, "There are emotions I want to generate. I can create these emotions by what I think and I can discipline my mind to think on purpose these emotions that I want to create to get the result I want."

Now, I already hear some of you saying, "Well, that sounds very airy-fairy. That sounds like something I can't really do." What I want to offer you is that you go through the process that I've taught you. The first process is really being aware of what you're currently feeling. You do that by becoming aware of what's going on in your body and what's going on in your mind. What am I feeling? Why am I feeling that way? The reason I'm feeling that way is because of what I'm thinking. Really be aware of that. You can't skip the part where you access the feeling.

I've been working with quite a few people lately that say they don't know what they're feeling. You can't just stay in your head all the time, you can't just swap thoughts, you can't just play in the thought realm. You have to tap into your body and experience what that vibration is before you can even access the thought genuinely causing it. Once you're able to do that, once you're able to really feel your feelings even if they're very negative, then you can realize, "Are these feelings creating energy that can fuel my result or are these depleting my energy?"

One of the things that I want to offer is that sometimes emotions that seem negative can fuel results. You want to be careful with the result you're actively creating with your energy. If you are infuriated or irritated or enraged, those are energy producing emotions. You want to make sure that you recognize that those emotions will create a result in your life if you feel them. They will create something that you may not want in your life. Just notice that's an energy producing emotion.
Then, there's all these energy depleting emotions that so many of us indulge in. Confused is a great example of that. I think I run into more confused people than any other kind of person in the world. I think that the answer that I get most often is, "I don't know." Confusion is a completely energy depleting emotion and it's not useful and it totally blocks any wisdom that you have. That's a perfect example of one. Confused, unsure, that "I don't know" energy, that self pity, that feeling sorry for yourself, disheartened, despondent, cheerless, stumped. These types of emotions are going to deplete your energy. They are not going to generate the result you want, obviously.

Also, make sure that once you're aware of those energy depleting emotions, you find the thoughts, the patterns of thinking that are creating them. You really make that association clear. You understand the reason you're depressed, the reason you're disheartened, the reason you're doubtful, is not because of your results, it's not because of what's happening outside of you. It's because of what's happening inside of you. This is good news because you can change what you're thinking. You can change your pattern of thought in order to think in a way that generates the energy that you need to create the result you want.

All right, you guys. I hope that was really helpful. It's been really helpful for me to make that distinction between those two types and then to make sure, depending on the result I'm trying to create in my life, that I'm generating the right emotion to get the job done.

Let me know. You guys can come to the comments, TheLifeCoachSchool.com/93, and let me know what emotions you're trying to generate, you're wanting to generate in order to get the result you want. Have a wonderful, amazing week, everybody. I'll talk to you next week. Bye, bye.

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