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Are you struggling to cope with discomfort and negative emotions in your daily life?
In this enlightening episode, Mande shares valuable insights on expanding your capacity for discomfort and embracing negative emotions as a path to personal growth and a meaningful life. By reframing your perspective on discomfort and learning to support yourself through challenging emotions, you'll discover how to thrive in the face of adversity.
What you'll learn:
Why trying to be happy all the time can actually decrease your happiness
The importance of not labeling emotions as "good" or "bad"
How to avoid identifying yourself as your emotions
Strategies for getting curious about your feelings and what they're trying to tell you
The power of validating your own emotions and those of others
"Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life." - Dr. Susan David
Throughout this episode, Mande shares personal stories and expert insights from psychologist Dr. Susan David to illustrate the transformative effects of embracing discomfort. By implementing the practical techniques discussed, you'll learn to allow, acknowledge, and accept negative emotions, ultimately moving through them with greater ease and resilience.
Useful Links Mentioned:
Free "The Discomfort" Workbook: https://www.learntothrivewithadhd.com/free-downloads
Whether you're dealing with anxiety, anger, sadness, or any other challenging emotion, this episode provides a roadmap for expanding your comfort zone and thriving in the face of discomfort. Subscribe for more inspiring stories and practical strategies to navigate life's challenges with greater ease and purpose.
Share your experiences and breakthroughs with us in the comments or on our social media channels. We're here to support you on your journey to emotional well-being and personal growth!
Remember: Discomfort is not something to be avoided, but rather an opportunity for growth and self-discovery. By learning to embrace and learn from negative emotions, you'll unlock your full potential and create a life of greater meaning and fulfillment.
#EmbraceDiscomfort #EmotionalResilience #PersonalGrowth #MentalWellness #NegativeEmotions #SelfCompassion #MeaningfulLife #ThrivingWithADHD
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Click here to read the transcript:
All right. Well, welcome back. This is episode 40. What we're talking about this week is expanding your capacity for discomfort. And this is going to sound a little crazy to some of you, like, why would you want to expand your capacity for discomfort? Why would you want to be uncomfortable at all? I'm sure it doesn't sound very attractive, but this is something I'm working on with clients right now.
I'm working on personally right now. I think every time we get to a new stage of growth, we have to continually expand our capacity or our ability to deal with discomfort. So I am here to make a case for that today and give you ways to do that until you why it's important. So you might say, Mandy, I have enough discomfort
So if you're one of the people that feel like you have enough discomfort, you might even think things like, I just want to be happy. I've been thinking about this subject for a few weeks now, and I was listening to a podcast this morning with Dr. Susan David on it, and she's a psychologist and an author, and what she was talking about in that was toxic positivity.
And I've heard this product before, but the way that she explained it was just really good. And I want to share that idea with you here today. But she brought up the point that it's been studied that when people try to be happy, their happiness actually decreases over time. It's so interesting. It's like when we try to sleep, it's more difficult to sleep.
I actually heard something today from a ADHD sleep specialist who said they did a study where they had a cash prize for who could get to sleep first and nobody could get to sleep because the stakes were so high to get to sleep. So that's that's an interesting example there. But what if feelings aren't good or bad? Positive or negative?
We were taught this in coaching certification, and for me that was really enlightening. I not only had a very limited idea of what my feelings were, but also that, you know, there were good ones and there were bad ones. There were ways I should feel in ways I shouldn't Feel.
When I'm working with a lot of my clients, what I'm really working on, and this is from personal experience and from from working with many people on it, is to not make our negative feelings a problem and not make our negative thoughts a problem. As soon as we make them a problem, they just get bigger.
So for this it might be personally, for me it was anxiety. I struggled with anxiety basically my whole life, especially being ADHD, hyperactive. You not only have that physical energy, but if you can't deal with that physical energy in some way, it can turn into anxiety. And that was my experience anyway. But anxiety was a daily emotion for me only got worse when I started having kids.
The pressures of that of keeping up with the world. It was a good portion of my day that I was anxious. And you know, when you have kids and family, you're worried about them. And there's just so much to worry about in the world. And this worry would just get out of hand. It would get to where my brain would catastrophize about things.
So however her possible, what I would do was try to make the anxiety stop, push it down or numb it somehow. And that was never dealing with it. And for you, this might be anger, sadness, stress, depression, frustration, humiliation, overwhelm. There's lots of negative emotions, right? Bad emotions. There are things we don't want to feel. But when this is made a problem, like I said earlier, it just gets bigger and bigger.
And that was my experience. Once I got anxious about being anxious or decided I shouldn't be feeling anxious, I just got more and more anxious and then it just kind of snowballed out of control. And I apologize if you guys can hear the cat crying outside the door. He really thinks he should be fed right now and nobody's nobody's home.
So I don't mean to go on a tangent there, but if you're hearing him meow constantly, that's what's going on. But yes, when we make the emotion a problem, it's only going to grow. When we try to push it away, it's only going to grow. A lot of times I explain it like holding a beach ball underwater. There's only so much that you can so long in that you can do that and there's only so much effort you can put into it before you have to just let it pop back up.
And when it pops back up, it really pops back up right?
So I've talked about this before in previous videos about labeling myself as an anxious person. But in Dr. Susan Davis, David's sorry, it is David's TEDTalk, which I highly recommend you checking out. She talked about the difference between I am anxious, for example, or I'm noticing. I'm feeling anxious when we make our self anxious, we identify as anxious.
Then it really takes away our power. I know that's what it did for me. I really felt like I had no control over my anxiety. It just happened to me and there wasn't much I could do about it. But when I just noticed that I was feeling anxious. As soon as I realized the day I remember where I was standing, I always kind of do this with with like, big epiphanies around coaching.
But when I realized, I am identifying as an anxious person, that is a choice that I'm making. I could feel my shoulders drop, I could feel myself relax. All of a sudden I was empowered and I was 50% less anxious. There on. And it was just that shift in identity where it's like, okay, I am not anxiety, I am not an anxious person, therefore there is nothing I can do.
What I am is feeling the feeling of anxiety, which is normal, and many people feel it and then it opens up this whole world to start asking questions. So we created a workbook for you so don't feel like you have to jot these questions down. Just kind of plant seeds in your brain for right now and you can go and get the workbook it's at.
WW You learn to thrive with ADHD, Tor.com, backslash, free dash downloads and it should be depending on when you're listening to this. It should be right there at the top, but it should be name to something about expanding your capacity for discomfort. So now not only are you identifying as this emotion when you're saying I am, fill in the blank.
But as I said it, it opens up your world. Now you have space to get curious about it. Ask yourself, why might you be feeling this emotion? What is this emotion trying to tell you? Why might it be perfectly normal to feel this way in this moment? And if you're familiar with the three, I think the four ends that I've talked about in the past, I am kind of taking you through that.
We are noticing we're normalizing, but it's just done in a different way where you can really I suggest that you write this out, but well, we'll talk about different ways that you can do this. What other emotions are you feeling? Simultaneous, feel simultaneously. Let me say that again too often and I've had coaching on this where I'm feeling multiple emotions at once, but without the coach being there to help me through the idea that I was feeling these things.
And she actually asked me this question What else are you feeling? And without that, I would just maybe just feel sad or feel mad or just feel hurt and not not understand the nuance and the layers of what else was going on so that I could deal with it. So that is an important question, not only for that reason, the layers, you know, maybe you're feeling angry and sad and, you know, mad at all.
I guess Matt and angry are the same, but at the same time. But you might also be feeling peaceful in certain ways.
What would you tell the person you love the most about having this emotion? If you wanted to be careful about not involve dating their emotions? The reason I say it that way is a lot of times, even with our friends, our partners, our children, people we love most in the world, our family members,
We often with the best intentions, will invalidate their feelings. We will not want our kids to be sad. We'll tell them they they don't need to be or they shouldn't feel that way in different ways. We'll say that if our partners feel in a certain way, we might tell them that that's not true.
We want to be careful not to invalidate our own feelings as well.
and ways that we can do this to ourselves and validate our feelings, as we might say, we shouldn't feel that way because or and that's really the biggest one, some form of we shouldn't feel that way.
So I had a client a while ago that loved his wife dearly but was frustrated with their communication. And I have to tell you, about half the men that I work with are coming into coaching because they want to be better partners.
And this was the case for this person as well. He would tell me a scenario that would happen and he just couldn't understand why the situation would escalate. He felt that these things were usually simple things, and over a few sessions he described these scenarios and I saw a pattern. I suggested that he try saying, I understand how you feel that way.
And of course, his immediate response was, But I don't like I don't I don't understand these things at all. It's not a big deal. It's not something that people should get upset over and so I explained to him, yes, but she does think it's a big deal and she is upset. So can you understand how this is upsetting to her?
That was the difference there, Right. And so he got it. He was like, okay, yes, I can see the pattern of her getting upset over things that I think are small. And I can see how these things are upsetting to her. And so I, you know, gave him the tool. And so, of course, you know, like he said, because he had plenty of evidence over this over time that these things were upsetting to her.
He went away with this tool. And one of the scenarios popped up in while they were in the car. And that was kind of one of the worst things for him when they were kind of trapped in a car and it escalated to an argument or a long discussion or something. And so he listened. And what he said is, I understand how you would feel that way.
And she stopped and she said, thank you. That's that's all I needed something along those lines. And that was the end of the subject. And he thought that that was so powerful of a tool.
but all he was actually doing was validating her feelings, and that was all that she wanted. And so he got what he wanted because this didn't turn into a big fight or a long discussion. And she got what she wanted because he did understand and was verbalizing why she would feel that way.
And he now understood that he didn't have to agree and feel the same way. He could feel differently, but understand why she would feel that way. And so everyone was happy. And I tell you the story because we so much need to do this for ourselves. You know, we need to validate our feelings. Why? Why is it completely normal that we would feel that way and we might have to look out to other people?
Why might it be normal for somebody else to feel that way? Okay, well, can I give myself that same grace that I'm feeling this negative emotion? So now if someone says to you, I'm a terrible person, of course the response is not going to be, I can see how you would feel that way, but what a good response might be and kind of to yourself as well, like we are.
We're doing this as in your work, but also it's it's our communication skills as well, isn't it? But another response might be, you know, tell me what happened or tell me more or what makes you say that? Or gosh, sometimes I feel that way, too. What's what's going on with you? So just ways to, like, open up to communication, validate the experience.
But we also need to be doing this internally. And so you can see how this all allows us to get curious about our feelings rather than judge them and try to shove them down. And that's going to make them just shrink. They actually say that our negative emotions, if we just breathe into them and feel them and we're going to go through all the steps of what you can do here.
But if we allow them, basically they only last for about 90 seconds. They come and they go, but when we don't allow them, they just kind of stay. I always describe to my clients like it's like I used to, I used to teach. I was a full time substitute teacher. I was not a teacher or teacher, but I was in the classrooms long term.
And whenever it was like the younger kids, like fourth grade down, especially like first graders, they would come and they'd be like, teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher. And they're pulling. I don't know if you can see that in the background. They pull your sleeve or. And so what I would do is I because that was a annoying experience to me.
And so what I would do is I would teach them because it was always when I was having a conversation with another student or an adult or something like that, I would teach them to just put their hand on the desk. And but that's what our emotions are like is it's just going to keep tugging at you. It's just going to keep coming back until you pay attention.
And you you follow the steps that I'm going to talk about here. Okay. So, again, if if you're driving or whatever, no worries, learn to thrive with ADHD, tor.com, backslash, free dash downloads and you can get the workbook there. But number one is allow and acknowledge and I put a few of these together because I don't think we need to complicate it, but I think allow and acknowledge go together.
Because if you're acknowledging it, then you get the opportunity to allow it. Right. So what am I feeling right now? Sometimes you just feel bad and you're not real clear on what that means. So allow and acknowledged number one. Number two, get curious so you can ask yourself the questions that we talked about. You can talk this out with a trusted person or a coach or a therapist or, you know, whatever, whoever you talk things out with or a friend, you can journal about these things.
You can write these questions down. And just when I if you do write it down, what I want you to do is make sure you're getting very, very honest. If you have to burn the paper, I tell my clients, you have to burn it or you have to shred it. Whatever you need to do, get get very honest when you're answering your curiosity questions that I gave you earlier and then expect and accept.
I have for number three, expect that you're going to have negative emotions and accept them when they come. You are going to get angry when your boundaries are pushed or when you feel violated in some way. You're going to get sad for various reasons. You're going to get anxious, you're going to you know, I can't even think of of the other emotions that we deem negative right now.
But these things are going to happen and they could happen every day and they likely will. And that is completely normal. And I think too often, like I said before, it's my favorite thing to say when we make it a problem and then they get bigger. So that's except right, let's not make it a problem and then move through or take it with you.
So either sit with it and sitting part A sitting with it is like, okay, why is it completely normal that I would feel this way? And that might be part of moving through with part of my moving through with it, for you might just be breathing or meditating on it or whatever you need to do. But if it's something like grief or an anger that, that you know, you can't quite let go of yet or something like that, you might just have to take it with you.
A very good example of this is I've been talking to a client about doing exactly what I'm doing here, right? Not exactly, but putting himself out there on on YouTube. And it's something he's having difficulty with. And why is he having that difficulty? Because of fear. And what I'm trying to express is you just have to take the fear with you.
Yes, it's frightening to put yourself out there, but you just have to be scared and do it anyway. And the example that the same client uses that resonates with me very well because I was always in the swimming pool as a kid and I was a lifeguard. And but he talks about jumping off the high dive and then it's always scary.
And I was like, you know, for some people they might get past that. But for me that really resonates because it didn't matter how many times I climbed up to the diving board, it didn't matter how many times I jumped off. I was always scared, but I was willing to do it anyway. Scared. And I never got less scared.
It was more like every time I was surprised that I didn't die again. Anxious. Scared. But it never got less scary. But I wanted to do it because it was fun and because in some ways it was fun, right? There was both emotions going on. It was terrifying and it was fun and other kids were doing it and it was something to do with the pool.
But that's a good example of like taking it with you. So if it's grief, you might just feel it, you know, just take it with you throughout your day. You're just going to feel grief throughout the day and that's okay. All right. So again, let's go through those real quick. Number one, allow or acknowledge. Number two, get curious.
Number three, expect and accept. And number four, move through or take it with you. Sometimes just sitting with the feeling or that 90 seconds or whatever, you will just move through it. All right, that does happen. But don't don't expect that to happen or try to make it happen if that's not going to work. Right. So discomfort, why are we talking about all this today?
Right. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. And that's back to Dr. Susan David. That was a quote from I believe from her talk, that TED talk. But we're also taught in coaching certification that anything worth doing is going to come with discomfort. And I've been shown that to be true for my clients and myself over and over again.
I'm always warning clients that any change is going to cause discomfort
so that they aren't surprised and they don't make it mean something's gone wrong when they are scared or when they are feeling any discomfort that comes up. Because too often what will make it mean is we've made a mistake because this doesn't feel good.
Therefore, I need to stop and go back to where it feels good. But what if, like the diving board example, it just never goes away? What if discomfort never goes away? But you do have examples in life where you're like, Yes, this was uncomfortable at first and now it's gotten easy. There are those examples, but if you are continually growing, you're always going to be in discomfort always and don't.
Isn't that what you want? Don't you want to be continually growing? I think we all do. Do some of us stop? Yes, but that's what makes them unhappy. That's what puts them in pain, is that they've stopped growing. So if you want the life you logically want, you know, you want the life where you're constantly growing, you're going to always be uncomfortable.
So if we're going to accept the discomfort is going to be there. And as we grow, we are going to grow our capacity for dealing with the discomfort.
Not only are we going to do it that way, but by things like this and other people that you learn from, you're going to learn new ways to expand your capacity for discomfort. If if that is the price of the life you want, are you willing to expand your capacity for discomfort in order to get it?
so an action item.
I love action items when I'm working with my clients is what can you do today to practice feeling discomfort and support yourself through that? If you're feeling that discomfort, ask yourself the questions. Now we're going to go through. There's a lot of episodes coming up. I've been really like writing down my ideas and my thoughts, and there's a lot of episodes coming up about people are waiting for you to put your your value into the world, and that is scary and uncomfortable.
There's an episode coming up about reinvention and like, who do you really want to be in this next part of your life? And that's very uncomfortable, like a metamorphosis, right? So, yes, pick your thing that's going to make you uncomfortable. It can be very small at first. If anything big is is just too much for you. We're just working on the skill of expanding our discomfort.
Right. So start small if you need to, but I want you to make sure that you're uncomfortable in a good way every day, and you're going to be practicing expanding that discomfort for yourself and these other tools as well as far as accepting and expecting and getting curious. But we're put all these things together to expand your discomfort, and that is what I have for you today.
Again, thank you guys for being here. And I will see you next week.
All right. Well, welcome back. This is episode 40. What we're talking about this week is expanding your capacity for discomfort. And this is going to sound a little crazy to some of you, like, why would you want to expand your capacity for discomfort? Why would you want to be uncomfortable at all? I'm sure it doesn't sound very attractive, but this is something I'm working on with clients right now.
I'm working on personally right now. I think every time we get to a new stage of growth, we have to continually expand our capacity or our ability to deal with discomfort. So I am here to make a case for that today and give you ways to do that until you why it's important. So you might say, Mandy, I have enough discomfort
So if you're one of the people that feel like you have enough discomfort, you might even think things like, I just want to be happy. I've been thinking about this subject for a few weeks now, and I was listening to a podcast this morning with Dr. Susan David on it, and she's a psychologist and an author, and what she was talking about in that was toxic positivity.
And I've heard this product before, but the way that she explained it was just really good. And I want to share that idea with you here today. But she brought up the point that it's been studied that when people try to be happy, their happiness actually decreases over time. It's so interesting. It's like when we try to sleep, it's more difficult to sleep.
I actually heard something today from a ADHD sleep specialist who said they did a study where they had a cash prize for who could get to sleep first and nobody could get to sleep because the stakes were so high to get to sleep. So that's that's an interesting example there. But what if feelings aren't good or bad? Positive or negative?
We were taught this in coaching certification, and for me that was really enlightening. I not only had a very limited idea of what my feelings were, but also that, you know, there were good ones and there were bad ones. There were ways I should feel in ways I shouldn't Feel.
When I'm working with a lot of my clients, what I'm really working on, and this is from personal experience and from from working with many people on it, is to not make our negative feelings a problem and not make our negative thoughts a problem. As soon as we make them a problem, they just get bigger.
So for this it might be personally, for me it was anxiety. I struggled with anxiety basically my whole life, especially being ADHD, hyperactive. You not only have that physical energy, but if you can't deal with that physical energy in some way, it can turn into anxiety. And that was my experience anyway. But anxiety was a daily emotion for me only got worse when I started having kids.
The pressures of that of keeping up with the world. It was a good portion of my day that I was anxious. And you know, when you have kids and family, you're worried about them. And there's just so much to worry about in the world. And this worry would just get out of hand. It would get to where my brain would catastrophize about things.
So however her possible, what I would do was try to make the anxiety stop, push it down or numb it somehow. And that was never dealing with it. And for you, this might be anger, sadness, stress, depression, frustration, humiliation, overwhelm. There's lots of negative emotions, right? Bad emotions. There are things we don't want to feel. But when this is made a problem, like I said earlier, it just gets bigger and bigger.
And that was my experience. Once I got anxious about being anxious or decided I shouldn't be feeling anxious, I just got more and more anxious and then it just kind of snowballed out of control. And I apologize if you guys can hear the cat crying outside the door. He really thinks he should be fed right now and nobody's nobody's home.
So I don't mean to go on a tangent there, but if you're hearing him meow constantly, that's what's going on. But yes, when we make the emotion a problem, it's only going to grow. When we try to push it away, it's only going to grow. A lot of times I explain it like holding a beach ball underwater. There's only so much that you can so long in that you can do that and there's only so much effort you can put into it before you have to just let it pop back up.
And when it pops back up, it really pops back up right?
So I've talked about this before in previous videos about labeling myself as an anxious person. But in Dr. Susan Davis, David's sorry, it is David's TEDTalk, which I highly recommend you checking out. She talked about the difference between I am anxious, for example, or I'm noticing. I'm feeling anxious when we make our self anxious, we identify as anxious.
Then it really takes away our power. I know that's what it did for me. I really felt like I had no control over my anxiety. It just happened to me and there wasn't much I could do about it. But when I just noticed that I was feeling anxious. As soon as I realized the day I remember where I was standing, I always kind of do this with with like, big epiphanies around coaching.
But when I realized, I am identifying as an anxious person, that is a choice that I'm making. I could feel my shoulders drop, I could feel myself relax. All of a sudden I was empowered and I was 50% less anxious. There on. And it was just that shift in identity where it's like, okay, I am not anxiety, I am not an anxious person, therefore there is nothing I can do.
What I am is feeling the feeling of anxiety, which is normal, and many people feel it and then it opens up this whole world to start asking questions. So we created a workbook for you so don't feel like you have to jot these questions down. Just kind of plant seeds in your brain for right now and you can go and get the workbook it's at.
WW You learn to thrive with ADHD, Tor.com, backslash, free dash downloads and it should be depending on when you're listening to this. It should be right there at the top, but it should be name to something about expanding your capacity for discomfort. So now not only are you identifying as this emotion when you're saying I am, fill in the blank.
But as I said it, it opens up your world. Now you have space to get curious about it. Ask yourself, why might you be feeling this emotion? What is this emotion trying to tell you? Why might it be perfectly normal to feel this way in this moment? And if you're familiar with the three, I think the four ends that I've talked about in the past, I am kind of taking you through that.
We are noticing we're normalizing, but it's just done in a different way where you can really I suggest that you write this out, but well, we'll talk about different ways that you can do this. What other emotions are you feeling? Simultaneous, feel simultaneously. Let me say that again too often and I've had coaching on this where I'm feeling multiple emotions at once, but without the coach being there to help me through the idea that I was feeling these things.
And she actually asked me this question What else are you feeling? And without that, I would just maybe just feel sad or feel mad or just feel hurt and not not understand the nuance and the layers of what else was going on so that I could deal with it. So that is an important question, not only for that reason, the layers, you know, maybe you're feeling angry and sad and, you know, mad at all.
I guess Matt and angry are the same, but at the same time. But you might also be feeling peaceful in certain ways.
What would you tell the person you love the most about having this emotion? If you wanted to be careful about not involve dating their emotions? The reason I say it that way is a lot of times, even with our friends, our partners, our children, people we love most in the world, our family members,
We often with the best intentions, will invalidate their feelings. We will not want our kids to be sad. We'll tell them they they don't need to be or they shouldn't feel that way in different ways. We'll say that if our partners feel in a certain way, we might tell them that that's not true.
We want to be careful not to invalidate our own feelings as well.
and ways that we can do this to ourselves and validate our feelings, as we might say, we shouldn't feel that way because or and that's really the biggest one, some form of we shouldn't feel that way.
So I had a client a while ago that loved his wife dearly but was frustrated with their communication. And I have to tell you, about half the men that I work with are coming into coaching because they want to be better partners.
And this was the case for this person as well. He would tell me a scenario that would happen and he just couldn't understand why the situation would escalate. He felt that these things were usually simple things, and over a few sessions he described these scenarios and I saw a pattern. I suggested that he try saying, I understand how you feel that way.
And of course, his immediate response was, But I don't like I don't I don't understand these things at all. It's not a big deal. It's not something that people should get upset over and so I explained to him, yes, but she does think it's a big deal and she is upset. So can you understand how this is upsetting to her?
That was the difference there, Right. And so he got it. He was like, okay, yes, I can see the pattern of her getting upset over things that I think are small. And I can see how these things are upsetting to her. And so I, you know, gave him the tool. And so, of course, you know, like he said, because he had plenty of evidence over this over time that these things were upsetting to her.
He went away with this tool. And one of the scenarios popped up in while they were in the car. And that was kind of one of the worst things for him when they were kind of trapped in a car and it escalated to an argument or a long discussion or something. And so he listened. And what he said is, I understand how you would feel that way.
And she stopped and she said, thank you. That's that's all I needed something along those lines. And that was the end of the subject. And he thought that that was so powerful of a tool.
but all he was actually doing was validating her feelings, and that was all that she wanted. And so he got what he wanted because this didn't turn into a big fight or a long discussion. And she got what she wanted because he did understand and was verbalizing why she would feel that way.
And he now understood that he didn't have to agree and feel the same way. He could feel differently, but understand why she would feel that way. And so everyone was happy. And I tell you the story because we so much need to do this for ourselves. You know, we need to validate our feelings. Why? Why is it completely normal that we would feel that way and we might have to look out to other people?
Why might it be normal for somebody else to feel that way? Okay, well, can I give myself that same grace that I'm feeling this negative emotion? So now if someone says to you, I'm a terrible person, of course the response is not going to be, I can see how you would feel that way, but what a good response might be and kind of to yourself as well, like we are.
We're doing this as in your work, but also it's it's our communication skills as well, isn't it? But another response might be, you know, tell me what happened or tell me more or what makes you say that? Or gosh, sometimes I feel that way, too. What's what's going on with you? So just ways to, like, open up to communication, validate the experience.
But we also need to be doing this internally. And so you can see how this all allows us to get curious about our feelings rather than judge them and try to shove them down. And that's going to make them just shrink. They actually say that our negative emotions, if we just breathe into them and feel them and we're going to go through all the steps of what you can do here.
But if we allow them, basically they only last for about 90 seconds. They come and they go, but when we don't allow them, they just kind of stay. I always describe to my clients like it's like I used to, I used to teach. I was a full time substitute teacher. I was not a teacher or teacher, but I was in the classrooms long term.
And whenever it was like the younger kids, like fourth grade down, especially like first graders, they would come and they'd be like, teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher. And they're pulling. I don't know if you can see that in the background. They pull your sleeve or. And so what I would do is I because that was a annoying experience to me.
And so what I would do is I would teach them because it was always when I was having a conversation with another student or an adult or something like that, I would teach them to just put their hand on the desk. And but that's what our emotions are like is it's just going to keep tugging at you. It's just going to keep coming back until you pay attention.
And you you follow the steps that I'm going to talk about here. Okay. So, again, if if you're driving or whatever, no worries, learn to thrive with ADHD, tor.com, backslash, free dash downloads and you can get the workbook there. But number one is allow and acknowledge and I put a few of these together because I don't think we need to complicate it, but I think allow and acknowledge go together.
Because if you're acknowledging it, then you get the opportunity to allow it. Right. So what am I feeling right now? Sometimes you just feel bad and you're not real clear on what that means. So allow and acknowledged number one. Number two, get curious so you can ask yourself the questions that we talked about. You can talk this out with a trusted person or a coach or a therapist or, you know, whatever, whoever you talk things out with or a friend, you can journal about these things.
You can write these questions down. And just when I if you do write it down, what I want you to do is make sure you're getting very, very honest. If you have to burn the paper, I tell my clients, you have to burn it or you have to shred it. Whatever you need to do, get get very honest when you're answering your curiosity questions that I gave you earlier and then expect and accept.
I have for number three, expect that you're going to have negative emotions and accept them when they come. You are going to get angry when your boundaries are pushed or when you feel violated in some way. You're going to get sad for various reasons. You're going to get anxious, you're going to you know, I can't even think of of the other emotions that we deem negative right now.
But these things are going to happen and they could happen every day and they likely will. And that is completely normal. And I think too often, like I said before, it's my favorite thing to say when we make it a problem and then they get bigger. So that's except right, let's not make it a problem and then move through or take it with you.
So either sit with it and sitting part A sitting with it is like, okay, why is it completely normal that I would feel this way? And that might be part of moving through with part of my moving through with it, for you might just be breathing or meditating on it or whatever you need to do. But if it's something like grief or an anger that, that you know, you can't quite let go of yet or something like that, you might just have to take it with you.
A very good example of this is I've been talking to a client about doing exactly what I'm doing here, right? Not exactly, but putting himself out there on on YouTube. And it's something he's having difficulty with. And why is he having that difficulty? Because of fear. And what I'm trying to express is you just have to take the fear with you.
Yes, it's frightening to put yourself out there, but you just have to be scared and do it anyway. And the example that the same client uses that resonates with me very well because I was always in the swimming pool as a kid and I was a lifeguard. And but he talks about jumping off the high dive and then it's always scary.
And I was like, you know, for some people they might get past that. But for me that really resonates because it didn't matter how many times I climbed up to the diving board, it didn't matter how many times I jumped off. I was always scared, but I was willing to do it anyway. Scared. And I never got less scared.
It was more like every time I was surprised that I didn't die again. Anxious. Scared. But it never got less scary. But I wanted to do it because it was fun and because in some ways it was fun, right? There was both emotions going on. It was terrifying and it was fun and other kids were doing it and it was something to do with the pool.
But that's a good example of like taking it with you. So if it's grief, you might just feel it, you know, just take it with you throughout your day. You're just going to feel grief throughout the day and that's okay. All right. So again, let's go through those real quick. Number one, allow or acknowledge. Number two, get curious.
Number three, expect and accept. And number four, move through or take it with you. Sometimes just sitting with the feeling or that 90 seconds or whatever, you will just move through it. All right, that does happen. But don't don't expect that to happen or try to make it happen if that's not going to work. Right. So discomfort, why are we talking about all this today?
Right. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life. And that's back to Dr. Susan David. That was a quote from I believe from her talk, that TED talk. But we're also taught in coaching certification that anything worth doing is going to come with discomfort. And I've been shown that to be true for my clients and myself over and over again.
I'm always warning clients that any change is going to cause discomfort
so that they aren't surprised and they don't make it mean something's gone wrong when they are scared or when they are feeling any discomfort that comes up. Because too often what will make it mean is we've made a mistake because this doesn't feel good.
Therefore, I need to stop and go back to where it feels good. But what if, like the diving board example, it just never goes away? What if discomfort never goes away? But you do have examples in life where you're like, Yes, this was uncomfortable at first and now it's gotten easy. There are those examples, but if you are continually growing, you're always going to be in discomfort always and don't.
Isn't that what you want? Don't you want to be continually growing? I think we all do. Do some of us stop? Yes, but that's what makes them unhappy. That's what puts them in pain, is that they've stopped growing. So if you want the life you logically want, you know, you want the life where you're constantly growing, you're going to always be uncomfortable.
So if we're going to accept the discomfort is going to be there. And as we grow, we are going to grow our capacity for dealing with the discomfort.
Not only are we going to do it that way, but by things like this and other people that you learn from, you're going to learn new ways to expand your capacity for discomfort. If if that is the price of the life you want, are you willing to expand your capacity for discomfort in order to get it?
so an action item.
I love action items when I'm working with my clients is what can you do today to practice feeling discomfort and support yourself through that? If you're feeling that discomfort, ask yourself the questions. Now we're going to go through. There's a lot of episodes coming up. I've been really like writing down my ideas and my thoughts, and there's a lot of episodes coming up about people are waiting for you to put your your value into the world, and that is scary and uncomfortable.
There's an episode coming up about reinvention and like, who do you really want to be in this next part of your life? And that's very uncomfortable, like a metamorphosis, right? So, yes, pick your thing that's going to make you uncomfortable. It can be very small at first. If anything big is is just too much for you. We're just working on the skill of expanding our discomfort.
Right. So start small if you need to, but I want you to make sure that you're uncomfortable in a good way every day, and you're going to be practicing expanding that discomfort for yourself and these other tools as well as far as accepting and expecting and getting curious. But we're put all these things together to expand your discomfort, and that is what I have for you today.
Again, thank you guys for being here. And I will see you next week.