Your emotions are raw data to work with -and how you ACT from them matters
There it was – a mental note I’d made while listening to a podcast months ago. All feelings are welcome, all behaviors are not. That one line was a big takeaway that I’d put on my Notes App on my phone months ago. It stopped me in my tracks and brought a big smile to my face. I imagined those very words on a front door mat.
Can you imagine arriving at someone’s front door and seeing a welcome mat declaring that all feelings are welcome; all behaviors are not?
It would probably make you chuckle, because clearly if you were to show up at your best friend’s house, you’d know yourself well enough to be operating on that principle anyway. Sure, you might feel a lot of mixed emotions during your visit, but you trust yourself enough not to behave poorly.
Yet the reality is that we forget about that emotional tango more than we realize. Most especially when we are at home, with our people.
Without the little guardrails to remind us to be on our best behavior, we often end up spilling all our feelings AND our unconscious habitual behaviors that accompany them without any discernment. We simply forget that all feelings are welcome AND all behaviors are not.
It was a podcast conversation between Dr. Marc Brackett, the founder of Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence and Dr. Ethan Kross, author of Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You, that offered that big takeaway I’d squirreled away on my Notes App. A nugget of life wisdom that I wanted to store.
As a grandparent, this is some life advice that I do want to impart to my young grandchildren. Imagine growing up and learning something so invaluable that will serve you well for the rest of your life.
All feelings are welcome, all behaviors are not.
Dr. Becky Kennedy, my favorite parenting coach, has long told us that kids come pre-loaded with all human emotions but none of the tools to work with them. That is our job – to help our kids learn from their emotions and to use that self-knowledge to our advantage. Just as we teach our kids to drive on the right side of the road and to pay attention to lane lines, we can teach them to be in alignment with their values.
Emotions are raw data about what is salient, important, intuitive.
Behaviors don’t need to be knee jerk reactions to emotional stimulus. Behaviors are choices and those choices show us who we are.
Those common sibling rivalries and frequent squabbles are the learning opportunities for welcoming all feelings and sorting things out. How many times do our young kids get into the emotional boxing ring and duke it out? How many times do they have to physically or emotionally hurt each other til they realize they can be much more strategic? They can work out their differences without causing so much pain and suffering.
In the last decade, there has been a major pivot in our understanding about the importance of our emotions. We have Dr. Marc Brackett to thank for this dynamic breakthrough. He has written two books to shift us into working WITH our emotions in healthy, helpful and constructive ways: Permission to Feel and his most recent book, Dealing with Feeling. He and his team also developed an app that I love and use quite often with my grandkids. It is the How We Feel app. It is fun, inviting, colorful and a clever way to teach kids this important life lesson: All feelings are welcome, all behaviors are not.
I want my grandkids to grow up with that life lesson as a guiding principle they keep tucked in their pocket.
It is a major pivotal shift from how I was raised and what I was taught about feelings back in the 1950’s. In my day, few feelings were welcome and some really bad behaviors became socially acceptable.
Explosive anger was a very common acceptable behavior. The repercussions of unchecked anger are like generational earthquake tremors that keep our nervous systems on constant edge.
Anger is a primary emotion and it is merely doing its job. It wants us to know that something is important – in that very moment. But if we overreact to anger, we will surely find ourselves having an oversized behavioral outburst. The feeling is welcome, that kid-like temper tantrum or mega meltdown is not.
Stop to reflect on small situations that caused you to over-react recently. It is this little self-review that reveals just how often we habitually behave in an unreasonable way. On a scale of 1 to 10, did that pile of laundry on the bathroom floor need to become a category 4 emotional hurricane? Did your kid not immediately stopping an annoying tapping on the kitchen counter warrant you blowing up? Did that driver who darted out in front of you to get in the flow of traffic really deserve you laying on your horn and shouting expletives?
All feelings are welcome, and all behaviors are not. Many habitual behaviors become normalized – expected and predicted – especially by our family members. But that doesn’t mean they are welcome, appreciated or necessary.
Joe Hudson, the master life coach, urges us to think honestly about our habitual behaviors that cause our loved ones to walk on eggshells around us or make them become hyper vigilant about our predictable emotional triggers. Are you aware that members of your family might be constantly scanning the home environment as though they are in a scene from the Matrix? Do you rely on your family members to be people pleasers, just to help keep you stabilized or happy?
Joe wants us to flip the script and pay close attention to how we are the ones putting the wheels in motion when it comes to habitual patterns of reactive behavior. The guiding principle is the same wisdom that Dr. Marc Brackett and Ethan Kross are championing:
All feelings are welcome, all behaviors are not.
Back in my day, the prevailing course correction was to tell people that they needed to sign up for “anger management” classes. Movies were made about anger management!
But today we have a fresh approach that is so much more productive, healthy and sustainable. We can normalize that getting angry, feeling that emotion is welcome. What is not normal is making a mountain out of a molehill, scaring the daylights out of our kids and causing our spouses to walk on eggshells.
We can’t teach what we ourselves don’t know, understand or practice.
If you were raised in a climate like I was, you will have to do the work on unlearning and relearning when it comes to feelings. Our emotions are raw data that helps us become more self-aware, more intuitive, more in touch with who we are and how we want to be in the world, and especially in our closest relationships.
If you are letting anger run the show, ask yourself if your family members run for cover or are tiptoeing around you. Is that who you want to be for the people you love the most?
Put out that welcome mat – and make it a practice to self-check your normalized behavioral patterns.
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