Just being positive does not always work to help you to feel better

Do you hear yourself saying just be positive and everything will be alright, or say that to others. The self help industry may portray that, tell you to do an affirmation, be positive.  That will not always work and can even make you worse.

Why? Because emotions create memories and when they just get put aside, pushed down, and we don’t deal with them or acknowledge them, then one day they finally explode. Either as an illness in the body or towards someone or something, perhaps in anger or jealousy or grief, even blaming and shaming others for how we feel. We are not acknowledging the pain or hurt within. It affects our relationships, work, home, kids because we then feel unrecognised by those around us, perhaps expecting them to consider how we feel or recognise it when they don’t or can’t no clue what’s going on for us inside.

Emotions are a way of giving us some direction about how to change our life. When negative, they are a sign that there is something out of sync. Listening to those negative emotions is about understanding what is out of sync. When those emotions are positive, it means we’re feeling good, things are flowing. Sounds simple doesn’t it?

But how often do you listen to your emotions, stop complaining and acknowledge how you feel? How often do you, instead of telling yourself to suck it up, just be positive, or find someone to join you in your story to consistently complain, simply slow down to listen to what your emotions are telling you?

Positivity and affirmations only work when you have acknowledged the pain, the dissatisfaction, the negativity within, becoming aware of your excuses and why you are complaining. In order to work, affirmations have to be repeated, repeated, and repeated, to form a new pattern in the brain, and this takes up to 66 days. That’s a long time. The quicker option, not always the easiest, is to sit down and face your emotions, say hi to them, understand the message that they are giving you and release it to find a solution to manage it, accept it, validate it and open up to a new move towards a new positive healthy way of being..

The good that comes from listening, is you can help yourself by teaching yourself to understand your emotions, and understand the functioning of others, learning empathy and compassion. In business and in leadership roles, these are highly esteemed qualities to bring the best out of you, and your staff, and gain results.  The bad that comes from not listening, is you stop being true to you, stop expressing yourself and that leads to exhaustion, stress, you may criticise yourself or others, and can become judgemental.

Again this leads to the emotions coming out through pain in the body instead, and disconnecting in your relationships at work, at home. For me it came out in stress through the body, in the form of sciatica and lower back pain, among other things, and through continuous bad relationships.

(see below for further reading on this) You see, we take those emotions from our childhood that never got dealt with, or acknowledged, and bring them into our adult life where they often control our thoughts and mindset, and affect our relationships with others.

What's the first step to tuning in to hear my emotions:The first step therefore to dealing with your negative emotions or all emotions, is to learn how to become more present, present to hear yourself.

It is in slowing down that we become present and this can start with 3 minutes.

Check out my video for how to begin to breath to help.If you need any more ideas or help give me a call to chat and do 3 minutes a day to feel better.

Other various ways this can be done to hear your emotions mindfulness, meditation.

I teach mindfulness and 3 minute tools that clear the mind, the persistent negative thoughts and feelings, that helps to release stress or overwhelm and learning how to listen to yourself to know the difference between your emotions and others and what you need to turn things around.. (especially helpful for empaths or highly sensitive children)

During these early periods in life they want to gain our approval so as to continue to feel loved.

It is therefore an important time in which we we need to learn how to validate their efforts not as good or bad but as a way to help them learn, to be ok to fail and to guide them to try again. Helping them to begin to believe in themselves and their own abilities.

It is also during this time that we teach them how to act and feel, understand themselves and their emotions. One of the biggest emotions that destroys confidence is fear. Fear is partly innate and partly learnt effecting how we feel about ourselves and our self trust. There is much research into whether we are born with fear or it is learnt, varying opinions. However scientific research says that there are only two real innate fears, the fear of falling and loud noises. The rest are learnt from evolution from our ancestry or fear of a future event, the thoughts of what might happen. Therefore certain fears are an illusion or imagined, although we don’t always understand that.

So what does this mean and what can we do?