85. When Everything Feels F*cked
Ever just feel like everything is f*cked?
Me, too.
Recently here in the US, we’ve had multiple shootings, the leaked Roe vs Wade doc, and so much more.
And even in times when things here feel relatively sane, there’s always something going on in some part of the world that my brain could despair about.
Although these things may not seem relevant for a podcast about work, I’m going to argue that they are.
Especially because this podcast is about so much more than your career.
It’s about how to build a satisfying life and career as a human in a deeply flawed world.
And the thoughts and feelings you may be having about recent events are part of that.
So, how do we navigate our lives, our work, and our emotional experience when everything feels super-duper fucked?
That’s what I’m talking about this week.
The tools I’m sharing in this episode will be applicable for collective experiences, like the events mentioned above, and they also apply for situations that are unique to you, like personal tragedy or difficulty.
Life as a human is full of difficult things. Sometimes it feels like everything is f*cked. I’m not going to tell you that it’s all ok or that everything happens for a reason. I am going to help you figure out how to navigate your current experience and show up in a way that feels good to you.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
I have a super fun announcement. This July, I’m launching my group coaching program Satisfied AF. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever designed in my life, so if you want to come together and be part of a community, build relationships, and figure things out so your life can feel satisfying as f*ck, click here to sign up for a consult.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why we resist feeling our feelings.
How we try to intellectualize our feelings, taking us further away from actually feeling them.
How to see the different ways you’re avoiding (possibly unconsciously) feeling your big emotions about what’s going on in the world.
The role your narrative plays in influencing your emotions
How to keep yourself going when the world isn’t changing as fast as you would like.
How to process your emotions
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about what to do when everything feels fucked.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey, y'all. Happy Wednesday. I just want to tell you, I hope the sound quality is okay, I'm sure my podcast team will let me know if it's not. But the Roomba attacked my podcast set up in the middle of the night and ate my little cord and knocked over the stool that my podcast mic is set up with.
It really actually just brings to light my podcast setup currently is a bit of a, it's a bit of a mess if I'm being honest. And that's okay. It used to be in my office, the sound quality's not great up there, I moved down to the spare bedroom. There's not actually a table in here so literally it's like an old kitchen stool that is now acting like it's a bedside table that my podcast mic is attached to.
And then the Roomba pulled it down by pulling on the cord, which is really my fault because I didn't tuck the cord up because I didn't know the Roomba came in here. So things don't always go according to plan. But we carry on anyways. Yes, we do. And that's what we're doing today.
And I hope the sound quality is okay. I did a little test, it seems like it's fine. Podcast team, let me know if it's not. And if you're hearing this, you listeners, then it probably is fine, or I didn't have enough time to do it again. And if it's bad, I'm sorry and I love you and we'll do better next time.
Okay, moving on. There's been a lot of stuff going on in the world that is upsetting to me and maybe to you. We've got the stuff that's going on with the leaked Supreme Court decision about Roe versus Wade. There's lots of other shit that is going on with the Supreme Court, like things that they're doing and stuff that they're undoing and taking away. And then we had the shooting in Buffalo. And then we had the school shooting in Uvalde.
And something I've been talking with my clients about is just like, how do we carry on when everything feels like a dumpster fire? How do we carry on when everything feels like super-duper fucked? And I think this is really important and I do think it's relevant for a podcast that's about work because we're humans.
We're humans doing the work, it’s not like we go to work and become a different robot person who doesn't have feelings. And I know that like a lot of our workplaces maybe sort of treat us like we're a robot person sometimes, but our internal experience is that we're humans and we're going to carry our humanity with us.
We're going to carry our humanity with us when we go to work, we're going to carry it with us when we go to the grocery store, we're going to carry it with us all the time, right? On a walk, you know, picking up dog poop, whatever, our humanity is going with us. And so how do we navigate ourselves, our lives, our work, our emotions when so much is going on?
And in a way, like so much is kind of always going on. Like there's been the war in Ukraine and there's like always something. And I think like really if you're paying attention, there really, really always is something. But there have been more somethings lately that I have been aware of. So I don't want to act like the things that I'm aware of are more important, or more pressing than any of the other things.
And sometimes it really is a personal everything feels fucked, you know, like if we've been really sick, or a friend or family member has been really sick, or a loved one passes, whatever. There are plenty of times where what I'm about to teach and talk about today is relevant and some of them are going to be collective experiences and some of them are going to be experiences that are going to be singular to you.
Okay, so one thing I was talking with one of my clients about this week was like a lot of people don't want to feel their feelings when there's a lot of big stuff going on in the world that they have a lot of big feelings about. And sometimes we don't want to feel our feelings because we're afraid the feelings are going to overwhelm us. And like, literally people are like, “I'll die if I feel my feelings.”
And I get that because feelings feel very big and intense. The human body is also designed to feel them, so we'll get into that in a minute. But that's one thing.
And then another thing that's very common is some people really struggle to give themselves permission to have feelings, especially depending on how close or far away they are from the thing that's happening. And I see this a lot where people are like, “How upset am I allowed to be? How upset is it appropriate to be based on these logical factors?”
And I get that, but I think it's very intellectualizing and it takes us away from the feelings themselves versus you're allowed to have whatever fucking feelings you have. Feelings are not logical. I mean, they are in that they get kicked off and they're like a physiological thing in your body. But they're also not logical, or they follow their own logic is actually kind of how I think about it.
Like any person can feel any feeling if you have a fully functioning human brain. And we do feel them at like really interesting moments. I think, as I've talked about before, our feelings are information. And that can be really interesting to look at. But that, again, is an intellectualization and there is a time for just processing the feelings, feeling the feelings. So I want to talk about that with y'all today.
And I've touched on this in some other podcasts, but I think especially when we're in a moment where everything feels fucked and we're trying to figure out like who we're going to be and what we're going to do about it. And if you listen to this podcast a lot, we're big about intentionality around here, right? So we're like, who do I want to be in the world with this shit happening? But before you can get to who you want to be, you need to have and process the emotions that you already have. Right?
So with everything going on, maybe you're feeling a lot of rage. I'm feeling rage. Maybe you're feeling a lot of sadness and grief. Maybe you're feeling despair. Maybe you're feeling hopelessness or overwhelm. Whatever you're feeling, kind of what I want to pitch to you about that is that it's okay. We don't have to judge it, we don't have to ask ourselves if we're allowed to have it. We don't have to, like, fight with the feeling. We don't have to run away from the feeling.
A lot of us don't want to feel our feelings, I'm like this even sometimes and I've been a coach for fucking years now. But in our culture we're not taught to like to have and be with our feelings. A lot of us are explicitly taught to shove them down to avoid them. And we do a lot of activities to avoid them.
In the coaching world we call this buffering. So you can buffer by eating, you can buffer by drinking, you can buffer by watching a lot of Netflix, you can also buffer by doing things that our culture would consider like health promoting, like people can buffer with exercise.
And I just kind of want to touch on that because you may find yourself doing that. If you're feeling really big emotions about what's going on in the world and you're not sure like how to be with those, you may find yourself overdoing in like these little activities as a way that your brain is using that mechanism to try to help you get away from your feelings.
And I want to be really clear that I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. I think a lot of human beings use that like buffering, numbing, distracting to a certain extent. There is a point at which it may become problematic, but I don't want you to think if you're doing any of that it's necessarily a problem, because it's not and sometimes that's a lifesaving mechanism.
But what I want for us to do here together today is to think about like meeting our emotions, whatever they are, with love, compassion, curiosity, and openness because we can really only push our emotions down for so long. And the thing we actually want, which is to like kind of get to the other side of that emotion, that happens when we are with the emotion, not when we try to push it away.
So it's a little bit like if you had gone to the bathroom and stepped on a piece of toilet paper and it got stuck to your shoe. And then you leave the bathroom, it's like going with you. If you try to run away from the toilet paper that stuck to your shoe, that's not going to work because it's going to go with you, it's like attached to you.
Whereas to get it off, you have to like stop, look at it, see how it’s stuck. And like, you know, pull it off or use your other shoe to get it off. The more we try to run away from it, it just comes with us and then we get like more afraid and worked up. And so that's kind of what feelings are like, except for feelings or something that's created inside of your body.
I also just want to take a moment to apologize if you can hear the beeping. There's some kind of machinery across the street and I was trying to wait and record this when it wouldn't be beeping but, fun surprise, it's going to beep all day. So yay. And if you can't hear it, most excellent. I'm glad.
Okay, so processing our emotions, being with our emotions with love, curiosity, compassion, courage, how do we actually do that? A lot of people think being with their emotions means repeating the story over and over and over again. That's not being with your emotions, that is kind of creating an emotion storm because every time you tell the story you create the emotion again, right?
So if you keep repeating a thought you're having about like the shooting, any of the fucking way too many shootings that have happened this year, you're going to keep creating more and more emotion in your body. It's going to be like a bigger and bigger wave. And then, of course, you're probably going to want to try to run away from it because it's going to seem really big and overwhelming.
Whereas when you notice you have a feeling in your body, instead we want to go out of the brain, we want to go out of the narrative, and we want to go down into the body. So I literally think about this as sinking down, taking my awareness from sort of between my eyeballs and dropping it down into my body, into my chest, into my belly.
So I literally think about taking the awareness from like, up in between my eyeballs, like that's a lot of us where our awareness like kind of is. It's like we're very cerebral, we're very in our heads. It's also like I think a lot of us orient towards visual, and I mean like seeing out of our eyeballs, I don't mean visualizing.
And so having body awareness, getting out of the narrative and into the feeling, I think about dropping that awareness down into my body and then looking in my body for the feeling. And that may be like, okay, it's in my chest, it feels hot, or it feels cold, it feels tight, it feels fast or slow. And we want to kind of go through our body and look for the feeling in a very neutral observational way.
We don't want to say things like it's too big, it's overwhelming, it's drowning me. That's going to make your brain freak the fuck out because your brain doesn't always understand the difference between metaphor and literal. And so if you tell your brain you're drowning, your brain will freak out and have a stress response because it's like we're drowning, we should do something. Versus like, okay, my chest feels hot and tight and just like sitting with the feeling in the chest.
So what we're going to do, we're going to drop into the body, we're going to scan the body, we're going to look for the emotion like we're playing hide and seek. And when we find it, we're just going to be with it. We're not going to judge it, we're not going to shame it, we're not going to tell it it shouldn't be there. We're not going to tell ourselves like we shouldn't have that feeling or we're not allowed. We're just going to like, hang out with it and observe it.
So it's kind of like you're just sitting at a table looking at someone, not doing anything. You're like looking at their eye color, looking at their hair color, we're not judging the eye color or the hair color, we're just looking at it. The feeling is the other person in this metaphor. And if this feels really uncomfortable to you before you begin set a timer for like 90 seconds to three minutes.
So this is fast, when we actually pay attention to the feelings we have, we can process through them pretty quickly. And you might not get back to totally neutral, but usually what happens is you pay attention to the feeling, and it will increase a little bit and then it like kind of crests and then it kind of mellows back out. And we usually come to a much more even keeled place. Sometimes there's like a wisp of that feeling still there. Sometimes we actually feel like much, much better or relieved.
And just to review, when you're in your body looking for the emotion and just observing the physical sensations of the emotion it's important to stay in the body awareness and not to go back into either the narrative about what's happening in the world or the narrative about whether you should or should not be having the feeling. When you're in that headspace of judging, you're not in the headspace of feeling.
And what feeling does is it allows us to kind of come back to at least like a neutral-ish place. When we're avoiding the feeling, we are going to feel overwhelmed, we're going to feel like it's all too much, we're maybe going to try to run away, we may, again, do some of that buffering behavior. And we may get stuck in what I often call the pit of despair, which is sort of like that hopeless fuck it place where it seems like there's nothing we’ll ever be able to do, and we should just give up.
When we process the emotion, we get to the other side of it. I want you to think about like an emotion is a physiological thing in your body. It's just a process in your body. And once you kick an emotion off, your body doesn't give a shit if you want to feel the emotion. Your body doesn't give a shit who you are to get to feel the emotion Your body is like I have a process, I'd like to finish the process please.
One of the less sexy metaphors I have for this is pooping. When your body needs to poop, it just needs to poop. It doesn't give a shit if you want to. It doesn't give a shit if you think you earned the right to have that poop. It doesn't give a shit like anything, it's just like this is a thing we need to do, we need to get rid of this.
And if you don't let your body poop when it's time, I don't know if you know about this, but I've had many experiences with this. If you don't let your body poop when it's time, then that shit gets backed up and lots of things go wrong and sometimes you even have to go to the doctor about it. And it can be very uncomfortable in the physical body.
This is how emotions are too. I do feel like people can be like emotionally constipated and it's no bueno. And I also feel like, so back when I used to work in an office, like when I started that office job it like really fucked my poops up because my body didn't want to go during the time that I was at home and then my body also didn't want to go when I was in the office.
And I think feelings can be like this too. You may be like, oh, like here's the time when I have to feel the feelings, but they don't want to come. And then they're trying to show up in this meeting but then I also feel uncomfortable, like I don't want to have them there. And so just like with pooping, one thing you can do is get yourself on a schedule, right?
I like actually gave one of my clients homework of like set a timer for a certain time during the day and just give yourself permission to cry and feel whatever feelings you're having. If all day long we're feeling like sad and we're not taking time to feel that and it's just sort of like, I think about it as like stacking up or getting backed up like in the poop metaphor. Giving yourself a time to let that out and release it is really beneficial.
And I think sometimes it can even go so far as like if let's say the time is 5pm and it's 5pm and you don't feel like crying, put on a sad video for like one minute and see if you can induce yourself into like having that emotion and letting it complete and move to the other side of it. Especially if you don't have a lot of practice feeling your negative emotions, sometimes that can be really helpful.
But again, we're not like making out with the emotion, we're not like getting married to it, we're not building a house in its space where we're going to live in forever. It's about learning to move through it.
It's a little bit like let's say like a really cold stream that you're just going to swim across. We have to get into the cold water to get to the other side, but the point is not that we hang out in the cold water forever. The point is we get in the cold water, we get to their side, we get out of the cold water. And that's what we want to do with the feeling too, right?
So if we're avoiding the feeling, it's like we haven't even gotten in the water yet. We're like looking at the water thinking about how cold it's going to be, thinking about how much we don't want to do it, thinking about all the other things we're going to do instead. So we want to get in the water, but then once we're in the water we don't want to just sit in the water and be like, “Wow, this is so cold. This is terrible. I can't believe how terrible this is.”
And that would be like when you're in the feeling continuing to like tell that narrative, tell that story about the feeling. No, you want to get in the water, then you want to swim, and you want to get to the other side, and you want to get out. And then you want to give yourself a big fucking high five for being so brave and courageous and going through that set of sensations.
Just like getting into cold water is physical sensations you're actually going to have in your physical body, that is what a feeling is like also. Okay, so when everything feels fucked, whether it's like everything feels fucked all over the world for all of us, or everything feels fucked just for you personally, this is the first thing I want you to learn how to do, is how to be with and process those emotions and get to the other side of them.
And this is not a one and done, y'all. You may be doing this multiple times a day, you may be doing it once a day. So when she feels fucked, being able to feel those emotions and get to the other side of them is not what your brain is going to want to tell you to do. Your brain will be like let's take some action or like let's drink some wine and pretend this isn't happening.
It's not going to feel natural to you to do this, but I want to point out here that it actually is like the most natural thing you can do, is to feel and process your emotions because the human body is like an animal body and physiologically that's what makes sense. The reason it feels more natural to go take a bunch of action or drink some wine or whatever is not because that is more natural, it's because that's what we've been trained to do.
So when you think well, it's more natural to do this other thing. No, it's not. It is learned, it's more habitual to do those other things. It doesn't mean it's more natural. It doesn't actually mean it's what's going to help you. I think processing the emotion and then getting back to kind of like homeostasis is actually going to be one of the most useful things you can do.
And even if it feels a little weird at first, you can do it and learn because guess what? Walking probably also felt a little weird at first when we were like little baby toddlers. But we learned it, we got habitual at it and now we don't even have to think about it, and it would feel really awkward to crawl. So this is just like that.
Okay, now you've processed your emotion, now what? Okay, this is the part where it's more like a lot of what we talk about all the time, which is who do you want to be? What do you want to do? And what do you want to do if you believe anything is possible?
So many people right now are feeling so overwhelmed, especially about things like the shootings, and feeling like it never changes in this country around that. And it hasn't changed yet, but I really want to impress upon you just because something hasn't been done yet doesn't mean it can't be done.
When we believe things can't be done, when we believe that nothing can change, what we create is us not doing things and what we create is things not changing and it'll seem like it's just happening to us. And listen, I get that there's already a status quo and it's operating. And, yeah, it takes a lot less effort just to let the status quo keep operating, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to create something new.
We've made so many huge and incredible changes in this country, like things that people thought wouldn't be possible to change, people have changed, right? There are plenty of things in our culture that I wish never happened, but they did, right? Things like slavery, and then that also ended and that took a lot of people doing a lot of things.
And I'm sure many of those people thought like, what if this never changes? Is this even possible to make this change? They took action anyways and it did change. Obviously, the end of slavery wasn't perfect and there are still a lot of problems and a lot of racism in our country, but some changes did happen.
Or like women got the right to vote. We haven't always had the right to vote, people had to work really hard. I'm sure it seemed impossible. I'm sure at times it seemed like that would never change, but it did.
So what I want you all to think about when everything feels fucked is like everything feels fucked is a mindset of hopelessness. And I don't think it's wrong or bad to have that mindset, like I'm talking, that's the language I'm using right now too. Everything does kind of feel fucked to me.
But I have to pause and be like, okay, everything feels fucked, that's bringing up a lot of emotions. Let me feel and process those emotions and then let me think about like what do I want to have happen? And what do I need to think and feel in order to take effort in that direction?
And something I was talking about with one of my clients this week was like we may take action and never see the outcome. But if I could guarantee that school shootings or just shootings would end in 100 years and there are things I could do to like help that come into being, would it still be worth it for me to do those things even if I could never see the benefit in my lifetime? And I was like, yes.
Now, would I like for the change to happen a lot faster? I sure fucking would. But I'm willing to do things and take action to create something even if I never get to see the benefit of it myself.
Now, something else got brought up, which I think is a really good point, which is like, how do we keep ourselves from overdoing it and then burning out when it comes to things like activism? That's a great question because a lot of people have tried to do things before and they like put everything into it. And then they didn't see change as fast as they thought they should and then they stopped working on it, right? They got burned out and they just quit.
And I think for that I would recommend you go listen to the mellow massive action podcast. I don't know what number it is, but we can link it in the show notes. But that podcast really talks about like if you're going to be working on something for the rest of your life, how do you want to work on it? You probably want to work on it in a sustainable way. Because the longer we're going to work on something, the more sustainable it has to be.
Particularly one of my clients was talking about how painful it can be to feel hopeful, and I agree. And also I don't think hope is always the best fuel. And there's nothing wrong with hope, it can be a really beneficial emotion sometimes. And it may be something you want to feel sometimes.
But also, I think sometimes when people take action from hope, they burn out faster because the hope is like hope for a change and they're looking for that to be the reason they're doing something. Versus a feeling like commitment, or determination. Or even like curiosity, like if I could change this, how could I? If I could move the needle on this issue, how could I?
I think there's something about hope that hooks in to the outcome. And listen, being oriented towards the outcome is important. We need to know where we're going if we want to get there. But if we get too attached to it and too attached to it happening on a certain timeline and if our reason for doing it is that we have to see progress in a certain amount of time, that's going to set us up to then go into the pit of despair later, go into the like it's not working.
Versus like how do we stay in the like how could it work? What are the ways in which it's already working? What are the ways in which I can make it work more? Whatever working means for whatever you're working on.
Okay, so let's review. When everything feels fucked, when you're feeling overwhelmed about what's going on in the world or what's going on in your personal life, when it all just seems like way, way too much, what I want to invite you to do is to process your emotions. Feel those feelings in your body, complete the bodily experience of having an emotion so you can get to the other side of it.
And then I want you to think about who you want to be in the situation and what mindset is going to help you get there and what you need to put into place to be able to show up however it is you want to show up for however long it's going to take. And part of that is going to be choosing a useful mindset, a useful set of thoughts, a useful set of feelings that will work as better fuel.
And some of it's also going to be doing things like resting. Doing things like experiencing joy and pleasure. Doing things like celebrating the shifts you're able to see, even when you're not where you want to be yet. And then of course some of its going to be feeling even more negative emotion, because that's not a one and done, that's going to keep happening.
And I think this is just part of what it means to be alive and be a person in the world and be paying attention. It's also okay to limit what you pay attention to. None of us can do everything. There's so many important issues in the world and we're not going to necessarily be able to work on all of them. Or if we do work on all of them, then how much work we can do on each of them is going should be less.
Let's just say you have like 100%. If you are giving to 100 things, then you can only give 1% to all of them if you're dividing your percentages evenly. Or, you know, give like 90% to one thing, and then 10% to like 99 different things would be like little, teeny blips. But you can only do what you can do. And in order to keep doing what you can do, you’ve got to also take care of you.
And you're going to be the best expert about what that actually means, but I want to be here as the voice that reminds you like, you need to rest and feel joy also. And that doing that is also part of how we make big changes in the world. And sometimes that's going to feel awkward as fuck.
Sometimes it's going to feel awkward to feel joyful and celebrate when you know other people are suffering. But in a world this size, someone will always be suffering, for better or for worse. I mean, it's not great. I'm not excited about that. I wish it weren't that way. And of course, there's like more suffering than just humans also, right?
And I think that sounds really depressing, and it is. And also we can do incredible things. We can make really big changes in the world. We can have an impact, even when we're just one person, even when it seems like everything is fucked.
All right, y'all, that is what I have for you today. I hope you're taking really good care of yourselves. I love you. I'm going to be over here trying to take really good care of me and then also be the person I want to be in this wild, wild, sometimes upsetting world.
And if this is the kind of work you want to do and you want to take deeper and you want to learn how to process all your emotions and show up as the person you want to be and create a satisfying as fuck life, even in this imperfect world, come sign up for a consult with me and let's talk about working together because I want to support you as you do all of those things.
All right, y'all have a lovely week. Feel those feelings. I'll talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey, y'all. Happy Wednesday. I just want to tell you, I hope the sound quality is okay, I'm sure my podcast team will let me know if it's not. But the Roomba attacked my podcast set up in the middle of the night and ate my little cord and knocked over the stool that my podcast mic is set up with.
It really actually just brings to light my podcast setup currently is a bit of a, it's a bit of a mess if I'm being honest. And that's okay. It used to be in my office, the sound quality's not great up there, I moved down to the spare bedroom. There's not actually a table in here so literally it's like an old kitchen stool that is now acting like it's a bedside table that my podcast mic is attached to.
And then the Roomba pulled it down by pulling on the cord, which is really my fault because I didn't tuck the cord up because I didn't know the Roomba came in here. So things don't always go according to plan. But we carry on anyways. Yes, we do. And that's what we're doing today.
And I hope the sound quality is okay. I did a little test, it seems like it's fine. Podcast team, let me know if it's not. And if you're hearing this, you listeners, then it probably is fine, or I didn't have enough time to do it again. And if it's bad, I'm sorry and I love you and we'll do better next time.
Okay, moving on. There's been a lot of stuff going on in the world that is upsetting to me and maybe to you. We've got the stuff that's going on with the leaked Supreme Court decision about Roe versus Wade. There's lots of other shit that is going on with the Supreme Court, like things that they're doing and stuff that they're undoing and taking away. And then we had the shooting in Buffalo. And then we had the school shooting in Uvalde.
And something I've been talking with my clients about is just like, how do we carry on when everything feels like a dumpster fire? How do we carry on when everything feels like super-duper fucked? And I think this is really important and I do think it's relevant for a podcast that's about work because we're humans.
We're humans doing the work, it’s not like we go to work and become a different robot person who doesn't have feelings. And I know that like a lot of our workplaces maybe sort of treat us like we're a robot person sometimes, but our internal experience is that we're humans and we're going to carry our humanity with us.
We're going to carry our humanity with us when we go to work, we're going to carry it with us when we go to the grocery store, we're going to carry it with us all the time, right? On a walk, you know, picking up dog poop, whatever, our humanity is going with us. And so how do we navigate ourselves, our lives, our work, our emotions when so much is going on?
And in a way, like so much is kind of always going on. Like there's been the war in Ukraine and there's like always something. And I think like really if you're paying attention, there really, really always is something. But there have been more somethings lately that I have been aware of. So I don't want to act like the things that I'm aware of are more important, or more pressing than any of the other things.
And sometimes it really is a personal everything feels fucked, you know, like if we've been really sick, or a friend or family member has been really sick, or a loved one passes, whatever. There are plenty of times where what I'm about to teach and talk about today is relevant and some of them are going to be collective experiences and some of them are going to be experiences that are going to be singular to you.
Okay, so one thing I was talking with one of my clients about this week was like a lot of people don't want to feel their feelings when there's a lot of big stuff going on in the world that they have a lot of big feelings about. And sometimes we don't want to feel our feelings because we're afraid the feelings are going to overwhelm us. And like, literally people are like, “I'll die if I feel my feelings.”
And I get that because feelings feel very big and intense. The human body is also designed to feel them, so we'll get into that in a minute. But that's one thing.
And then another thing that's very common is some people really struggle to give themselves permission to have feelings, especially depending on how close or far away they are from the thing that's happening. And I see this a lot where people are like, “How upset am I allowed to be? How upset is it appropriate to be based on these logical factors?”
And I get that, but I think it's very intellectualizing and it takes us away from the feelings themselves versus you're allowed to have whatever fucking feelings you have. Feelings are not logical. I mean, they are in that they get kicked off and they're like a physiological thing in your body. But they're also not logical, or they follow their own logic is actually kind of how I think about it.
Like any person can feel any feeling if you have a fully functioning human brain. And we do feel them at like really interesting moments. I think, as I've talked about before, our feelings are information. And that can be really interesting to look at. But that, again, is an intellectualization and there is a time for just processing the feelings, feeling the feelings. So I want to talk about that with y'all today.
And I've touched on this in some other podcasts, but I think especially when we're in a moment where everything feels fucked and we're trying to figure out like who we're going to be and what we're going to do about it. And if you listen to this podcast a lot, we're big about intentionality around here, right? So we're like, who do I want to be in the world with this shit happening? But before you can get to who you want to be, you need to have and process the emotions that you already have. Right?
So with everything going on, maybe you're feeling a lot of rage. I'm feeling rage. Maybe you're feeling a lot of sadness and grief. Maybe you're feeling despair. Maybe you're feeling hopelessness or overwhelm. Whatever you're feeling, kind of what I want to pitch to you about that is that it's okay. We don't have to judge it, we don't have to ask ourselves if we're allowed to have it. We don't have to, like, fight with the feeling. We don't have to run away from the feeling.
A lot of us don't want to feel our feelings, I'm like this even sometimes and I've been a coach for fucking years now. But in our culture we're not taught to like to have and be with our feelings. A lot of us are explicitly taught to shove them down to avoid them. And we do a lot of activities to avoid them.
In the coaching world we call this buffering. So you can buffer by eating, you can buffer by drinking, you can buffer by watching a lot of Netflix, you can also buffer by doing things that our culture would consider like health promoting, like people can buffer with exercise.
And I just kind of want to touch on that because you may find yourself doing that. If you're feeling really big emotions about what's going on in the world and you're not sure like how to be with those, you may find yourself overdoing in like these little activities as a way that your brain is using that mechanism to try to help you get away from your feelings.
And I want to be really clear that I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. I think a lot of human beings use that like buffering, numbing, distracting to a certain extent. There is a point at which it may become problematic, but I don't want you to think if you're doing any of that it's necessarily a problem, because it's not and sometimes that's a lifesaving mechanism.
But what I want for us to do here together today is to think about like meeting our emotions, whatever they are, with love, compassion, curiosity, and openness because we can really only push our emotions down for so long. And the thing we actually want, which is to like kind of get to the other side of that emotion, that happens when we are with the emotion, not when we try to push it away.
So it's a little bit like if you had gone to the bathroom and stepped on a piece of toilet paper and it got stuck to your shoe. And then you leave the bathroom, it's like going with you. If you try to run away from the toilet paper that stuck to your shoe, that's not going to work because it's going to go with you, it's like attached to you.
Whereas to get it off, you have to like stop, look at it, see how it’s stuck. And like, you know, pull it off or use your other shoe to get it off. The more we try to run away from it, it just comes with us and then we get like more afraid and worked up. And so that's kind of what feelings are like, except for feelings or something that's created inside of your body.
I also just want to take a moment to apologize if you can hear the beeping. There's some kind of machinery across the street and I was trying to wait and record this when it wouldn't be beeping but, fun surprise, it's going to beep all day. So yay. And if you can't hear it, most excellent. I'm glad.
Okay, so processing our emotions, being with our emotions with love, curiosity, compassion, courage, how do we actually do that? A lot of people think being with their emotions means repeating the story over and over and over again. That's not being with your emotions, that is kind of creating an emotion storm because every time you tell the story you create the emotion again, right?
So if you keep repeating a thought you're having about like the shooting, any of the fucking way too many shootings that have happened this year, you're going to keep creating more and more emotion in your body. It's going to be like a bigger and bigger wave. And then, of course, you're probably going to want to try to run away from it because it's going to seem really big and overwhelming.
Whereas when you notice you have a feeling in your body, instead we want to go out of the brain, we want to go out of the narrative, and we want to go down into the body. So I literally think about this as sinking down, taking my awareness from sort of between my eyeballs and dropping it down into my body, into my chest, into my belly.
So I literally think about taking the awareness from like, up in between my eyeballs, like that's a lot of us where our awareness like kind of is. It's like we're very cerebral, we're very in our heads. It's also like I think a lot of us orient towards visual, and I mean like seeing out of our eyeballs, I don't mean visualizing.
And so having body awareness, getting out of the narrative and into the feeling, I think about dropping that awareness down into my body and then looking in my body for the feeling. And that may be like, okay, it's in my chest, it feels hot, or it feels cold, it feels tight, it feels fast or slow. And we want to kind of go through our body and look for the feeling in a very neutral observational way.
We don't want to say things like it's too big, it's overwhelming, it's drowning me. That's going to make your brain freak the fuck out because your brain doesn't always understand the difference between metaphor and literal. And so if you tell your brain you're drowning, your brain will freak out and have a stress response because it's like we're drowning, we should do something. Versus like, okay, my chest feels hot and tight and just like sitting with the feeling in the chest.
So what we're going to do, we're going to drop into the body, we're going to scan the body, we're going to look for the emotion like we're playing hide and seek. And when we find it, we're just going to be with it. We're not going to judge it, we're not going to shame it, we're not going to tell it it shouldn't be there. We're not going to tell ourselves like we shouldn't have that feeling or we're not allowed. We're just going to like, hang out with it and observe it.
So it's kind of like you're just sitting at a table looking at someone, not doing anything. You're like looking at their eye color, looking at their hair color, we're not judging the eye color or the hair color, we're just looking at it. The feeling is the other person in this metaphor. And if this feels really uncomfortable to you before you begin set a timer for like 90 seconds to three minutes.
So this is fast, when we actually pay attention to the feelings we have, we can process through them pretty quickly. And you might not get back to totally neutral, but usually what happens is you pay attention to the feeling, and it will increase a little bit and then it like kind of crests and then it kind of mellows back out. And we usually come to a much more even keeled place. Sometimes there's like a wisp of that feeling still there. Sometimes we actually feel like much, much better or relieved.
And just to review, when you're in your body looking for the emotion and just observing the physical sensations of the emotion it's important to stay in the body awareness and not to go back into either the narrative about what's happening in the world or the narrative about whether you should or should not be having the feeling. When you're in that headspace of judging, you're not in the headspace of feeling.
And what feeling does is it allows us to kind of come back to at least like a neutral-ish place. When we're avoiding the feeling, we are going to feel overwhelmed, we're going to feel like it's all too much, we're maybe going to try to run away, we may, again, do some of that buffering behavior. And we may get stuck in what I often call the pit of despair, which is sort of like that hopeless fuck it place where it seems like there's nothing we’ll ever be able to do, and we should just give up.
When we process the emotion, we get to the other side of it. I want you to think about like an emotion is a physiological thing in your body. It's just a process in your body. And once you kick an emotion off, your body doesn't give a shit if you want to feel the emotion. Your body doesn't give a shit who you are to get to feel the emotion Your body is like I have a process, I'd like to finish the process please.
One of the less sexy metaphors I have for this is pooping. When your body needs to poop, it just needs to poop. It doesn't give a shit if you want to. It doesn't give a shit if you think you earned the right to have that poop. It doesn't give a shit like anything, it's just like this is a thing we need to do, we need to get rid of this.
And if you don't let your body poop when it's time, I don't know if you know about this, but I've had many experiences with this. If you don't let your body poop when it's time, then that shit gets backed up and lots of things go wrong and sometimes you even have to go to the doctor about it. And it can be very uncomfortable in the physical body.
This is how emotions are too. I do feel like people can be like emotionally constipated and it's no bueno. And I also feel like, so back when I used to work in an office, like when I started that office job it like really fucked my poops up because my body didn't want to go during the time that I was at home and then my body also didn't want to go when I was in the office.
And I think feelings can be like this too. You may be like, oh, like here's the time when I have to feel the feelings, but they don't want to come. And then they're trying to show up in this meeting but then I also feel uncomfortable, like I don't want to have them there. And so just like with pooping, one thing you can do is get yourself on a schedule, right?
I like actually gave one of my clients homework of like set a timer for a certain time during the day and just give yourself permission to cry and feel whatever feelings you're having. If all day long we're feeling like sad and we're not taking time to feel that and it's just sort of like, I think about it as like stacking up or getting backed up like in the poop metaphor. Giving yourself a time to let that out and release it is really beneficial.
And I think sometimes it can even go so far as like if let's say the time is 5pm and it's 5pm and you don't feel like crying, put on a sad video for like one minute and see if you can induce yourself into like having that emotion and letting it complete and move to the other side of it. Especially if you don't have a lot of practice feeling your negative emotions, sometimes that can be really helpful.
But again, we're not like making out with the emotion, we're not like getting married to it, we're not building a house in its space where we're going to live in forever. It's about learning to move through it.
It's a little bit like let's say like a really cold stream that you're just going to swim across. We have to get into the cold water to get to the other side, but the point is not that we hang out in the cold water forever. The point is we get in the cold water, we get to their side, we get out of the cold water. And that's what we want to do with the feeling too, right?
So if we're avoiding the feeling, it's like we haven't even gotten in the water yet. We're like looking at the water thinking about how cold it's going to be, thinking about how much we don't want to do it, thinking about all the other things we're going to do instead. So we want to get in the water, but then once we're in the water we don't want to just sit in the water and be like, “Wow, this is so cold. This is terrible. I can't believe how terrible this is.”
And that would be like when you're in the feeling continuing to like tell that narrative, tell that story about the feeling. No, you want to get in the water, then you want to swim, and you want to get to the other side, and you want to get out. And then you want to give yourself a big fucking high five for being so brave and courageous and going through that set of sensations.
Just like getting into cold water is physical sensations you're actually going to have in your physical body, that is what a feeling is like also. Okay, so when everything feels fucked, whether it's like everything feels fucked all over the world for all of us, or everything feels fucked just for you personally, this is the first thing I want you to learn how to do, is how to be with and process those emotions and get to the other side of them.
And this is not a one and done, y'all. You may be doing this multiple times a day, you may be doing it once a day. So when she feels fucked, being able to feel those emotions and get to the other side of them is not what your brain is going to want to tell you to do. Your brain will be like let's take some action or like let's drink some wine and pretend this isn't happening.
It's not going to feel natural to you to do this, but I want to point out here that it actually is like the most natural thing you can do, is to feel and process your emotions because the human body is like an animal body and physiologically that's what makes sense. The reason it feels more natural to go take a bunch of action or drink some wine or whatever is not because that is more natural, it's because that's what we've been trained to do.
So when you think well, it's more natural to do this other thing. No, it's not. It is learned, it's more habitual to do those other things. It doesn't mean it's more natural. It doesn't actually mean it's what's going to help you. I think processing the emotion and then getting back to kind of like homeostasis is actually going to be one of the most useful things you can do.
And even if it feels a little weird at first, you can do it and learn because guess what? Walking probably also felt a little weird at first when we were like little baby toddlers. But we learned it, we got habitual at it and now we don't even have to think about it, and it would feel really awkward to crawl. So this is just like that.
Okay, now you've processed your emotion, now what? Okay, this is the part where it's more like a lot of what we talk about all the time, which is who do you want to be? What do you want to do? And what do you want to do if you believe anything is possible?
So many people right now are feeling so overwhelmed, especially about things like the shootings, and feeling like it never changes in this country around that. And it hasn't changed yet, but I really want to impress upon you just because something hasn't been done yet doesn't mean it can't be done.
When we believe things can't be done, when we believe that nothing can change, what we create is us not doing things and what we create is things not changing and it'll seem like it's just happening to us. And listen, I get that there's already a status quo and it's operating. And, yeah, it takes a lot less effort just to let the status quo keep operating, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to create something new.
We've made so many huge and incredible changes in this country, like things that people thought wouldn't be possible to change, people have changed, right? There are plenty of things in our culture that I wish never happened, but they did, right? Things like slavery, and then that also ended and that took a lot of people doing a lot of things.
And I'm sure many of those people thought like, what if this never changes? Is this even possible to make this change? They took action anyways and it did change. Obviously, the end of slavery wasn't perfect and there are still a lot of problems and a lot of racism in our country, but some changes did happen.
Or like women got the right to vote. We haven't always had the right to vote, people had to work really hard. I'm sure it seemed impossible. I'm sure at times it seemed like that would never change, but it did.
So what I want you all to think about when everything feels fucked is like everything feels fucked is a mindset of hopelessness. And I don't think it's wrong or bad to have that mindset, like I'm talking, that's the language I'm using right now too. Everything does kind of feel fucked to me.
But I have to pause and be like, okay, everything feels fucked, that's bringing up a lot of emotions. Let me feel and process those emotions and then let me think about like what do I want to have happen? And what do I need to think and feel in order to take effort in that direction?
And something I was talking about with one of my clients this week was like we may take action and never see the outcome. But if I could guarantee that school shootings or just shootings would end in 100 years and there are things I could do to like help that come into being, would it still be worth it for me to do those things even if I could never see the benefit in my lifetime? And I was like, yes.
Now, would I like for the change to happen a lot faster? I sure fucking would. But I'm willing to do things and take action to create something even if I never get to see the benefit of it myself.
Now, something else got brought up, which I think is a really good point, which is like, how do we keep ourselves from overdoing it and then burning out when it comes to things like activism? That's a great question because a lot of people have tried to do things before and they like put everything into it. And then they didn't see change as fast as they thought they should and then they stopped working on it, right? They got burned out and they just quit.
And I think for that I would recommend you go listen to the mellow massive action podcast. I don't know what number it is, but we can link it in the show notes. But that podcast really talks about like if you're going to be working on something for the rest of your life, how do you want to work on it? You probably want to work on it in a sustainable way. Because the longer we're going to work on something, the more sustainable it has to be.
Particularly one of my clients was talking about how painful it can be to feel hopeful, and I agree. And also I don't think hope is always the best fuel. And there's nothing wrong with hope, it can be a really beneficial emotion sometimes. And it may be something you want to feel sometimes.
But also, I think sometimes when people take action from hope, they burn out faster because the hope is like hope for a change and they're looking for that to be the reason they're doing something. Versus a feeling like commitment, or determination. Or even like curiosity, like if I could change this, how could I? If I could move the needle on this issue, how could I?
I think there's something about hope that hooks in to the outcome. And listen, being oriented towards the outcome is important. We need to know where we're going if we want to get there. But if we get too attached to it and too attached to it happening on a certain timeline and if our reason for doing it is that we have to see progress in a certain amount of time, that's going to set us up to then go into the pit of despair later, go into the like it's not working.
Versus like how do we stay in the like how could it work? What are the ways in which it's already working? What are the ways in which I can make it work more? Whatever working means for whatever you're working on.
Okay, so let's review. When everything feels fucked, when you're feeling overwhelmed about what's going on in the world or what's going on in your personal life, when it all just seems like way, way too much, what I want to invite you to do is to process your emotions. Feel those feelings in your body, complete the bodily experience of having an emotion so you can get to the other side of it.
And then I want you to think about who you want to be in the situation and what mindset is going to help you get there and what you need to put into place to be able to show up however it is you want to show up for however long it's going to take. And part of that is going to be choosing a useful mindset, a useful set of thoughts, a useful set of feelings that will work as better fuel.
And some of it's also going to be doing things like resting. Doing things like experiencing joy and pleasure. Doing things like celebrating the shifts you're able to see, even when you're not where you want to be yet. And then of course some of its going to be feeling even more negative emotion, because that's not a one and done, that's going to keep happening.
And I think this is just part of what it means to be alive and be a person in the world and be paying attention. It's also okay to limit what you pay attention to. None of us can do everything. There's so many important issues in the world and we're not going to necessarily be able to work on all of them. Or if we do work on all of them, then how much work we can do on each of them is going should be less.
Let's just say you have like 100%. If you are giving to 100 things, then you can only give 1% to all of them if you're dividing your percentages evenly. Or, you know, give like 90% to one thing, and then 10% to like 99 different things would be like little, teeny blips. But you can only do what you can do. And in order to keep doing what you can do, you’ve got to also take care of you.
And you're going to be the best expert about what that actually means, but I want to be here as the voice that reminds you like, you need to rest and feel joy also. And that doing that is also part of how we make big changes in the world. And sometimes that's going to feel awkward as fuck.
Sometimes it's going to feel awkward to feel joyful and celebrate when you know other people are suffering. But in a world this size, someone will always be suffering, for better or for worse. I mean, it's not great. I'm not excited about that. I wish it weren't that way. And of course, there's like more suffering than just humans also, right?
And I think that sounds really depressing, and it is. And also we can do incredible things. We can make really big changes in the world. We can have an impact, even when we're just one person, even when it seems like everything is fucked.
All right, y'all, that is what I have for you today. I hope you're taking really good care of yourselves. I love you. I'm going to be over here trying to take really good care of me and then also be the person I want to be in this wild, wild, sometimes upsetting world.
And if this is the kind of work you want to do and you want to take deeper and you want to learn how to process all your emotions and show up as the person you want to be and create a satisfying as fuck life, even in this imperfect world, come sign up for a consult with me and let's talk about working together because I want to support you as you do all of those things.
All right, y'all have a lovely week. Feel those feelings. I'll talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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