Harnessing Your Emotions Step 3: Your Emotional Shelf

Last week, we learned and practiced strategies for taking a pause when our emotions are starting to get the better of us.

   As we learned, taking a pause is hard work and takes practice.

(Try to start taking that pause before you're moving full steam ahead - when you start to feel agitated, irritated, overwhelmed, impatient, and so on.)

This bring us to step 3 in harnessing your emotions: DISTANCE

Specifically, we want to get distance between ourselves and our big emotion.

There are different strategies for doing this - some of which you've probably heard of.  You can self talk, take a few deep breaths, and move into a calming space.

 Here's one that works REALLY well for me.  I use an imaginary emotional shelf - it's a shelf that I see in my mind's eye, once I've managed to take a pause.

 I then go through a short mental exercise - I imagine myself taking my big overwhelming emotion and placing it on a shelf.  (If you're interested, it's always a single white shelf hanging on a wall).  This helps me remove that big emotion from wherever I'm feeling it and allows me to give myself a break from the weight of it.

 I'm not putting it in a box.  I'm not crumpling it up and throwing it under a pile of ignored feelings.  I'm not sweeping it under the rug.  I'm simply removing it from myself and placing it on a shelf for a period of time so that I can get some distance.

 It's critical to emphasize that I am not ignoring it.  I am not putting it there to collect dust.  I'm using the shelf for one purpose - to remove the weight of the emotion for a time so that I can evaluate what is going on.

 Once it's on the shelf, I feel more capable of examining it, evaluating it, and  - ultimately - acting on it.

 Here are questions that I ask myself in this process.  I hope they'll be helpful for you, too.

1. Where is this big emotion coming from?  Am I tired?  Hungry? Thirsty?  What happened earlier today that I didn't deal with directly?  Is this emotion about what is happening right now, or is this a leftover emotion from something that happened earlier today or this week that I didn't deal with?

2. What am I feeling?  Is it anger? Disappointment? Fear?  Sadness? Grief?

3. Why am I feeling this?  If I feel angry, what I am worried about or afraid of?  If I'm sad, is it because I'm disappointed? Lonely?

I'm someone who feels a lot of emotions as anger - but when I take the time to pause, shelve them, and allow myself to investigate those emotions…I often realize I’m not angry.  I'm sad or disappointed, or I'm lonely or afraid.

 That kind of clarity is gold.  And once we have it, we grab our emotion back off the shelf so that we can act (more on that next week).

 For now, practice pausing and shelving your emotion so that you can get space, and evaluate and investigate what you're feeling.  Remember, it will be more effective if you start the process when you start feeling a big emotion.  It will take a lot of practice before you'll be able to do this at the height of your big feelings!  But I promise you that the hard work will be worth it.

OK, it's YOUR turn - what will you learn this week when you put your big emotion on the shelf?