How To Effectively Navigate Your Emotions: Part 2

Today is Part 2 on how to effectively navigate your emotions.

Last week on the blog, I shared about why your feelings are always valid.

I touched on why it is so important to insert a pause between the event and your response.

Being overly reactive is never effective when it comes to communicating our feelings.

When we approach difficult conversations with mindfulness, we see better results.

That’s why I wanted to share a specific story with you guys about what can happen when you fail to manage those emotions.

Sharing the story:

Jen visited Buffalo in the summer of 2018 and ended up getting an interview for a job!

I was driving her to her interview in the morning and started feeling very stressed. I couldn’t find the building that I was supposed to drop her at, and I started getting overwhelmed by the laundry list of items I had to do for work that day.

As we know, anxiety is extremely contagious.

My anxiety bled into Jen’s headspace and totally rattled her right before her interview.

You guys, it was a really crappy situation. We were short and tense with each other just a few minutes before Jen’s interview.

I was deep in the tornado – the apex – of my anxiety and had lost my self-awareness in that moment.

Well, Jen got out of the car and walked into the building, and within two minutes I realized the mistake that I had made.

When Jen got into the building for the interview, I realized how epically I had messed up.

I didn’t navigate my anxiety effectively and as a result, I made her extremely anxious.

I texted her apologizing immediately and told her that she would totally nail the interview!

Lucky for me, Jen is my best friend which means she knows how I am and is extremely forgiving.

Jen was so grateful to see my self-awareness play out through my apology and it made such a huge difference in her feeling supported by me before her interview.

That story was an example of me doing the work – practicing self-awareness.

It only took a few minutes for me to reach out to Jen and apologize for my behavior.

But here’s the reality: I cried while filming this video because so much shame came up.

It made me feel so ashamed because sometimes living with anxiety feels like a burden.

Nobody wants their emotions to negatively impact the people they love; that’s hard to sit with.

It’s understandable to feel guilty when you don’t show up in a way that you’re proud of.

Rather than beating yourself up for being a human and having emotions, it’s important to learn to forgive ourselves.

We need to accept that we are human beings just doing our best job every single day.

When you do the work and call yourself on your shit, you improve your relationships with people.

What do you guys think? What is your experience with navigating your emotions?

Share your story in the comments below!

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