What Are You Feeling?

This isn't a rhetorical question.

A healthy, well-adjusted person processes their emotions, rather than avoiding or subduing them.

And then there’s the rest of us.

At work, most of us are encouraged to be unemotional. Don’t be disruptive. Be efficient and productive!

We tell our kids not to to cry, throw tantrums or be too sensitive. For many kids, school is more like the army than a creative space in which to learn and develop emotional intelligence. Stay seated! Focus!

At home, it’s easy to tell your significant other “to calm down and get over it”.

And then there are all the things we do to avoid feeling at all: drink, use drugs, watch TV. The list can be pretty long.

Here’s the problem: you can’t avoid “bad” feelings and still experience “good” ones. You can’t be joyful, but never sad. You can’t be confident, but never feel inadequate. You either feel all your emotions, or you deaden them all.

This morning, I created a variation of a Feelings Wheel that’s been around for awhile. Mine has two differences:

• It’s organized in an easier-to-read table, with emotions in alphabetical order within each category.

• I added the words “I am…” at the top, to make it crystal clear that the purpose of this tool is to help each of us understand what we are feeling right now.

When you want to feel your feelings, take this table out, say “I am…” and then say the feelings that come up for you.

That’s it. Use it if it helps, ignore it if it doesn’t.

P.S. If you discover I missed something, please let me know and I’ll distribute version 2.0 in the future.

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