Can You Shift Your Emotional Energies?

Great question, eh? (Thanks, I thought so too. ;-)

Isn’t this where we seem to get stuck all too often?…

“I don’t feel like it.”

“I’m so frustrated!”

“I’m bored with this.”

“I’m too worried to focus”

What if there were ways to shift this energy into a place that works better for us?

Well, good news! There are actually several ways and today we’ll look at a couple.

Where Your Heart Is…

The first we’ll talk about is intended to help you shift into a positive place or, at the least, to get you into “neutral”.

This is a technique I’ve mentioned before in a post called Use Your Heart to Jumpstart Your Brain and it describes something called “heart coherence”.

Without describing it in detail here — follow the links! ;-) — there is a One-Minute Shift video of Rollin McCraty, the Research Director of the HeartMath Institute, that describes why connecting with your positive heart feelings/rhythms can be so powerful. It’s titled The Science of the Heart.

The reason this technique can be useful for even starting the emotional shift is that you have two options:

1.  You can connect with positive feelings of gratitude, appreciation, joy, etc., etc. to move yourself out of the negative space into a much better positive place OR
2. If that’s a wee bit too challenging for how you’re feeling and you’re sure you’re quite stuck there, you can do some paced breathing (6 beats in, 6 beats out) to get yourself into at least a more “neutral” place. And then it becomes easier to find yourself able to make a more positive shift.

Sneak up the Emotional Gradient Scale

If even getting to neutral seems too difficult to tackle, try a more gradual shift.

This technique has no scientific studies for it that I’m aware of, but it makes excellent sense from the perspective of “shaping” your emotional state. “Shaping” refers to a series of gradual approximations, much like learning any physical task — you start out “in the ball park” and gradually get more and more precise.

In this case, you’ll start out at some emotional place and gradually move further up and up the scale to something a little less negative/more positive with each step.

Let me share one possible Emotional Gradient Scale (from Esther and Jerry Hicks, 2004):

1. Joy/Knowledge/Empowerment/Freedom/Love/Appreciation

2. Passion

3. Enthusiasm/Eagerness/Happiness

4. Positive Expectation/Belief

5. Optimism

6. Hopefulness

7.Contentment

8. Boredom

9.Pessimism

10. Frustration/Irritation/Impatience

11. “Overwhelment”

12. Disappointment

13. Doubt

14. Worry

15. Blame

16. Discouragement

17. Anger

18. Revenge

19. Hatred/Rage

20. Jealousy

21. Insecurity/Guilt/Unworthiness

22. Fear/Grief/Depression/Despair/Powerlessness

Ok, let’s notice a few things about using a Scale like this.

First, the exact words and their order may or may not fit your emotional experiences.

This is just an example - ideally, you might create your own Gradient Scale. For example, for me Guilt is something that feels much better than Revenge. To me, Guilt implies something that holds the promise of re-Connection with someone by apology, re-taking an action, whatever. Revenge, on the other hand, is something pushing me away from the Other even more, so to me it would be a much worse place to Be.

Which leads us to the second consideration - how to use it.

What you want to do with this tool is to locate yourself emotionally and then find a feeling that is still accessible to you even when you’re feeling “this” flavour of bad. Move yourself to that feeling intentionally.

It’s important that you see this move as an intentional one, as it will demonstrate to you that you have a role in how you are feeling - it’s not just “something that happens to you”.

So, for example, if you’re feeling Frustrated about your advisor’s feedback, you may not be able to jump to being “Grateful” for that feedback; but you may be able to move to imagining being Bored with making revisions, then in a bit to imagining Hopefulness that this work will do the trick, then maybe even to Enthusiasm that this will actually make the final product better. Ahhh…. doesn’t that feel better? ;-) Now it’s time to start addressing that feedback….

Play with these a bit, explore the processes and let us know if you have comments, improvments, successes, alternatives — we’ll take whatever you have to offer!

(Of course, the more you can hang out in positive places, the harder it is to get knocked down, but just in case…stay tuned for more on the Positivity Ratio and its power!)