The Trick to Living a Full Life - Episode: 019
The goal isn't to be happy. The goal is to experience the full wheel of emotions. Just like our ecosystems thrive on biodiversity, our lives thrive with emotional diversity.
How many of us run on stress? Or overwhelm or anger? Conversely, if we're sitting in comfort or ease for too long, we start to feel empty. The trick is to welcome them all.
Join us in an exercise to identify the three emotions you'd like to feel more, and let's discover why it's crucial to be emotionally diverse. Plus, don't miss out on an opportunity to learn more with our upcoming free class on emotional agility. It's time to live a full, emotionally diverse life.
Speaker 1
This is the Durable Dad podcast. I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. What is happening, guys? Today is a Friday for me and it was a new week. Our three-month-old daughter went to daycare two days this week and it was pretty impactful for our family here and what our day-to-day looks like.
Speaker 1
I don't know if you guys know or not, but Brenda, my wife, does a lot of the behind-the-scenes work. Kind of call her our executive producer of me. Pretty much Part of that is editing this podcast, producing this podcast, helping get the social word out, having these last three months adopting our daughter and it's been kind of crazy around here. We're just like getting by, getting by. I think I mentioned this on another episode, but having these two days of being able to work was really awesome and productive and we got some cool things coming up that we want to really get momentum on. You'll be hearing more about free classes maybe you're hearing about it before this episode and a course that we're going to run Really awesome getting Brenda back, and there is this feeling a little guilty that I'm excited that my daughter went to daycare and there's a little bit of sadness that she's not just outside my office door anymore and I can't go and say hi to her. That's kind of what we're going to talk about today. It's a good lead-in to emotional diversity. I can feel excited, guilty, sad, and that's what emotional diversity is.
Speaker 1
The basic way I like to describe it is that the goal of life is not to be happy. The emotional state of happiness is not the goal. We want to be emotionally diverse. I was reading one article and they kind of tied it to biodiversity. An environment is healthier when various species all serve their own functional roles. An environment suffers when one species is depleted or one species becomes overabundant and it throws off the balance. Being things insects, creatures, plants, humans they all feed off of each other and having more of a diverse landscape is healthy for an environment. It's the same thing with our internal emotional environment.
Speaker 1
We want to feel and have all these different emotions because if we're constantly stressed and constantly pushing, that balance is thrown off and we start to get burnt out. Or, on the other hand, if we're constantly comfortable, constantly finding ease and not pushing ourselves, then that can lead to a less fulfilling feeling and almost a depressed type of feeling. To find fulfillment, we have to feel all the emotions and acknowledge them, accept them. Image that comes to my mind is an emotions wheel. Maybe you've seen one, maybe you haven't, but I'll link to one in the show notes. I'll link to the one that I use when I'm coaching guys. That's a little simpler than some of the other emotional wheels out there, but pretty much it's a wheel and it has different emotions in different colors. Joy, happiness, is one part of the wheel, but there's also sad and angry, and embarrassed, disappointed. All these emotions the goal is to feel, acknowledge all of them. None of them are wrong. We should feel all these emotions, we should have all these emotions because that's what life is. Life is emotionally diverse and being able to embrace it is how we live a full life. The check-in process that I went over in an earlier episode, and I think I even talked about it in the last episode, is an example of this. Like when you check in and part of the check-in process is naming three emotions that you're feeling right now. Like three emotions that I'm feeling right now. How can I feel three different things at once, because our bodies, our brains, are emotionally diverse.
Speaker 1
You can feel joy and sadness at the same time. Think about watching your kids grow up. I could picture my daughter used to go to this daycare that was outside of the office I worked at when I worked for a ski company out in Colorado and I was walking in my car and the class happened to be walking I don't know, probably like into their playground or something like that. And it was when my daughter was like two. So she was barely walking and I just looked over and I saw her and it was just this overwhelming feeling of whoa, she has her own life and it was like a little snapshot of where life is going as a parent and there was like excitement. There was also a lot of sadness and overwhelm and there was a lot of joy for her for having her own separate life. So that just kind of swept over me and you can embrace it all, like watching our kids grow is really fricking cool and it's really sad and all those emotions.
Speaker 1
Another thing that popped into my head was Michael Jordan winning the NBA finals and bawling his eyes out, and you probably know this image of him holding the championship trophy on the ground in the locker room just sobbing, and he had lost his dad earlier that year and I just think about all the emotions he was feeling. And I went back and watched an interview with him and right after the game you could see he was celebrating with his teammates. He was pumped, he was excited. And then he got asked a question and everything just kind of changed in his face and he got a little choked up. And think about a guy that is living life to the fullest, like playing at the top level of what he's good at, pushing himself all the time and allowing himself to fricking weep and feel sad and probably pissed off because of how his dad died and all that. Like that's emotional diversity. That's showing how, when we feel all the emotions, we can live a full life.
Speaker 1
Another example I kind of see a lot when I'm coaching and in myself is when we compare ourselves to someone else and when we look at someone that might have more money than we have or seem to have a better job than we have and they have a more fulfilling life than we have. There's a sense of jealousy there and we can navigate that to find some respect and maybe even find some inspiration so we can compare ourselves to another person and feel a bunch of different emotions. And then the trick is gonna be honing in on the helpful emotions. And we can do that. We can create our emotions intentionally. If we think about the thinking cycle, our thoughts, the sentences in our head, those are the things that are creating our emotions. How we interpret the world is gonna create our emotions. So we get to decide how we wanna feel.
Speaker 1
And that doesn't mean that we push away uncomfortable, maybe unhelpful emotions. We don't bottle them up. We acknowledge them. We validate our own emotions by turning towards them, accepting them, and we have the agility not to get stuck there. If we stay stuck and stressed and pushing ourselves and anxiety and feeling defeated and beat down, then we stay in the same thinking cycle. But if we recognize that defeated, stressed emotion, own it, allow it to be there, then we can start to shift and have the agility to feel a different, more helpful emotion. And this is a huge skill to have and it doesn't happen overnight. It's something you build up to Like.
Creating Emotional Diversity in Life
Speaker 1
Whatever the emotions are, we have to become aware, we have to allow them and then we can start to have the agility to summon the helpful ones, and I'm actually diving into this in a free class that I'm teaching on July 26th so I don't know when you're listening to this episode, but that's July 26th, 2023, where I'm gonna talk about how we can have the emotional agility to work our asses off during the day and be motivated and be disciplined and focused and shift those emotions. When we get home, before we walk in the door, we can start to create more love and joy and curiosity and maybe even some ease so we can be with our families, because the emotions that are helpful at work aren't always the same emotions that are helpful at home. So there's a process, there's tactics that you can do that can help you, guide you to be emotionally diverse and emotionally agile. But what I want you guys to take from this episode is that we all have different emotions. We all have this full wheel of happy, sad, joy, anger, embarrassment, defeated, disappointed. We have them all, and when we can open up to them all, that's when we really start living and we feel less of a shell of ourself and we feel our full self. And one of the ways you can get started is one sign up for the class that I'm teaching, or just do this yourself Write down the three emotions you feel most often and when you look at those emotions, ask yourself why why you feel those emotions.
Speaker 1
And then ask yourself, what three emotions would you like to feel more of? Maybe you wanna keep some of them, maybe there's some new ones. And when you ask yourself, what are the three emotions that I want more of? Why do you want more of them? How would they be helpful in life? How would they help you be a better parent, be a better man, live life to its fullest, take chances, fail all that kind of stuff. Those are the emotions we wanna create, the emotions that are gonna make life exciting and a little scary, really happy, and maybe there's gonna be some sadness around. So the goal isn't to be happy, the goal is to be emotionally diverse, and that's what I got for you this week. So have a good one, guys, and catch you next time.
If this episode hit, don’t keep it to yourself.
Subscribe to The Durable Dad Podcast and leave a quick review. It helps more men find the show and raises the level of conversations happening at home and at work.
Want to take this work further?
Tommy G Coaching is built for high-achieving men who want to show up steady, clear, and connected in their marriage and their life.
