How to bring the best out in anybody! A series of daily blogs that teaches you how to focus on and amplify your’s and others’ strengths… For Things to CHANGE 1st I must Change

How do you really feel about your emotions?

It can be a pretty loaded question for a potentially heated area.

Talking with a female friend on the weekend who is just starting to be OK with her emotions – after years of telling herself that to show emotion is a sign of weakness – and you read right – a female friend and she would be in her early 30’s. She’s still a bit embarrassed by her emotions.

So lets have a look at this…

Lets look at the seat of our emotions, the source of our emotions…

So in Right Brain Left Brain theory we’re told that the Right brain is the part of the brain that is responsible for creativity, spatial thinking, ‘big picture’ , intuition, the “how” of speech, lateral thinking, emotions, kinesthetics, the question Why…
Where the Left brain is said to be logical, analytical, sequential, details, organsied, language and grammar, the question What, rules.

Hmmmmmmm…

Can you see something similar here between what we’ve been learning about the Parent Adult, Child model as well?

Can you also see that creativity seems to lie in the same domain as emotion?

So it seems from this (very loose) association that a freedom of emotions could also equate with an increase in creativity. (We could also expand the definition of creativity to include freedom of association, problem solving, innovation and lateral thinking, not just art, music, writing and craft…)

More often than not emotion for many people is a thing to fear and to be embarrassed by. In my mother’s day to be strong was to not to show emotion. (it’s sill around today – ref my female friend) So what I don’t want to do is make this behaviour wrong… enough is made wrong… it is, afterall, what it is.

This is more about asking you what you want your reponse to be – your own response…

So if you value creativity, creative problem solving, lateral thinking, innovation – then you might also like to look at the association of these attributes with emotions.

I’m not talking about over the top out of control emotion. Just permission…

I’ve see this more times than I care to count, the number of people who begin to get in touch with their emotion (permission?) and have a quantum leap in creativity.

Ken would call permission OKness.

I think the word is incredibly misunderstood and at one point became a cliche. OKness is a life position…

He would say the 5 OKs of life were
I’m OK You’re OK
We’re OK They’re OK
It’s OK

It’s not a cop out, it’s not asking you to accept the unacceptable.

But the question I ask is that believing that people are NOT OK in the first place, that emotions are not OK, that making mistakes is not OK …. I’m sure you can add plenty of your own .. could that be more the reason for the unacceptable in the first place?

Am I in a very pensive place today – I think I am…

I also like to ask questions…

Until tomorrow…