You are listening to the Life Coach School Podcast with Brook Castillo episode number 189.

Welcome to the Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching.

And now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brook Castillo.

Well, hello, my friends. Today we're going to talk about the balance of feelings. And I'm so excited because everyone I've been talking to about these concepts is just like blowing their own mind, which of course is what I was hoping and super excited that you are all having the same experience that I had when I started living my life in this emotionally balanced way.

And I think the main thing to remember is that when we stop feeling bad about feeling bad, we feel better.

And really most of us want to feel better. And one of the best ways to feel better is to understand that we're not supposed to feel great all of the time.

I think a lot of my anxiety and depression throughout my entire life was because I felt like I should feel better more of the time.

It was so unnecessary for me to feel bad about feeling bad because I just doubled down on feeling bad.

When I could just accept that part of the human experience is a contrast in thinking, which means a contrast in emotion, then I could be at peace with my experience as a human.

So in this podcast, we're going to review the feelings list and talk about the idea of the silver platter of feelings being optional.

And here's where I get a lot of questions from my students when I teach them the idea that our thoughts create our feelings.

The first argument that I get is, okay, so if our thoughts create our feelings, why don't we feel great all of the time and why don't we try and feel great all of the time.

And in fact, I have a lot of new students who will try and do this. They'll try and take all of their current negative thinking when they do a thought download and they'll try to make it all positive all of the time.

And they'll actually feel guilty and beat themselves up for any negative thoughts and any negative emotion. And when I explain to them, no, no, no, that's not the deal.

The deal is that we will have that balance. We just want to do it more deliberately. Then there's some clarity around it.

And I want to make sure that you all understand this as well. It's a pretty advanced concept. We talk about it kind of further into our training, but you guys have been with me a while. Let's see if we can wrap our heads around this.

This idea that as we become aware of our feelings, as we become aware of our thoughts and start paying more close attention to those, there will be a tendency to beat ourselves up because we'll understand that our negative emotion and negative thinking is all self created.

And so we start to blame ourselves or other people for how we're feeling and how we're thinking. And when we can't blame the other people, then we really blame ourselves because we understand, oh, wait, it's all my thinking. So all of this is my fault, which some people think is very bad news because then they use it as an excuse to beat themselves up instead of a reason to feel super empowered.

So here's the deal. If I give you a platter of emotions, the imagery that I like to use with my students is that I am walking around at a dinner party. And I have this beautiful platter and instead of saying or do I'm saying feeling, which would you like to choose, which feeling would you like to choose today.

And it's a really important imagery for you to get visualization for you to see because that is basically the power that you have in your life. You get to choose how to feel all of the time by what you think.

This does not mean that you should choose to feel great all over the time.

As I've talked about on the previous two podcasts, a lot of the time, we don't want to feel great about what's going on in the world.

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