So, how are you feeling today? Happy? Sad? Stressed?
Now dig a little deeper. How are you really feeling? Perhaps not so much happy, but excited. And maybe rather than stressed, anxious. Now, let's run a quick experiment. For the next ten seconds close your eyes while holding on hard to that emotion. Go!
Welcome back. Now if you're not an alien, then it's highly likely that your mind drifted into a story that is either causing or at the very least influencing that emotion which is presently most alive in you. And if you pay attention to how you feel now, there's probably a slight shift. Perhaps there's even a bit of relief. Whoa! That's because when we identify an emotion and the underlying story causing it, it usually feels more manageable, less daunting; or on the upside more exhilarating and fun. Today, this little exercise took me from I feel awesome... to... I feel grateful for the fact that the sun came out in London today... to... Maybe I should write about this. And what you're reading is the result.
Let's try that again. Think of how you felt on Saturday night. You know the drill: eyes closed for ten seconds.
Did you feel surprised because of how much fun that party/romantic dinner was?... or did you feel irritated because nobody came to the party/your partner arrived late to the dinner you so carefully prepared? Truth is, regardless of whether the emotion is "positive" or "negative" -- it's the awareness of WHY you feel like this that matters.
Here's where it gets problematic: We're not very good at this. It wasn't until I got deeper into the art and science of storytelling that I discovered how impactful it can be in increasing our emotional vocabulary beyond superficial terms such as great and terrible. What amazed me most was how tangible the results were. The more carefully I chose my words, the more my friends paid attention when I said "I have a story for you." I would get vulnerable and descriptive while keeping it short; and people simply connected with me. I could feel it. This conscious discovery was so exciting that it led me as far as deciding to teach Storytelling -- at an amazing institution called United World College -- without ever having taught much more than how to use a computer to my mom. Quickly I realized that the level of connection we can generate with others is proportional to how emotionally descriptive we are willing to be.
By engaging directly with my students' stories -- and later with first-time speakers in events such as TED and ECHO -- it became even more evident how much our emotional vocabularies have been decimated with the proliferation of communicational immediacy. In one generation, it went from letters to emails to texts to lol and whatevs.
Yet regardless of the cause, this tendency is a big deal. If we can't efficiently express ourselves to our friends, life partners and even bosses, then our abilities to solve conflicts with them and with ourselves diminishes. And the stories that cause the conflicts in the first place? They are simply never acknowledged or understood.
To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.
But don't despair, there is hope! I'm just trying to generate awareness of the problem.
See, the words are inside us, they're just a bit rusty. So before you go on to sharing this post on Facebook (maybe you feel curious as to people's reactions?); I want to dare you to try and dust off those deeper emotions from your mental dictionary, and bring them back to your everyday life. Next time somebody asks you how you're feeling, dig a little deeper, find that emotion, that story behind it... and notice how much more interesting that conversation becomes.
Alas, last but not least.
"Isn't there like a list of emotions or something that I can find?" you may be asking. Well, thanks to ConversABLE, there is. Voilá: universal needs / universal emotions. Now go feel freely.