EMOTIONAL HEALTH · emotional health. We spend way too much time avoiding pain because we think the...

MODERNEMOTIONALHEALTH

B Y B R O O K E C A S T I L L O

OVERVIEW OF THE PROGRAM

MY STORY 3

WHAT IS MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? 5

OUR MODERN ENVIRONMENT 6

OUR EMOTIONAL EDUCATION 8

EMOTIONS ARE IN OUR CONTROL 10

BUFFERING 13

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN 14

WHAT IS AN UNHEALTHY EMOTIONAL LIFE? 16

50/50 IN RELATIONSHIPS 18

THE FIVE STEPS TO EMOTIONAL HEALTH 19

SUMMARY OF THE FIVE STEPS 25

DISCOMFORT IS THE CURRENCY TO YOUR DREAMS 27

TAKING IT FURTHER 30

MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH PAGE 2

My life coaching story starts when I was 15 years old. I remember feeling so much emotional pain after a devastating breakup. I didn’t know how to manage my painful feelings, so I chose to eat instead. I buffered my way to feeling better by eating food because I didn’t know how to deal with the emotional pain.

During this time, I went to Barnes and Noble with my mom, where I stumbled upon the self help section. I bought the first self help book I ever read, Women Who Love Too Much, by Robin Norwood.

I devoured the book in one night. It immediately helped me. The author shared ideas about how to feel better. She actually offered some solutions to my problem.

In that moment, I decided I wanted to help people feel better, too. The author was a therapist. So, I decided to become a therapist.

MY STORY


I went to college to study psychology. I was so excited and eager to start college to get to do what I love. But that is not what happened.

Instead of learning how to help people, I learned everything that was wrong with the human mind, including diseases and abnormal psychology. I was devastated. I wanted to help people like me—normal people suffering with emotional pain.

I didn’t want to help people the way they had taught in my psychology major. I left college feeling lost.

One day, Oprah was on TV and interviewed someone who identified herself as a life coach.

That episode changed my life.

I was introduced to the career of life coaching, where you can help normal people who are simply in emotional pain.

I knew in a moment this was exactly what I wanted to do, so I found that coach and signed up for her training.

I started out as a solopreneur, and eventually started The Life Coach School with my husband in 2010.

I love being a life coach. I am doing exactly what I wanted to be doing—serving people who are suffering emotionally, and motivating them to set big goals and achieve their dreams.

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WHAT IS MODERN EMOTIONAL HEALTH AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?My latest obsession right now is modern emotional

health. Do you know what it means to be emotionally

healthy in this modern day?

I’m really going to talk about this from the perspective

of a beginner. No matter how much you think you

already know about emotional health, we are going to

start with the basics and build up from there.

Let’s start with the question, what is modern emotional

health? And I use the word modern on purpose, because

it’s really important that we understand that our brain,

and our cognitive and emotional life, in this modern

environment is a problem.

If we don’t learn how to manage our brain in our

modern environment, we are going to be in trouble.

Don’t worry, I’m going to take you through the whole

process. First, let’s look at emotional health.

What do you think emotional health is? How would

you define it? Have you ever thought about it? Do you

think you are emotionally healthy?

The main problem is that most people don’t even know how to define emotional health, therefore how do they even answer the question?

When you ask people, “Are you emotionally healthy?” what most people think that means is, “Are you happy?”

Happiness does not equal emotional health. Most people don’t know how to differentiate them.

I used to think that thinness meant happiness. I also used to think that thinness meant healthiness. We associate these things.

In a similar way, a lot of us think emotional health means happiness. I believe that belief system has caused more trouble and more emotional unhealthiness than any other thing we’re focused on in our lives.

So first of all, we need to ask the question, are we emotionally healthy and how do we know if we are?

Happiness does not equal emotional health.


OUR MODERN ENVIRONMENTLet’s start with why we need to use the word modern when we talk about emotional health.

THE FIRST REASON IS FALSE PLEASURES.

Our modern environment is filled with false pleasures. It’s easy to look at other people’s lives and think that everyone is happy but us.

Have you looked on Instagram lately? What about Facebook? Have you watched TV? Everybody’s happy. Everybody’s having a great life. No one ever has any zits. Everyone’s hair is perfect. Everybody eats gourmet food. Everybody exercises. Everybody is happy.

THE SECOND REASON IS OUR MOTIVATIONAL TRIAD IS BACKFIRING.

What is the motivational triad? Think about us in the cave. We had to be motivated to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and preserve our energy in order to survive. We can see how that served us.

The fact that we wanted to seek pleasure had us going out and connecting with other people, and having sex, and getting food and water, and seeking comfort and warmth to take care of ourselves, and avoiding pain. We avoided the emotional pain and the physical pain that literally could have killed us, and preserved our energy so we could stay alive.

This motivational triad—seek pleasure, avoid pain, and preserve energy—is what got us here. All of those things were necessary back in the day, but now they are causing us all sorts of trouble because our modern day environment has so many false pleasures. We are constantly overseeking pleasure, overgetting pleasure, and causing ourselves all kinds of problems with our emotional health.

We spend way too much time avoiding pain because we think the point of life is to be happy all the time. We buffer our way away from pain so we don’t feel our emotions. We don’t allow or process negative emotion. We don’t experience what it’s like to be a human who experiences pain.


Back in the day, we had to avoid pain. Can you imagine? We were literally in fear for our lives—no clothes, no comforts, no air conditioning, no heat, nothing. Avoiding pain back then meant avoiding having a rock stab you in the back when you’re trying to sleep. Versus now, avoiding pain means you might feel a little bit uncomfortable. You for sure better avoid that.

What about preserving our energy? Conserving our energy is what kept us alive. We are now doing that to the point of inaction and laziness.

This motivational triad that served us so well back then is now causing problems in our modern day. We need to do the exact opposite of what our brain initially was designed and evolved to do.

We need to delay pleasure instead of seeking it. We need to embrace our emotional pain, open up to negative emotion and experience it, and we need to generate energy and utilize it instead of trying to preserve it.

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We need to do the exact opposite of what our brain initially was designed and evolved to do.


So let’s talk about what happens in our emotional education. What are we taught about emotion? We are taught that other people hurt our feelings. We are taught that other people make us happy. And we are taught that circumstances make us happy or sad.

That is what we are taught as children. “Did little Sally hurt your feelings?”

“Well, let’s go talk to Sally and tell her not to do that anymore.”

“What you said really hurt John’s feelings, don’t say things to hurt his feelings.”

“That makes mommy sad when you hurt other peoples feelings, don’t do that.”

How often are we told these things? In school, we are taught not to hurt other people’s feelings and not to let them hurt ours. We think other people make us happy.

“That makes mommy so happy when you do that.”

“You make me so happy.”

Get married. Find a husband that will make you happy. Find a wife that will make you happy.

We’re also taught that circumstances make us happy or sad. When good things happen, we’re happy. When bad things happen, we’re sad. When we achieve things, when we go after things in life and accomplish them, that will make us happy. If we don’t get them, we’ll be sad. If we’re thin, we’ll be happy, if we’re rich, we’ll be happy, if we’re married, if we have two kids, if we’re normal, if we fit in, if we have lots of friends.

This is what our emotional education is reduced to. First of all, it’s not like they have a class to teach you about your emotions. Why would they? They’re only the most important thing in the world.

OUR EMOTIONAL EDUCATION


The most important thing.

Our emotions are the reason why we do or don’t do anything. We want to accomplish things because of how we think they will make us feel. We avoid doing things because of how we think they’ll make us feel. Our personality, the way we show up, everything is based on how we feel or how we think something will make us feel. It drives everything. It is the only thing that matters.

Our emotional life is what matters because it determines everything else in our life, but we’re not taught anything about it. We’re taught, maybe in third grade, happy face, sad face, mad face. That’s the extent of our emotional education.

I have a degree in psychology, and even there, the amount of time we spent studying emotions was minimal. We studied the effect of emotions, and the pathology of not processing emotion, but we weren’t taught what causes emotions, or how to manage and process them.

There is a severe lack in emotional education. Yet, if you ask anyone what is more important in your life as an adult—history, math, physics, trigonometry, what happened in the 1800s, or what’s going on in your emotional life—What do you think they would choose? What would you choose?

Zero is taught about how to recognize, understand, and manage your emotions. Zero.

I think that’s ridiculous. As I studied, and went through the process of learning how to be a life coach, I’ve had to dig deep to learn how to manage my mind and emotions. I’ve had to study myself.

OUR EMOTIONAL EDUCATION

Zero is taught about how to recognize, understand, and manage your emotions. Zero.


I discovered that other people have no ability to hurt our feelings. In fact, other people can't cause our feelings at all, because our feelings are caused by our thoughts.

I remember when I first learned this. I was listening to a talk on a cassette tape. Remember those? When the speaker said, “Your thoughts cause your feelings,” I was like, what? What are you talking about? I thought other people caused my feelings, I thought other things caused my feelings. I thought feelings just happened.

You're telling me that my thoughts cause my feelings and I have 100% control over my thinking? It was mind blowing to me.

So what we are taught is actually false. Other people don't hurt our feelings. Other people can't make us happy. We try to change them. We try to teach them how to behave. We try and teach them all the things, but they don't behave the way we want them to, so they don’t make us happy. Even if they did every single thing

we wanted them to do, they still wouldn't make us happy. Because you know what makes us happy? Our own thinking.

And remember, being happy isn't the goal anyway. So let's talk about the worst lesson that we are taught—the goal is to be good and the goal is to be happy. That message is in the undercurrent of everything we are taught.

We are taught that negative emotion should be fixed, and that it can be fixed by something external.

If I see a little girl crying, "Oh my gosh, what's wrong? Something's terribly wrong, you're having a negative emotion. Let's fix it. What's wrong?"

EMOTIONS ARE IN OUR CONTROL

You know what makes us happy? Our own thinking.


That's how we talk to people who are having negative emotions. We ask them what's wrong with them. What's wrong with you? What's right is to be happy. If you're crying, something's wrong with you. This is what we're taught.

The problem with this is that nobody can be good and happy all of the time because there is no good without bad, and there is no happy without sad, and the world isn't meant to be happy and good and right all of the time.

How do we know this? Because it isn't happy and good and right all the time.

It's impossible to even have good without the bad. If we were happy all the time, we wouldn't even know we were happy. If we were good all the time, we wouldn't even know we were good because there is no bad. There's no balance.

When we're taught that happiness is the goal, we are sold so much BS and then we feel like there's something wrong with us when we experience negative emotion. We think somehow it should be fixed.

So let me educate you on how the world really is. This is your modern emotional education.

EMOTIONS: THE 50/50 CONCEPT

Life is half positive and half negative.

How do we know this? Have you been alive? Have you noticed that is the case?

Yes, there is good and there is bad. There is positive and there is negative. There is comfort and there is discomfort.

It’s a balance. Life doesn't exist without this. You can't have it. We don't even know that something's positive if there is no negative. E

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So when you have a negative emotion and we say there's something wrong with you, what happens?

We think there's something wrong with us when we're human.

We're like, oh my gosh, I feel anxious a lot of the time, I feel frustrated a lot of the time, I feel hate, I feel doubt, I feel scared. What is wrong with me? Everybody on Facebook is happy all the time. All these other people are causing me all this negative emotion.

So you know what we try and do? We make an effort to be happy and positive all of the time. But we were taught that what makes us happy and what makes us sad is the world. So we go out into the world to try and solve a problem that isn't even a problem.

This isn't a problem. This is humanness.

But we try and solve it. We try and solve this problem by telling other people how to act towards us, by trying to get them to behave in a way that doesn't hurt us.

We try to find people who will make us happy. But they are terrible at making us happy, because it's impossible.

We feel bad when other people don't comply, and the circumstances of our life aren't making us happy all the time. So you know what we try and do? We try to fix the circumstances of our life.

We think there’s something wrong with us when we’re human.


BUFFERINGNow, let’s go back to what I originally said about the modern environment. If you’re supposed to be happy all of the time and you’re not, then you will try to fix that.

What do you do? You go out and find false pleasures. You get concentrated pleasures that have been created by money-making organizations who get rich on our pleasure.

Think about overeating and overdrinking and over-Facebooking and over-porning and over-smoking and over-drugging and all the things we’re trying to do to compensate for this. We’re doing all this buffering to try and make negative emotion go away.

We resist it, we avoid it, we deny it, we hide from it because we think it means there’s something wrong with us. But I want you to know there is nothing wrong with you.

First of all, we’re supposed to have the human experience.

I want you to just look at the world. So many of us think there’s something wrong with the world and we want to fix it. The world should be kind and happy and peaceful and it’s not, so we need to fix the world to make it kind and happy and peaceful. And yet what makes us think that the world should be kind and happy and peaceful? It’s never been 100% kind and happy and peaceful. It’s always been a combination of good and bad, right?

When you look at back in the day, we had really amazing things and we had really terrible things. And then you go forward 100 years. Really amazing things, really terrible things. Now, today, a lot of the terrible things that we had hundreds of years ago we don’t currently have, but you know what we have? All brand new terrible things.

We’ve eliminated some of those terrible things and replaced it with positive things, but then the negative thing is filled in with new negative things.

Have you noticed the balance is there all the time? And yet we’re so upset that the negative is still there. If we could just eliminate the negative, then everything would be right, and everything would be good, and everyone would be happy.

But we spend so much time being upset by the negative that we become inordinately negative about our own negativity and we start trying to compensate for it by adding more negativity, and more buffering, and more false pleasures, and more compensation.

And then we think there’s something terribly wrong with us because listen, we have this negative emotion, so we eat over it and then we gain weight, and then we hate ourselves for that, and then we eat more and then we hate ourselves for that. And then suddenly, we’re in this spin of rejecting everything.

So people say to me, “Does it have to be 50/50? Can we go with 80/20 maybe? Please 80/20.”

Here’s the thing, when you accept that half of your life has negative emotion and that half of the world has negative things in it, then they’re not so negative anymore. When you make them so awful and so negative by trying to push them away, they become worse than they are.


WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMANSo I want you to think about this. Do you really want to be happy all of the time? Some of you may think you would love to be happy all of the time. And the truth is you could try to be happy all of the time, but that also means you would have to be happy when horrible things happen. You would have to be happy when people die, and when people are raped, and murdered, and hurt. When all the terrible things happen in the world, you would have to be happy in order to be happy all the time.

My students start to say, “Wait a minute, you know what I’d rather be? I’d rather be human.”

Humans aren’t happy all of the time. Humans feel pain and they feel sadness and they experience anxiety and discomfort and fear, and I want all of that in my life because I want to be fully human. I want to open up to this part of life.


When I think it should be better than this, I miss out on the full human experience, and I end up not showing up. I end up hiding, and trying to compensate for my negative feelings, and cowering from my life because I think there’s something wrong with me.

So here is your education. Here is what I want to teach everyone when they’re really young. I want to tell them, “Listen, your whole life is going to be 50/50.”

And here’s what I tell my kids, and this is really important for us all to remember. Everybody’s life is 50/50.

When you look at that person on Facebook or you look at that billionaire or you look at that person that has the perfect body or the perfect life or the perfect husband or the perfect children or the perfect face or the perfect hair or whatever, their life is 50/50. Your life is 50/50.

Now, the 50/50 is different. That person with the perfect body, do you think they don’t worry about their body? The model that has the perfect body that’s on the runway, do you think she doesn’t hate her body and think about her body and worry about her body? You think she’s just like, “My body’s perfect, I’m so happy”? No. Everybody has 50/50. So even the professional football players and the professional basketball players and the ones that get the division one scholarships and the most popular people and the most successful people, it doesn’t ever get better than 50/50.

So when you’re trying to go out there in the world and compensate for this by accumulating and changing and nipping and tucking and dieting and all of that, what you find out is that you’re still left with 50/50.

The topics change, but this is still your life. Knowing this is amazing, because it saves you so much time. You can stop trying to compensate for this and you can decide what you want your life to be, knowing that it won’t get any better, it won’t get any worse. It is up to you how you interpret it.

If I can teach you this one concept, I have taught you everything.

Your whole life is going to be 50/50.

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN


WHAT IS AN UNHEALTHY EMOTIONAL LIFE?Let’s talk about unhealthy emotional life. So if we have modern emotional health, what is an unhealthy emotional life?

A complete lack of awareness. You’re not aware of what you’re feeling, you’re not aware that feelings matter, you’re not paying attention to your feelings.

Avoidance and resistance to negative emotion. This means you’re buffering. So you’re going into your house at night and you feel stressed and you feel frustrated and you feel overwhelmed and you feel tired and you feel negative emotion, and you think that negative emotion needs to be fixed because that’s what we’ve been taught.

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We have to do something about it, and you know how you fix negative emotion? You find something outside of you to fix it. So you find something to drink or something to eat or someone to talk to or a bath to take or something external to you to solve your internal crisis of negative emotion.

That’s what buffering is. That’s addiction—when we’re using drugs, when we’re using food, when we’re using porn, when we’re using obsession.

We get compulsive about things because we’re trying to solve internal problems with external solutions. We have these urges inside of us and we use all these false pleasures to try and solve for them.

Of course that doesn’t work, because you can’t solve an internal issue with an external problem.

By the way, your negative emotion doesn’t need to be solved. It just needs to be accepted and processed properly. When you resist it and avoid it, that’s when you cause yourself problems.

The third thing we do that’s unhealthy for our emotional lives is indulge in our emotions, which means we blame and we react to our emotions.

There are two ways that I like to see them:

1 The victim role

2 Reaction

The victim role is all about blaming other people for causing our negative emotion and holding them accountable for our emotional lives.

Reaction is when we have an emotion and we just act it out. We bully other people, we react to our anger, we yell at other people, we try to change them because we think they are causing frustration in our life.

This is just indulging in self pity, in anger, in reaction, in self loathing, in overwhelm, in worry. All of the things.

We get tied up and spin in all these emotions because we think we could just solve them by changing someone else. So when we react to emotion, when we bully, or get angry, or lose our shit, we blame the other person.

Then we blame ourselves and feel bad for acting out our emotions.

None of this works because it leaves us totally powerless. We’re out of control with our emotions or we’re blaming other people for causing them. That leaves our emotional life in a very unhealthy spin.

The last thing we do is hide from truth and from goals. When we don’t want to experience negative emotion, we hold ourselves back from life.

I want you to think about this in terms of goals that you’ve set in your life. A lot of people tell me they don’t want to set big goals because they’re afraid of failing. Instead, they spin in self doubt and overwhelm. But not setting goals is not telling the truth about what you want in your life. It’s not showing up. Not having important conversations. It’s hiding from any purposeful negative emotion.

You can’t solve an internal issue with an external problem.

WHAT IS AN UNHEALTHY EMOTIONAL LIFE?


50/50 IN RELATIONSHIPSI see this in the coaching that I do on relationships all of the time. People come into relationships and they think they’re responsible for the other person’s feelings and that the other person is responsible for their feelings. So they don’t show up as the truth of who they are because they want to be the version of the person this other person wants them to be. Likewise, they don’t want that person showing up as the truth of who they are either because of the fear that it might somehow affect them negatively.

So two people coming into a relationship, taking responsibility for each other’s feelings can’t be truthful, can’t be honest. They have to try and be the version of the person that the other person wants them to be. But they never have any true connection, which is what both people desperately want. They can’t connect because no one’s even showing up as who they really are because they’re afraid that they will hurt the other person’s feelings, or the person will hurt their feelings.

What if you went into a relationship knowing that half of this relationship is going to be negative emotion because half of the human experience is negative emotion, and that’s okay. You don’t need to behave any differently, and I don’t need to lie about who I am. We can both just show up as who we are and take care of our own emotional lives, and the rest of the time just have a blast together because you’re in this space of fully accepting the other person as they are. Isn’t that what we all really want? To be accepted for who we are?

We want to be in a relationship where we can just be accepted. A relationship where we can just love the person we’re with without trying to change them because that’s so ineffective anyway.

This is where I see so many of my clients hiding from their lives. They don’t want any change, they don’t want to rock the boat because they’re at a point where they’ve been able to try and manage their life so they don’t have any purposeful negative emotion. And if negative emotions do come up, they’ve learned to hide from it by over-treating it with false pleasure.


THE FIVE STEPS TO EMOTIONAL HEALTH

Now that we’ve defined what it looks like to be emotionally unhealthy, let’s talk more about modern

emotional health. What does it look like?

STEP ONE: UNDERSTAND YOUR EMOTIONS

First, we learn to understand our emotions. We know how to name them, we know how to feel them, we know how to identify them.

So if I ask you, “What emotion are you having right now?”, you’d be able to identify it. The more sophisticated you get in being able to decipher between emotions, the more you’re going to be able to create the life that you want.

For example, when you understand, right now, I’m feeling really excited, or I’m feeling anticipatory, or I’m feeling elated, versus I feel good, or I feel fine.

When you ask people how they feel, most people respond with good or fine. Is that all you have? Good or fine?

People don’t have any breadth or diversity to the types of emotions that they’re having, or they just feel bad, or they just feel anxious. Anxiety is so common and is just the resistance to an underlying emotion. They’re not wanting to experience whatever the emotion is, so they’re pushing it away and resisting it, which causes a tremendous amount of anxiety and panic for so many people.


STEP TWO: ALLOW YOUR EMOTIONSOnce you get good at identifying your emotions, the next step is to allow those emotions without fear or resistance. This is much harder to do than it is to say, because most of us have been trained to fix our emotions, or resist them, or pretend they’re not there.

If I feel frustrated, the answer is not for me to tell you, “I feel frustrated when you do that, stop doing that.” My job is to feel frustrated, to allow myself to really feel that emotion. It’s totally harmless.

Emotions can’t hurt us. We don’t need to fix them. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. In fact, it’s part of the human experience.

I want you to imagine your life if you didn’t experience frustration. Someone would say to you, “I’m frustrated.” And you’d be like, “I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what frustration is.” Would you feel less of the experience of life? Frustration is part of it. It’s part of the deal. The same goes for every other emotion we feel as part of this human experience.

The bigger the goals, the bigger your emotions, your positive and your negative emotions, and that’s a beautiful thing.

One way I work with my students to help them experience emotions, and allow them to be there, is by allowing urges. We feel an urge to do something that is not healthy for us, and we allow it to be there without reacting, without giving in to the urge.

We’re used to reacting to our urges. We have an urge to watch Netflix. We have an urge to overeat. We have an urge to smoke a cigarette, and we just react to those because we don’t know how to allow an emotion.

I teach my students to allow 100 urges. You’ll feel restless, but allow yourself to feel anxiety and panic without reacting to it, without resisting it, without buffering to avoid it.

So many of our urges, so many of the problems that we experience with our modern emotional health, is because of our environment. We have urges to overeat sugar, for example, because our brain thinks that sugar is super important because of the way that it reacts in our brain. But when we

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understand our emotion and we understand the reason we’re feeling that way is because of the way our primitive brain is wired, and we understand it from that perspective, we don’t have to react to it.

It’s important to remember two things when it comes to our emotions. First, we identify we are feeling an emotion, and then we have a choice to react to it. Those are two separate things.

STEP THREE: STOP INDULGING IN EMOTIONSThe third step to modern emotional health is that we’re not indulging in emotions all the time. We’re not feeling sorry for ourselves and blaming everybody and worrying all the time. We’re not doubting ourselves and hating other people and hating ourselves all the time.

Those emotions—worry, doubt, blaming, hating—are all very indulgent. And the way you know that they’re indulgent is that they don’t get you anywhere. They keep you stuck in a spin. They make an excuse for why you can’t go out into the world. And the reason why we indulge in the familiar negative emotion is because we’re afraid of feeling any kind of new negative emotion. But it’s still negative emotion. It’s still part of the 50/50.

I always say, you might as well get rich and get what you want while you’re experiencing negative emotion, because indulging in negative emotion isn’t getting you anywhere and it feels terrible.

You’ll feel restless, but allow yourself to feel anxiety and panic without reacting to it, without resisting it, without buffering to avoid it.

Think about self loathing and pity and blame and hate. It doesn’t feel good even if you feel justified in it. Even if you feel like you have a reason, who cares? Who cares what the reason is?

If it feels terrible, you could be using up that 50% of negative emotion on something that pursues a goal for you, that creates something, that makes a contribution to your life, that doesn’t have a net negative consequence to it.


STEP FOUR: BE WILLING TO FEEL IN THE FUTUREBeing willing to feel in the future is the opposite of hiding, right? When we hide from our lives, we don’t set big goals for ourselves. We don’t pursue anything we want because we’re hiding from negative emotion. But when we say, “I am willing to go do this…” and be rejected and be humiliated and feel failure and feel stumbling and fear and pain; when I’m open to the human experience of life, that’s when I have the emotional health that I need to be able to pursue things that help our entire human race evolve beyond where we currently are.

When we hide and indulge and avoid and try to be happy all the time, we get the opposite result. Do you know how unhappy it makes you to try and be happy all of the time? It’s crazy. But when you allow for the 50/50, when you allow for the full experience of life, there’s nothing to lose.

You know that’s what your life is going to be, so you might as well pursue the biggest dream you have. If you’re going to feel bad half the time anyway, why not?

The reason we’re not pursuing our dreams, the reason we’re not going after what we want, is because we don’t want to feel bad when we don’t get it. Wait a minute, you already don’t get it. You already don’t have it. You already feel bad. You might as well try. You might as well become the person that you want to be, fully alive, fully human, experiencing everything.

Let’s review the steps so far:

1. The first step is really understanding and identifying your emotions.

2. Then you allow them to be there.

3. Then you don’t indulge in them.

4. And then you remain open and willing to feel them in the future, rather than indulging in them.

Allowing and not indulging means you experience the emotion but you don’t react to it and you don’t succumb to it and you don’t blame it on anybody else. You keep moving forward with it.

When you allow an emotion, it’s almost like you digest it. You process it through. If you experience an urge and you really allow that urge to be there, there is a beginning, middle, and an end to it. It isn’t going to overtake your life.

When we feel like emotions are going to overtake us is when we push them away and don’t experience them, and then they become this overwhelming resistance.

When you allow for the 50/50, when you allow for the full experience of life, there’s nothing to lose.


When we allow emotions to pass in and through, because of the human experience being 50/50, we start really experiencing life because we know we’re going to go out into our day and probably experience some negative emotion. But that’s okay—we’re human, it’s fine.

When we go out into our day and think, “I better not experience any negative emotion today. I’m going to make sure these people don’t cause me any negative emotion today…” what do we end up doing?

We end up creating all the negative emotion by trying to avoid all the negative emotion.

STEP FIVE: CREATE EMOTION ON PURPOSEThe last step is to create emotion on purpose. This means that you understand that you are the person who generates your emotion. You generate your emotion by what you think, with your brain. And you can generate the emotion that you most want to generate to create the result you want.

So for some of you, it’s motivation. For some of you, it’s discipline. For some of you, it’s courage. For some of you, it’s love.

Just know you have the ability to generate emotion on purpose. Make sure you don’t do it with the agenda of feeling happier more of the time because that’s not the life you want. You’ve told yourself that’s a life you want, but it’s not.

You want the human experience. You want to experience what it’s like to be fully human. That’s why you are a human.

When you learn that you can generate the emotion that you want, to create the result that you want in your life, don’t be fooled into thinking, “Wait a minute, my thoughts cause my feelings, therefore I should be happy all of the time.”


No. Remember the rules are that you get to create whatever emotion you want, but you want to be a human being.

Ask yourself this question: Do you want to be a person that’s just happy all of the time? “I’m just happy about everything. All of the horrible things are fabulous.”

Why do we tell ourselves that’s what we want? We don’t want that. We want the full experience of life.

I want you to think about this. We know that life sucks pretty much half of the time. There are terrible things that happen in the world. People die, kids are kidnapped, people are raped, people get stolen from, people go to prison, people have accidents. So many horrible things happen.

We all know this, and yet we have children and we bring them into the world knowing that they are going to have pain, knowing that they’re going to experience frustration and heartbreak and despair. We know that for them and we still bring them into the world. And we still want to be here knowing that bad things are going to happen.

So why do we make it seem like such a terrible thing? It is what it is. It is the modern emotional environment we have, and when we can embrace it, that’s when we get some authority over our life. That’s when we start enjoying our life instead of trying to hide from it. Actually, we start enjoying the parts of it that aren’t even supposed to be enjoyable.

We’re not supposed to enjoy the negative part of life, but when we see it as part of the experience of being alive, that’s when those touching moments, those deep moments, that deep love, even the heartbreak happens—and we say we’d do it again. We would do it all over again, go through the heartbreak all over again to have experienced what we experienced, to be alive.

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We would do it all over again, go through the heartbreak all over again to have experienced what we experienced, to be alive.


SUMMARY OF THE FIVE STEPSSo let’s review the five skills—these are the skills I teach to my students in Self Coaching Scholars. These are the skills that you can learn in order to have modern emotional health.

First, you need to learn to identify your emotions. This is a skill that most of us need to take some time to develop. What am I feeling right now? Most of us don’t know how to differentiate between emotions.

Number two, we need to learn the skill of processing and allowing discomfort, delaying gratification, being present with whatever the truth is right now.

Number three, we need to separate emotion from circumstance. We need to stop telling ourselves that other people and other things cause our emotions. How much money we have in the bank does not determine how we feel. How other people treat us does not determine how we feel. Who’s in the White House does not determine how we feel.

We determine how we feel by how we think about the things that

are in the world, how we think about how other people treat us, how we think about ourselves and our lives.

When we allow ourselves to know that emotion is separate from circumstance, when we can see facts as facts and emotions as our experience, that’s when we get some authority over our emotional life and we stop trying to change all the circumstances in order to feel better.

We stop chasing all of the things outside of us. We stop trying to change other people. We stop trying to control the world. We stop trying to control other people. We are able to be happy in the space of the 50/50, which is so ironic, right?

Can you be at peace and content knowing that you won’t be at peace and content 100% of the time? Isn’t that a crazy thing to think about? It’s almost like when you accept the negativity and you’re at peace with it, then you’re at peace, because when you’re at peace with negativity, when you’re happy with the negativity, then you’re more happy.

Number four, identify your thoughts. Remember, your thoughts are what cause your feelings. Those sentences in your mind are what cause your emotions, so you want to be able to identify the thoughts that are causing the emotions that you’re experiencing.

It doesn’t mean you’re going to change those thoughts so you’ll be happy all of the time. It just means you will know the true cause of all of your emotion comes from your brain. And once you understand that, then you can change your brain as much or as little as you want.

Then you realize that the world isn’t causing your emotional life, other people aren’t causing it; you are.

Finally, number five is you learn how to create wanted emotion. So what is the emotion that you need to create in order to generate the motivation to do the things that you want to do?

How many of you have said, “I feel stuck, I don’t feel motivated, I don’t feel excited, all I do is


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procrastinate, all I do is overeat, all I do is overdrink…” because you don’t know how to generate the emotion that you need in order to achieve the things that you want to achieve?

Here’s something totally fascinating about this: a lot of time, the emotion that you need to generate isn’t necessarily happiness. If our goal is to be happy all the time, then shouldn’t we generate happiness all the time?

No, because sometimes what we need to experience is the discomfort of change in order to achieve our dreams, in order to achieve our goals.

Now, here’s the question so many people ask me; what is the point of achieving goals if the goal isn’t going to make you happy? Well, then you have to go back to the premise. The goal of life isn’t to be happy. So the goal of the goal isn’t happiness; it’s the experience of being alive.

You realize that the world isn’t causing your emotional life, other people aren’t causing it; you are.


DISCOMFORT IS THE CURRENCY TO YOUR DREAMSSo when we go back to the question, what is the purpose of your life—if the answer is to be happy all of the time, you’re in the wrong place, my friends. If being happy all of the time is the goal of your life it is not going to work. In fact, this experience on the planet is not about being happy all the time.

What is it about for you? Is it about having the full experience of life, being able to process emotion, being able to be present with all the aspects, the good, the bad, the right, the wrong, the positive and negative, so you can have a complete experience? That complete experience is what gives you emotional health.

People say to me, “I think emotional health has a lot to do with confidence…” and I agree with that. But where does confidence come from? It comes from not being afraid of experiencing any emotion.

The reason I’m so confident when I go to speak to a group is because there is no rejection, there is no humiliation, there is no failure that I’m not willing to experience. When I go in there, I know the the worst that can happen is a feeling. The worst that can happen is terror or embarrassment or humiliation or fear, and I’m open to all of them. I can go in with 100% confidence knowing that I can handle the worst that can happen.

Insecurity and low self-esteem come from believing you can’t handle, or that you should avoid, the negative thing. So if I make you an offer and I’m terrified of you saying no, then I’m not going to want to make a lot of offers. But if I make an offer and I’m all in if you say no and I’m all in if you say yes, then I can make that offer from a place of confidence, and that’s how I show up in my life.

I notice that the more negative experience I have, the more positive experience that I have, and the more experience that I have, the bigger my life gets. So if I try to hide in this little tiny circle and avoid the negative all the time by buffering my feelings away, I end up with a very small life. But when I decide that I don’t need the buffering, I just want more negative and more positive, I can experience all that life has to offer. I want a bigger life. That’s when it gets exciting. That happens for me because I open myself up to more positive and more negative.

My emotional mental health becomes bigger and it becomes stronger and I become more agile because I’m not pushing everything away, I’m not escaping in drugs, I’m not beating myself up, I’m not indulging.

I’m open to feeling any emotion. I’m open to feeling anxious. I’m open to feeling doubt. I’m open to feeling frustration and I’m open to feeling joy and excitement,


because here’s the deal—when you’re hiding over here buffering, when you’re escaping life in false pleasure and drugs and getting high and drinking and all that, you’re not experiencing the genuine human experience. You’re hiding on the outskirts of your life.

Do you see that? You know that is true because whenever you come back, it just feels terrible because you’re not truly in your life.

Think about it in terms of relationships. When I show up as 100% me and I say to my husband, “Listen, I have all the good and all the bad. Here I come. I’m not going to try and hide the negative, I’m not going to try and hide the things about me that I’m ashamed of, I’m just going to show up as me, 100% as me. And I want you to show up as you. I want you to be you 100%.”

And then all of a sudden, we both come with our full selves, and then we have this full experience of being together instead of trying to tiptoe around each other, meet each other’s needs, be who the other person wants us to be, and hide the real truth of who we are.

You know what’s great? If you’re not afraid to feel emotion, you’re not afraid to feel embarrassed, you can just tell everybody the truth about you.

I tell everybody the truth on my podcast, on my webinars, I tell everybody. I have nothing to hide. So when people are like, “You know that thing…” I’m like, “What, bring it, tell me everything.” Because if you find something out about me that I haven’t told the world, I’m going to tell the world. And I’m going to tell the world and risk feeling embarrassed, risk the rejection, risk the exclusion, because there’s nothing I’m not willing to feel.

And when I hide, what I notice is that I exclude myself ahead of time versus just being open and being myself. Now, here’s the other thing that’s true; when you show up as the truth of yourself and you’re willing to bring the good and the bad of yourself, and you’re willing to experience the good and the bad in the world, and you’re willing to experience the positive and the negative in your emotional life and emotional health, there’s a freedom that you can’t taste anywhere else.

That freedom is the freedom to just be you, and to nod when things are negative, and to nod when things are bad, and to be willing to experience the worst of the world. Because the truth is, life is what it is, and we can spend our life hiding from it, but it doesn’t make us any more protected.

We feel like if we just stay in our house, then no one can hurt us. But you know what we’re doing by staying in our house? We’re hurting us. There’s no way to avoid it. It’s 50/50 whether you’re fully exposed or whether you’re fully hiding. It’s always 50/50.

In fact, think about how you feel when you’re hiding. Aren’t you afraid someone’s going to find you when you’re hiding?

Because the truth is, life is what it is, and we can spend our life hiding from it, but it doesn’t make us any more protected.

The people who show up and tell the truth are the people we can relate and connect to.


I’m terrified. Whenever I play hide and go seek, I’m like, “Oh my god, somebody’s going to find me.” I’m totally freaked out. I’d much rather just be out in the open as the truth of who I am.

Haven’t you noticed that when people are the truth of who they are, when they show up and they’re like, “Hey, listen, I got all this negative stuff and all this positive stuff, my name’s Brooke…” it’s so much more attractive than when someone says, “Well I’m perfect and I’ve always been perfect. My family is perfect and my life’s been perfect and I have a perfect job and I weigh the perfect weight and I have the perfect husband and I have the perfect kids.”

Why are we all trying to be perfect all the time? I look at people’s Instagram and I’m like, holy shit, how is anyone that perfect? Because we think that’s what we’re supposed to do to get it right and to be good.

But the people who show up and tell the truth are the people we can relate and connect to. They’re like, “Oh my god, I’m a mess… So am I…” but not in an indulgent way. Not like, oh I’m a mess because of this, or this person, or because of my boss, or because of my husband. I’m a mess because I’m a human and I’ve got messiness and I’ve got cleanliness and that’s how they work together. And that is the

balance of the human experience, and that is modern mental and emotional health.

Your mental health is what you think. Your emotional health is what you feel. And what you think is what causes what you feel.

There is nothing more important than your emotional health. Your emotions drive all of your actions. Your emotions are what you experience in your body as your experience of the world.

When you ask someone, “How do you experience the world?” It’s all through emotion. And the way that you generate emotion is how you interpret the world.

Now, if we go back to the beginning and I ask you this question, what is modern emotional health? And you tell me it is, “I’m trying to be happy most of the time…” I will tell you that you probably are stuck in an unhealthy emotional life.

That’s where most of my clients begin. They’re so well intended. They just want to be happy and can’t understand why they’re not happy more of the time. They feel like they should be happy because they look at their life and they have all the things that were supposed to make them happy.

And when I tell them, “Wait, no one told you? You’re not supposed to be happy all of the time. No matter what you have, no matter what you’ve accomplished, no matter how you look, no matter how thin you get.”

Your mental health is what you think. Your emotional health is what you feel.

Emotional health doesn’t feel like joy and being ecstatic. It doesn’t feel like eating a chocolate chip cookie.


Emotional health requires accepting and understanding that we have both positive and negative experiences.

I want to leave you with one more thing.

The negative part of the emotional experience can be the best part. It can be the part that makes the rest of it so much better. So when you’re open to all of it and you open up your life, that is when you have emotional health.

But it doesn’t feel like happiness. Please know that.

Emotional health doesn’t feel like joy and being ecstatic. It doesn’t feel like eating a chocolate chip cookie.

It feels like being a human, which includes the positive and the negative of your experience, of your life.

TAKING IT FURTHER If you want to apply these concepts to your life, it requires daily practice. If you’re out there in the world, you’re going to be taught that you should try to be happier and look prettier and be better and be good and be more kind and fix the world.

I teach my students in my monthly coaching program, Self Coaching Scholars, how to apply the steps to Modern Emotional Health to their life every single day.

I will teach you to set and achieve bigger dreams than you ever thought possible. Because the only reason you’re not setting them now is because you’re afraid of how you’re going to feel.

When we can take away that fear of how you’re going to feel, your goals and your dreams become so much bigger.

What are you waiting for? I’d love to have you join me inside Self Coaching Scholars.



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EMOTIONAL HEALTH · emotional health. We spend way too much time avoiding pain because we think the...

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