"I don't feel great!"

This is a conversation I’ve had with many of my clients over the years, and I know that with almost every client, it comes up at least once.

“What would you like coaching on today?”
“I don’t feel great right now, I’d like to feel better.”
“What’s the problem with not feeling great?”
Another way to say this could be:
“I don’t feel great, so what?”

In our culture, we are obsessed with how we feel. We write books about how we feel, and we tell stories about how we feel. How we feel carries a lot of significance.

That, in itself, wouldn’t be a problem. But it becomes one when we think that how we feel means anything more than we are simply thinking thoughts that don’t feel good.

We think we don’t feel good because… of the job, the house, the weather, the spouse, the money, the children, the employees, our performance, and so on and so on.

Yet, that’s not how we work.

Things don’t create feelings; our interpretations, beliefs, and meanings do.

This is taken to absurd extremes when we feel bad and then think because we feel bad, that means we are X or should do X, or can’t do X.

Our feelings are generated by how we see the world and ourselves. And how we see them is framed, shaped, and created in thoughts. And most of those thoughts are out of our control (95% of them are recycled from past events.)

We can get into a bad feeling simply by pulling up an old story when met with a similar situation. Why would we make that significant?

One could argue we do this because, evolutionarily, we evolved to memorize danger and be aware of threats to our survival. But in today’s world, most of the things we encounter are harmless, yet we still function as if they could harm us.

Like feeling scared is a problem. Like feeling insecure is a problem.
By focusing our attention on it, we give it more and more food to grow into absurdity.

Instead of leaving our feelings alone and letting them pass, like they do for a baby—one moment happy, the next moment sad, then excited—without any significance attached.