At Rising Vibe we are all about the conversations that matter, and the language we use has a huge impact on every conversation. With ourselves and others.
Tantrums.
They can be uncomfortable to watch, especially if we’re the caregiver of the child having one. We’re overwhelmed with the urge to make it stop. Happy child – good. Angry child – bad. Right? So we scold. ‘Stop that! It’s naughty!’ ‘You cannot behave like this!’ ‘People are looking at you!’ It’s a horribly embarrassing situation to be involved in. But have you noticed how the child simply couldn’t care less? They feel their feelings, they express them fully and when they’re done expressing them, it’s over and they move on. They have no shame that people are looking. They’re not remotely bothered if Mum is mortified in the middle of Tesco’s. And if you’ve ever seen another child tantrum and haven’t been emotionally involved yourself, you might have thought, yeah kid, I know how you feel – secretly wishing you could do the same and be rid of the feelings you bottle up inside.
When we’re little, usually up to 2 or 3 years old, we don’t experience fear of judgement or shame.
We’re free to express how we feel completely, as we don’t think about it. We just feel. Then we act. To our 2 year old self, there is no ‘wrong’ way to behave, we’re just expressing our feelings.
As we grow up, we’re bombarded with behaviour rules.
We’re reminded daily of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to be – control your anger. Stop crying. Be kind. And when we don’t feel good, we’re told to change – cheer up. Smile, it might never happen. Calm down. Get a grip. So when we get into the world of work and we’re reminded again that emotions don’t belong here, we struggle to be honest about how we’re really feeling. Being open when we don’t feel good makes us vulnerable and so to protect ourselves, we’re not our real selves. And when we’re not our real selves, we’re not fulfilling our true potential.
It’s this binary right/wrong, good/bad, positive/negative language around feelings that’s the problem.
As adolescents and adults, we don’t feel our feelings in surround sound technicolour like we did when we were 2 years old. We’ve had years of people telling us off for acting out our ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ feelings. So we deny them. We numb them. We’re so fearful of judgement that we push them away.
At Rising Vibe, we don’t believe in good and bad, right and wrong, positive and negative emotions. Emotions are either high vibe or low vibe.
This constant confirmation of the undesirability of our low vibe emotions means that we start to pretend we’re high vibe when we’re not. We’ve all seen them at work. The people who get their game face on and make out that they’re ok when they’re really not. We call these people functioning fake-a-holics and they aren’t fooling anyone.
The corporate world has never been a place for feelings.
The pandemic changed all that. Anxieties around health, furlough, fear of redundancy, the stress of working from home and a myriad of other issues meant that emotions at work were brought into sharp focus. As low vibe emotions amongst staff ran high, many business leaders felt that they had to pretend they had it all together. But this lack of authenticity distanced and disconnected them from their team. The most successful leaders during this time were the ones that showed their vulnerability and were honest about how they felt. They didn’t put on the brave face. They told their teams they didn’t have all the answers and that they were struggling too, but together, they’d get through it. The leaders that didn’t pretend they were ok were the ones that connected the most and had the biggest impact.
Unless we’ve been really lucky and been able to express our feelings freely, fully and without shame or judgement since childhood, most of us have had years of conditioning in this binary language around feelings. And it has to stop.
Language impacts our connection to self.
When we’re told in childhood and subsequently tell ourselves later in adulthood, that anxiety is weak, anger is bad, sadness is wrong, we disconnect from these feelings and ultimately disconnect from ourselves. And when we disconnect from ourselves, we can’t fully connect with other people.
The only way we can support people to feel how they feel is by avoiding binary language.
We feel what we feel and it is what it is, either low vibe or high vibe. So you feel angry. OK. It doesn’t make you a bad person. We can address our anger by asking, how am I feeling right now? How can I express it in a way that is helpful to me? Can I go for a run? Pummel a punching bag? Vent to someone I trust to let off steam?
If we don’t express our feelings, they stick around and they build, until, like a shaken can of pop, they explode.
Then we have the breakdown. We resign. We finish the relationship. So let’s stop telling ourselves that our feelings are wrong. They’re just low vibe. And with self-awareness and healthy expression of our feelings, we can be our true selves, start to feel better and make meaningful human connections.
Check out Rising Vibe Founder & CEO Lou Banks delivering her TEDx Talk on the importance of human to human connection here: https://youtu.be/Z5_6ol51SnEFor more information on Rising Vibe visit www.rising-vibe.com or come and see us at the World of Learning Conference & Exhibition 2022 – stand C150!