Yesterday, I had the honour of witnessing a leader allow emotion to come up in a webinar talking about the impacts of the COVID-19 situation on his business.  He teared up as he talked through having to lay off some of his employees.  I know firsthand the ups and downs of emotion that we’re all going through.  Disbelief, anger, sadness, frustration, loss, grief and more.  I also have had great moments of joy, love, laughter, and connection with family, friends, and colleagues.

It can be a reaction from many leaders to hold back any emotion from being seen by others and especially from their team for fear of scaring them or being judged.  When you don’t feel your feelings, bad things happen. When we avoid feeling unpleasant feelings, we lose our capacity for experiencing pleasant feelings.  You can’t have the light without the dark.  You can’t have music without silence between the notes

We bottle up unpleasant feelings like energy. And, like energy, those feelings eventually need somewhere to go. If you don’t feel them and talk about them, you’ll have them come out in destructive ways.  Unprocessed feelings come out in hitting the ceiling from time to time or a crying fit out of nowhere. Or, for the more reserved, they come out in a breakdown of your health. Even worse, failing to process your emotions pushes those you care about most away through incorrectly directed blame or insincere niceness being perceived as a martyr.  That’s not you. 

One thing we don’t talk about is feeling opposing feelings at the same time.  You may feel anxious, grief, uncertain and fearful of the current global reality we are dealing with while also experiencing joyful feelings in embracing your child or laughing playing a game or joking with your team in a video conference.  There is room for all of these feelings, all at the same time. Experiencing a duality of feelings is perfectly normal.  Feelings aren’t exclusive of one another.

Be patient with yourself. The only way to the other side what you’re experiencing is feeling through. You can’t go around, you can’t avoid it or you’ll get stuck in it. Here are three ways to process your feelings:

1.      Talk to someone who’s in your one-inch square.  This is a literal square that you draw on a paper and write the names of people who truly matter.  Write them down and then go talk to one of those people about what you’re going through.

2.     Write for 5-10 minutes about what you’re dealing with and how you feel. Some call this journaling, but journaling doesn’t have to last a page or an hour.  I’m a big fan of limiting journaling to less than 10 minutes.  If there is more to write, it will still be there for your 10 minutes of writing tomorrow.

3.     Try a self-compassion meditation from Kristin Neff’s self-compassion.org website. No cost, no signup, no catch.  Her meditations give you real practice with self-compassion skills and feeling all the feelings while moving through and processing them.  An exceptional tool for getting unstuck.  

It’s hard to sit with unpleasant feelings and essential for your mental health. Go find some music and listen for the silence between the notes.