Just finished up Feel Better class, and it was fantastic. The feedback has been excellent, I think the most important element to me is that students say they walk away from the class not just feeling better but understanding HOW to feel better. That’s really important to me. That this does not have to be this heavy process, that you can learn some basic information about your brain, some basic cognitive concepts and tools and you are in a much better position to manage your own emotional state regardless of what is happening around you. So I am really happy with the effectiveness of those concepts for my students.

I teach people how to change….I teach this in part by studying myself, noticing what makes something hard, noticing what is in the way. I understand the pain of feeling like you can’t, like you keep trying and you can’t change, I know it so well, and I want to help you with the components of change to make it easier.

We want to enjoy our lives more. We want to change so we can feel better. And whatever that is for you: we want to earn more money, lose some weight, manage our anxiety—less stress less reactivity, less worry, better relationships. These are the things we want. Our desires.

So we have the desire. The desire is important. It is the impetus, it’s the spark. So we go out seeking solutions –a book, a class, a teacher, a new regimen. We try new things. But where the rubber hits the road is in our choices. The consistency of choices on a daily basis.

You have to choose to change. This is where we get tripped up. The desire isn’t hard, the gathering of info, the taking of classes, the reading of the books…not hard. It’s part of the path. The hard part is the choice….where in any given moment we choose to change, to do something different. and the underpinnings of making that choice is emotional maturity. What do I mean by that…..I define emotional maturity as our willingness to take full responsibility for our emotions. That doesn’t mean we blame ourselves for how we feel, it means that we want to be empowered in our lives and we understand that our emotions are OURS, they are created by us, they are the fuel for how we behave so we want to utilize them productively.    

So if we can increase emotional maturity, we will make the choosing part easier. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today….I’m going to give you my four best ideas to increase your emotional maturity.

Okay so the first one might hurt a little, this is tough love…if you’ve been trying to get what you want and you don’t have it,

1.        Stop putting so much emphasis on how much you’ve tried. You want credit from someone, some vague someone, for how much you’ve tried.  That mentality—omg I’ve tried harder than anyone….it sounds so true. But that belief will have you exhausted, giving up and it almost requires you to feel sorry for yourself which feels awful ultimately. If you’re trying and not getting the outcome you want, it requires honest evaluation. You have to separate your value as a person from your evaluation of your activities of trying. Perhaps the outcome you want requires way more effort than you theorized. Or different effort. You are not entitled to your theory being accurate. Your job is to try things, and if you’re trying and evaluating, you’re getting closer. Mostly what we do is we try and we don’t evaluate. So we don’t learn from all of the failure that we’ve been through. We’re not asking ourselves—what DID work? What didn’t work? What do I know now that I didn’t know at the beginning of this journey. Often times, change requires more effort than we think it’s going to take, it requires more consistency than we think. So the trying part is important but the point is to learn from the trying and keep going. This is where resilience is born, and it's worth it. And btw, stop rescuing your kids from this process of becoming resilient. You are robbing them of a much more robust life. 

2.        You have to practice on the small stuff. You have to. So let’s just say you have a desire to be less stressed, that will require a choice to be less stressed. You will need to make many choices to be a person who is less stressed. That means in a tiny moment of stress or aggravation, can you choose to let it go? Not turn it into a problem. We want to learn techniques to be less stressed—breathing, somatic exercises, different ways of getting our nervous system back online. Wonderful. But if you aren’t choosing to be less stressed in a situation that is triggering you, you will never be less stressed. ……Wanting the world and the people around you to be less triggering so you can be less stressed is the long way around, and it is not emotionally mature because it’s saying my emotions are coming from outside of me and that’s not true. EM says I can feel anything, and my emotional reaction is mine. So if I want to feel different, it will require something of me. I will need to choose it. It will require me to not feel like I have to be right. That I can let other people not understand me and my sensitivities—I can keep that to myself, let that be my work. Anything that you do on the regular is your practice field. Driving in traffic and standing in the grocery store are perfect places to practice. Can you be okay with someone driving too slow? Can you be okay with there not being enough checkout lanes open? If you can’t, you need to keep practicing, because if you can’t let the small stuff go, you will not be able to let the big stuff go.

3.        40% rule. It’s a question to pose to yourself: Can I be happy with 40% of what I want? A good life does not mean you get what you want.  But you already have a lot of what you want—can you be happy with what you already have? Or do you have to have 80 or 100% in order to be happy? Living in a society where people choose to be happy with 40% would greatly improve the energy and optimism of that society. Instead, we’ve made these massive leaps of progress, still can’t be happy. This is emotionally immature. Get on with living while you try to make more progress. And I made up the 40%--it’s just an idea. How do you calculate how much of what you want and have? It’s just an idea, an opinion in your own head. If you’re living in the impoverished slums of Brazil, you would look at an american’s life and say they have 150% of what they want, they have MORE than what anyone could ever want. Same if you were a pioneer and you were able to time travel to the year 2024, you would think they have 3000% of what they want—all of their wants and needs are filled in the most dazzling unimaginable ways…. So who is right? Who gets to decide if you have enough. And you might say well I do, only I know if I have what I want, and I’d say correct. You have full control over that opinion. Are you willing to make a choice to feel great about what you already have? It’s a choice. Deciding that you want to feel better about your life will not come with your life delivering more to you. It will come from you choosing to feel better now. That’s EM. Taking responsibility for it.  

4.        Emotional maturity means you set your own standards and hold yourself to those standards. So the comparison is with you and you. Now this is true for all areas of your life but I’m going to use FOOD/BODY as the example….don’t let someone else set your standard. Set your own. Am I eating the way I want to eat? In a way that feels good to me? Am I moving my body in a way that I am happy with?  That’s the only standard you need to compare yourself to. We are awash in images and messages that tell us that we aren’t doing it right. That we could be MORE perfect, as though there is a way to be. When in reality there is only what you CHOOSE. Step into your own sovereign life, and make your choices with joy and lightness of being. We’ve made this so heavy.  And if there’s something you want to improve, wonderful. But start with getting real about how YOU want to live.  So many of the food and fitness gurus out there are outliers, they are living life in a way that might optimize their health but is that what you want? If you do go for it, let David Goggins guide you. But first ask yourself: …. Do you really want that? Do I want what is required to have that? If your answer is no, that’s not a problem. What is YOUR choice? What works for you? Don’t you know people in your life who don’t eat and exercise perfectly but they have had a huge wonderful impact on you??  The person who jumps to mind for me is the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle—he looks like he reads all day. That’s what his body looks like, like a little question mark. He's living according to his own priorities and his life is so impactful. You get to decide. Make a choice that you feel good about, that supports the life you really want and then, crucially, drop all of your self criticism about your decision. Own it with happiness. That is emotional maturity. And do not misunderstand me…I believe in having high standards, I think they make life better. But I get to decide what those are. My standards might look low to someone else, I don’t care. I’m comparing me to me. I love the idea that I can always be inspired to be better, to learn more. I don’t want to feel like I already know everything, I’m much more comfortable knowing that there’s always more. HOWEVER, that is an inspiring idea to me. It doesn’t haunt me or drain me. I don’t ever let that idea take a toll on me. I don’t ever use it against myself. That’s what I want for you—to choose your own standards that inspire you and free you and have you yearning for more and using your life to contribute. We need the best of you right now, in whatever package that comes in. You’re supposed to be you exactly where you are now. Not the spiffed up version you think you need to be. You. Right now.