Mindfully Recharged with Mariana Thomas

How to Use Your Emotions to Your Advantage

May 24, 2021 Mariana Thomas Season 3 Episode 25
Mindfully Recharged with Mariana Thomas
How to Use Your Emotions to Your Advantage
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, I have shared something personal with everyone. I have been going through all sorts of emotions recently, and here I talked a lot about how to use your emotions to your advantage. 

  • 8:46 - The reason for my current emotions
  • 10:22 - You can only control what's on the inside
  • 13:33 - Strategies to help you find strength in the hardest times
  • 24:08 - Overcoming the big emotions


Don't forget to download your FREE GUIDE to Mindful and Energetic Living here, and subscribe to this podcast!

See you in Episode 26!

———
Buzzsprout podcast link: http://mindfullyrecharged.marianathomas.com/

Apple podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/mindfully-recharged-with-mariana-thomas/id1540285007

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3b1IfgnP3uCpEFOPHzlACN?si=lhViiwSbRVC7BE7CxpbPxw

Amazon Music: https://www.amazon.com/Mindfully-Recharged-with-Mariana-Thomas/dp/B08JJQZ792/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=mindfully+recharged&qid=1605818730&sr=8-1

Visit my Website and subscribe to my mailing list!
 https://www.marianathomas.com/

7 Days of Healthy Habits Workbook
https://www.marianathomas.com/courses
 
Follow me on Instagram!

https://instagram.com/the_real_mariana_thomas?r=nametag

Support the show

Keep in touch! Connect with me through the following links, whichever is best for you:

Website
Subscribe
Instagram
Facebook
Support

Mariana 0:00   

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindfully Recharged podcast. This is your host, Mariana Thomas. And today's episode, we are going to talk about how to use your emotions to your advantage. Okay, I recently went through a little bit of emotion and I want to talk about this today with you. I hope you stick around and listen to it. So, let's go. 

 

Intro Speaker 0:35   

Welcome to Mindfully Recharged with Mariana Thomas. In this podcast, Mariana brings you mindful conversations and people that will develop and recharge you from the inside out so that you can increase productivity in your personal and professional life. This is Mindfully Recharged.  

 

Mariana 0:55   

Welcome everyone, this is your host, Mariana Thomas. And today, I want to speak to you about the topic: how to use your emotions to your advantage. And the reason why I wanted to talk about this is that I have been dealing with something that you guys probably don't know. Let me get something here real quick. But as you all know, if you have been living in this world for the last couple of years, I would say almost two years. And if you have not, maybe you have been under a rock. But anyway, as you know, the vaccines are ready to go pretty much for everyone. So, there is a virus in the world, right? As you guys know, I don't want to make it controversial. It is all about how I had the feeling about taking the vaccine and it has nothing to do with my emotions, my feelings, and basically, fear. Yeah, where is that coming from? You probably are asking. I didn't know at the beginning where was it coming from. But all I know is that emotions are here to teach us something. Emotions are teachers. And I have been dealing with this for the last couple of months. I don't know when this was ready to go for everyone and the world is getting back, we are excited to get back into the world with everybody and maybe hug those that we haven’t hugged in a long time. But let's talk about these feelings and emotions and how we take advantage of them. So, stick around because throughout the topic or throughout my conversation here with you, I'm going to include what happened and how I came out with this topic. As I said, emotions are teachers, and only when we talk about big emotions, those feelings, they are unshakeable, they keep us awake at night, and motivates us into doing something. I don't know with you, but you felt those. You felt those emotions that show up in a time when you are calm, and you are into your mindfulness practices, maybe those emotions that make you go like “this is how I want to be, and this is how I want to live my life”. Those are really happy emotions and really big emotions. They are big emotions and are very, very important. Also, we need to count the painful emotions, those are the ones that I want to focus on the most today. Those emotions make us cry and feel pain because they have important messages and lessons to give us. Remember when I said in the beginning, “emotions are teachers”, they teach us and direct us in the course in life, right? They teach us and direct our course in life. Big emotions are the energy-giver of human life and the greatest teacher, at least it has been for me. Let’s say that you miss somebody, you know, in my case, I miss some of my friends back in Colombia. Well, I haven't seen them in, I don't know, a hundred years. And when I was a little girl, when I was growing up in high school, I missed them very much. And sometimes I tried to look for them on social media. And, by the way, most of the time, it's a waste of time, because I can't find them. But that means that you love those people, that you love that person. And you should do that, right? You should feel those emotions. If you really want things so much, that you can’t stop thinking about them. Right? And I think a lot about my friends. But let's say that you're thinking about something different, and you can stop thinking about it. That's a dream, maybe that's your dream that you need to pursue. It doesn't matter if it is a, maybe a luxury car that you want to buy, a mansion, I don't know, maybe you are into that. Or a trip around the world, now that the world is opening, maybe you want to go and visit the world. Is something like that is what you know, keeps you awake? That's an emotion. Oh, by the way, that’s the sound of my daughter sending a message. And this is not going to be edited. So, you’re just going to have to listen to that beep.  
 

7:28 

Okay, so let's go back to the emotions that hurt. If something makes you hurt, that means it is something you should avoid in life. Because it goes against your dream life. Right? You don't want to say, “Okay, I would love to have a new house, and that hurt”. Oh, that doesn't really hurt, I'm talking about a different emotion that truly hurts. But sometimes you may not know where that is coming from. And stick around because we're going to get into that. Maybe it sounds too simple to you. Right? But it is just like that. You just have to think about what type of emotion it is. Is the one that makes me really happy that I can think about, I can't stop thinking about it. You know, it gives me love, it gives me motivation and I want to run into it, or is it the one that hurts me? 

 

8:46   

People have different standards when it comes to life. What gives me pleasure can make someone else hurt. So, you may have those two different emotions in you. But you may be one of those that are always happy. So, what gives me pleasure and be happy, and I will get to that. You know, my daughter was very excited about getting the vaccine. So that's the emotion that I'm talking about. Right? She's happy, she's looking forward to it. On the other side, I was hurting, I was scared to even think about it. My emotions were completely different than hers. So, what made her excited, you know about going to get this vaccine, Oh my god. I’m like “Oh no. Oh no”. Clearly different because it is our souls that guide us to the good and to the bad, and the not so good and not so bad. 

 

10:22   

And I also know that sometimes there are things in life that we can’t control like she was having that beautiful emotion of “I can't wait to go get vaccinated”. And I was having the fear. And in my case, I’m thinking, at that moment, I was thinking, I can’t control that, I can’t control this emotion and these feelings that I had. We can’t control the outside world all the time, right, we can’t control what's going to happen on the outside. I was wrong because I can control what happens on the inside. This is what I teach you guys, this is what I preach. And I wasn't applying that to my own self. So, if you are facing a situation that's difficult like I was, you know, here is my daughter super excited to get vaccinated. And I am here shaking and being scared. Because I don't know the outcome on the outside. I worried about the attachment or the outcome. When I could have been thinking about how can I change on the inside? That's a different story. Right? And you probably thinking “Yeah”. So, if you're facing a situation as difficult, and you can't do anything about it just change the way you feel. And think about it. That's all I needed to do. I know there are some strategies, you know, real things in the world that happens that is hard. We go through a strategy, but human nature has always proved that we are capable of finding strength, even in the hardest time. And you know what I'm talking about back when I was a little girl when the most horrible thing that a little girl can go through isn't losing their mother. Right? That happened to me. But I was capable of finding strength even in the hardest time. So, for that, I want to give you a couple of rules. Because one of the things that I did was - Don't try to put it out. That's my first rule. I didn't put it out, I sat with the fear that I was having. And I spoke louder about it. And there is a practice that I did that I probably will record another episode about how I did that. But I needed to speak out loud of all the emotions and feelings that I was having about taking my vaccine. And where that was coming from was from what I just told you when I was a little girl, because I did not want to die. I thought that “hey if they put something strange in my body, I don't know what's going to happen”. And I don't want to leave my daughter alone just like my mother left me. 
 

15:00   

And that was this scary thing in my mind when I was going through this. So, rule number one is, don't try to put it out. Our emotions are like a fire. But don't even think you can put it out. They're burning inside of you. So, if you think that you can put it out, you're lying to yourself because it is like a volcano. And the more you tried to cover it up, the more powerful it will explode its way out. Because that's how I was feeling. I think that's why addictions are so bad for our future. You know, we get addicted to social media, we're addicted to food, we get addicted to I don't know, alcohol, there's a lot of things, right? Because all they try is to put out emotions. But that will never happen. What happened is that the number of emotions grows inside of us. The pain becomes unbearable, and can even make us lose our mind. I was already thinking of stories, what's going to happen, you know, making up stories in my head. What's going to happen if I do this? That's what I was doing. Making all of these stories because of fear.  

 

17:15 

Rule number two: “You can’t always change a situation, but you can always change how you feel about it”. Hmm, and that's exactly what happened once I did my practice. And like I just mentioned, I probably will record an episode on it. And I’ll tell you what that was about. This is something that I teach but I need to apply the things that I'm teaching, and I do it many times. But this emotion was so heavy in me that I forgot that I had a tool to apply to myself. So, rule number two once again you can’t always change a situation but you can always change how you feel about it. And my voice is a little raspy today guys and that's because you can't change the intensity or the fire but you can change its direction. I hope that you can feel me on this one. You can change the intensity or the fire but you can change the direction. You basically can direct your volcano into something constructive. So, I was sitting right there speaking out loud my emotions to recognize them. Then I discovered that the feeling as we're moving in a different direction, and the emotions, and it doesn't matter what caused the volcano inside of you. You can totally control how you are going to use it. 
 

19:50   

So that fire that I had inside, even though it was an unhealthy emotion, I used that and it was gone. And it turned the other way. I was like, “Okay”. I was feeling like my daughter, okay. I don't feel that fear anymore. Now, what can I do with this new emotion that is so positive? Not that I'm crazy about shutting myself in the arm. That's not what it's about. But it's like, what did I do with this positivity in me now? Okay, so not only the fear goes away, but now you have a different emotion that is way more positive. And you can use that to your advantage for good. Maybe you have something that you were trying to do. But you were so scared and caught up in this emotion that you were going through, and you put it on the side, and you didn't get it done. So how did you have this new feeling and this new emotion, and this new motivation, you're like, “Where is that thing that I was trying to finish and I was trying to do? Let's get it going”. That is what I'm talking about. Using your emotions to your advantage. That's how you do it. But you have to overcome those first. Right? So, they are good emotions. The ones that you are already motivated to do whatever, the and the ones that you “Oh, I missed this person, because I loved him so much and it feels so good”. Or “I’m so scared about whatever decision I made right now and this is paralyzing me right now and I can't do anything”. Those are the two. So, the first thing is that I got to remember to recognize them. So don't put it out. And the second thing is you can’t change it, but you can change how you feel about it. You can’t change the situation, but you can change how you feel about it. And recharge yourself. There is a lot of people that use emotions, to get motivated for a hobby, maybe, for success. You know, I remember when I was 16 you know, I remember I lost my mother when I was 13. And at the age of 16, I decided to start my health and wellness journey. So, I went to the gym, and I wanted to get stronger. And I wanted to be my best because of the emotion that I had just gone through. It gave me something to cope and overcome my sadness with, and increase my overall health and wellness. 

 

24:08   

That's the beauty of that. But if you want to know more about that story, go to episodes number 1, 2, and 3. Remember, that will tell you everything about me since I was a little girl. So, I want to remind you to go to those three episodes if you have them. And I hope that this episode was helpful to you in how you can use your emotions to your advantage. And on the next episode, probably I will record the acronym RAIN that I use to teach others. I actually applied that about myself to overcome an emotion that I was going through. Because I was scared of taking the backseat. And before we go, let me tell you, I haven't taken it yet. I will. But the beauty is that I'm not scared at the moment to go do it. That's the emotion that you want. That's the place where you want to be. Even if you made the decision to “Yes, I'm going to do it” or “no, I'm not going to do it”. Either way, you are not scared, you're not driven by your emotions, but you are actually taking advantage of it because you liberated yourself from being paralyzed by that emotion. So, you can now go and do whatever you have maybe put up there in a corner because you have been scared to do. And that's what happened to me. You know, I get so excited about my new feelings. Now, let's go. What do I have pinned in my list, you know, because I had been so consumed by this feeling? So, the two rules are, don't put it out; you can change the situation, but you can change how you feel about it. I hope this was helpful. I know that I ramble a little bit. And I'm all congested today. But I hope this was helpful to you. And you use your emotions to your advantage from now on. And with that my friends, have a fantastic rest of the day. And I'll see you in the next episode.  

 

Closing 27:18 

Thank you for listening, everyone. And don't forget to go to the show notes and click to download your free Mindful and Energetic Living Guide. Also, don't forget to share this podcast with your friends, families, and everyone out there. I want to get this out there to everyone. So, thank you for your support, and I'll see you next week.