Lesson: Mastering Presence with Diana Chapman

Step #7 Five Feelings: The intelligence in our emotions

At the Conscious Leadership group we say your feelings look like a team of your best friends. And we use five core feelings that we put attention on. So fear, sadness, anger, joy and sexual feelings. So we'll start out with fear. Authentic fear says, "Hey. There's something here that you need to learn." It's an ally that just says, you can't go about it the same way that you've been going about it. It's a little bit of anxiousness, typically feels like a swirl in the belly. Typically fear does show up as a sensation as part of the body in the belly area. Sometimes it's a tightening of the throat and it's here to say, "You've got to learn something. Don't just go about things the same old way."

So one of my metaphors that I use is, that everybody can relate to, whoever got a drivers' license, is when you first get behind a car for the first time, fear will be there. It's this message that says, "Hey, you do not know what it's like to pay attention to that mirror and that mirror and that mirror and these breaks. You're going to have to bring a different kind of attention to this experience than you're used to, which is why we make you wait a while until we think your brain is mature enough to do this.”

But in the beginning we're all experiencing that fear and that fear stays with us in that driving experience until the fear believes that we have understood what we needed to learn about how to pay attention, and then the fear dissolves. So now we all drive around, once we have that experience, without needing any fear there. But until it leaves, we can remember it's an ally that says, there's more to learn. There's more to learn. And so if you can start to think of fear as, "I welcome fear as an intelligence that reminds me to open to something I couldn't see before."

So even if I'm going up onstage to speak, fear might say, "Hey, you're going to need to show up. There might be a different way you're going to be in relationship with your voice and your energy and your body as you're talking to really make sure that you're dynamic up here.” So it's not about trying to stop it. It's about welcoming the fear and asking "What can I learn? What's new here?"

The next emotion is sadness. A message of sadness is, there's something to be let go of, or there's something to be completed. One of the things I see, especially as a startup gets going, is that we all have visions for where we think we're going to go, and then we get to that mark and we realize we're not where we thought we were going to be. In that moment, it's really important, if you pay attention you'll notice that sadness is there. And most people try to skip over that.

But the sadness, if you're with it, will say, "You need to let go of what you thought was going to happen at this time. Really move through that. Let that go so that now you can actually be with the way it is.” It's difficult to be with something the way it is if you haven't grieved the way you thought it was going to be. That doesn't just mean a situation, it also with a relationship, so people often don't take enough time to let go to say, "It's not the way I thought, so now I can open and really be present to what's here now and welcome that, and see what do I need to do to bring that to the new place of vision."

Anger is, the intelligence says, "There's something that's not of service here any longer. There's something that needs to end. There's something that needs to be destroyed so that we can create something new in its place that is now more aligned for the time and for the people." So you see that happening a lot in the world right now. There's a lot of anger rising. And it says "These systems that did work for us aren't working for us anymore.” So the anger is here to say stop. In the business world it's not politically correct to be angry, or people don't know what to do if somebody says, "Hey, I'm angry,” everybody kind of freezes and holds their breath. And so one of the things the Conscious Leadership group wants to do is to say, "Great, can you just say, 'Hey I notice I feel angry.'"

I just got a report this morning, I was supposed to meet with a team down in Florida. We were going to work on some of the issues, they need to clear a lot of things with each other. And the CEO had made a decision to cancel that meeting because they wanted to go get some new business, and there was a conflict. So the team met this morning and they said, "We feel angry. This doesn't feel like what most serves us. We need to handle some of our own inner dynamics before we take on more work." And so the anger was an intelligence that got voiced, and the CEO said, “I can see what you're pointing to, and I do get really enthusiastic about more business, and I do see that sometimes in my enthusiasm, I skip over needing to clean house first."

If somebody had not expressed that anger, they might have just skipped over it, got more business, and now we're going to have even more drama because we're putting more work on top of some unhealthy behaviors that need to be addressed. So anger is a great intelligence to help us wake up from what needs to be involved or changed or stopped.