September 22nd, 2015 Crying Is Not A Bad Thing

September 22nd, 2015 Crying Is Not A Bad Thing

Today was a well rounded day. And by "well rounded," I mean it had its ups and downs. It had challenges that sent me reaching out for support.

I had some emotionally challenging circumstances this afternoon. And not because my lunch pizza creation fell apart during the plating process (see Tweet below). 

In the moments of challenge, I experienced sadness and anger. These two emotions are ones I rarely deal with, especially anger. I pride myself on staying fairly cool and collected, even when I'm really furious about something. But not today. Oh no...I took on a wave of these two and felt very unstable afterward. Nervousness, shaky, jolted from my comfort zone and just out of sorts. And you know what I'm really good at doing in these moments? I'm a pro at stuffing those emotions down with plenty of excessive food!

I mean seriously, let's look at the numbers: I have almost four decades of experience in stuffing emotions with food and a fraction of that, not. Which am I better at doing? This thought was first presented to me by Life Coach Gerri and it makes perfect sense.

There's an intersection approached at this point. It's the intersection of Resolve Way and Insanity Boulevard. 

If I turn onto Insanity Boulevard, then I'll keep doing what I've done time and time again for countless years. Everything looks bright and shiny down Insanity, with a shimmering promise of how everything will be better. But it's a deceitful trap. It's really just a detour of distraction that leads to an unresolved dead end--and then, on top of the original feelings prompting my detour, I add to it feelings of disappointment in my decision to do this same thing, over and over again.

Resolve Way is straight ahead. It doesn't seem as exciting. Not too shiny that way. Not much down that road to distract me and that leaves me having to deal with the emotions at hand, processing and understanding and applying some helpful perspectives to it all. It's a hard decision to go down Resolve Way. It takes some encouragement, some reassurance that it'll be okay. And that's when making contact with good support becomes critically important.

I texted Gerri, "When I feel like this, it makes me want to cry. And that makes me want to eat." Gerri replied, simply: "Crying is not a bad thing. Cry instead of eating, okay?" Me: "I'm preparing a lunch in harmony with my sacred boundaries." Gerri: "Good. And you're telling on yourself." Me: "Yep." Gerri: "You did the right thing."

We exchanged a few more specific to the issue messages, she offered some excellent perspective and then added: "Relax, renew & retreat. The challenge is over for now." 

And it was.

She suggested I reach out and help others within our support groups. Suddenly I was on the other end of the support dynamic, offering perspectives and encouragement to anyone in need. This made a significant difference. It wasn't too long before I was planning a good workout prior to our Tuesday night support group conference call and putting together a nice plan for dinner.

Emotions felt, perspectives explored, crisis averted.

And that's not an easy thing to do when you're a pro at doing the opposite. But it gets easier each time, thank goodness. It really does get easier.

The Winning Loser Video Blog Episode 1.5 finally uploaded after taking forever! I added it to last night's blog, this morning. In case you missed it, here it is:

I plan on making these shorter moving forward. Ten minutes is a little too long. The fully produced versions will run between 4 and 6 minutes, these .5 versions should be around 4 or 5 minutes.

Thank you for watching!

My Tweets Today:
































Thank you for reading and your continued support,
Strength,
Sean
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