When you listen to your emotions, you're privy to information that no one else knows about you. Your emotions hold information about your deepest desires and fears, wants, needs, and losses, and when you're able to listen to them, to hear them, you hold the key to your own freedom. We call this ability to listen "intuition," but what it really means is to be able to hear without judgement what your emotions are saying.

The thing about listening to your emotions is that sometimes, the information that they tell you isn't what you want to hear, or more accurately, it's what you think you shouldn't feel. 

In Western culture, we have very specific ideas about what it is appropriate to feel, and what it is not. In fact, we're shamed for feeling a lot of the emotions that tell us key information about ourselves. But when we don't listen to all of our emotions, or repress certain emotions, then we're only getting part of the story. It's like reading a fairy tale where the princess wants to marry a prince, so she does. Where's the drama, the journey, the conflict, the rest of the story? 

For example, the rest of the story might be that she wants to marry the prince, but her father thought he wasn't good enough for her, and she also wants to please her father. The rest of the story might be that the prince was raised as a peasant, recently discovered he was a prince, and feels like a fraud as he dresses in finery and eats rare delicacies. The rest of the story is that the prince and princess have a lot of complex emotions going on beneath the surface that could potentially drive them apart, if they leave them unaddressed. 

While we might think that it would be nice to just feel happy all the time, the reality is that one-note emotions make for a flat existence. The truth is that everybody feels a variety of emotions, even when they use weasel words to label them. Our emotions tell the whole story when we listen to all of them. 

The first key to being an emotional genius is understanding that there are no good or bad emotions - but that all emotions contain valuable information for us, if we know how to listen to them.

Becoming aware of what our emotions are telling us is a process, one that is helped by using an Emotional Vocabulary list. When you can name what you're feeling, it helps you to know what to do with it. I talk more about this here.

Thank you so much for reading, and for learning more about emotions!