We feel emotions. But neuropsychologist Julia DiGangi asks you to picture them instead, as a bridge between where you currently stand and where you want to be. “When you learn how to work with the energy of your emotions, you find empowerment, clarity and satisfaction,” she writes in Energy Rising.
She stresses that you won’t eradicate stress, anxiety, disappointment and other bad feelings from your life. The goal should be to rise even when your situations give you plenty of good reasons to stay down.
To do that, you need to reconfigure your sense of emotions to see them as energy. She has tracked them through magnetic resonance imaging. When an emotion like fear, anger or happiness occurs, she can measure spikes in the brain’s energy. “Your emotions are the product of a complex dance between electrical, chemical and magnetic energies,” she notes.
Your emotional power – the ability to cross that bridge to where you want to go – involves intelligently harnessing this energy. Essentially, moving from the circuitry of the brain to our more common experience of emotions, they come in two flavours: Emotional pain and emotional power.
Emotional pain describes the negative sensations you feel, which need not be catastrophic but can be everyday feelings like anxiety, frustration, irritation and anger. Emotional power is any emotional sensation that makes you feel you are worthy, such as strength, esteem, peace or resilience.
“In what I have come to understand as one of the great paradoxes of life, the depth of your emotional power relies directly on your ability to work with the energy of your emotional pain,” she says.
When worked with wisely, the energy of your emotional pain strengthens you. The problem is we often get stuck, feeling confused or anxious or uninspired, because we try to avoid these negative feelings. But she warns that chronic avoidance of your painful feelings – and the conversations, people, places and memories that cause pain – doesn’t end your feelings. It just exhausts you. Burnout, energy depletion and numbness follow.
One technique when avoiding pain is to instead pick a more powerful pain to embrace. This happened with one of her clients, Meg, a global vice-president of a large company, the youngest person to hold that role, and on track to soon become chief human resources officer. She prided herself on being a consensus-based leader but that lovely description disguised the fact she was a people pleaser. If a meeting was elective, she would be there. Email her at midnight and she would have a response before you woke up.
She had been pleasing people since childhood and believed her continued success depended on not disappointing others. But this habit was creating a ton of pain. She was totally depleted and numb to a life she once loved. So Dr. DiGangi guided her to choose a more powerful pain to work toward: Self-respect.
If you’re thinking that’s not painful, Dr. DiGangi counters that the price of true self-respect is high. “To be self-respecting, we must be willing to deeply honour our own energy even at the cost of other people’s approval,” she writes. “As Meg prepared to say no more readily, her pain increased. She became more nervous, more anxious and more guilty than she had felt before as a people-pleaser.”
But in the end, she gained self-respect. The pain she had chosen gave her release.
In your own life, Dr. DiGangi suggests, your more powerful pain can be a bridge to attaining a deeper emotional desire. Perhaps you want to be freer, feel more excitement, feel more confident or feel more relaxed. Name the potentially awful things that could happen if you pursue this desire that seems so difficult to achieve. She says that if you carry those negatives to their most painful conclusion you will also realize they are entirely illogical.
Then cross the bridge.
Quick hits
- Our desire to clear our to-do list is wrong-headed, Ottawa productivity consultant Chris Bailey warns. There have always been things on your to-do list and there always will be. Instead, your focus should be on prioritizing the items you need to get done.
- Your email newsletters should mostly provide insights with only some promotion, digital marketing specialist Ann Handley advises. Think 90 per cent insights, 10 per cent promotion.
- The best artificial intelligence image generator is DALL-E 3, according to testing by Charter Work Tech. Magic Media and MidJourney were runners-up.
- “The imperfect project you actually complete is worth more than the perfect project you never finish,” says author James Clear.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.