#125 – Increasing Your Emotional Awareness
00:00:00 I’m Ben Pugh and you’re listening to Impact Parenting with Perspective episode #125. This podcast is all about helping parents manage the mental and emotional drama that comes with Parenting teens so they can focus on what’s most important, building rock solid relationships and having a powerful impact on their teen’s life. Join me each week as I dive into real tools to help you and your teen turn struggles into Strengths.
00:00:36 Hello guys. Welcome back to the podcast. I’m just so grateful that you are here on this journey with me. Thank you for really doing the work to be the parent of your dreams and to really tap into who you want to be and start being that it changes everything. Just the other day I was listening to someone kind of talk poorly about themselves as a parent and they’re like,
00:01:07 Man, I’m the worst parent. I’m ruining my kids. And I remember in that moment thinking, Man, that’s gotta feel scary and hopeless. And I, I think partially they’re doing that to get attention and to get laughs. But in the moment I realized, man, I know I’m not perfect. I make mistakes, but dang, I’m a really good dad and I’m the best dad for my kids.
00:01:34 Like no one loves ’em like I do. No one understands ’em. No one wants to put up with ’em like me. Like I truly am the best dad for my kids. And it just felt so empowering to realize that I am doing my best to be the parent that I want to be, to be the parent that I think I should be.
00:01:55 And I feel like I’m doing a really good job of that. And it doesn’t mean I’m perfect, and it doesn’t mean that my kids listen me all the time. And if you asked them half the time if they thought I was a good dad or not, they’d probably tell you no half the time. But it was just so comforting to realize, No,
00:02:11 I think I’m a good parent. I love the way I’m doing this, and I’m just, I don’t know. I’m doing a different version of a podcast today. I typically script out my podcast and write show notes, but today I’m kind of short for time and I want to get ahead on my podcast. And I just had a really good coaching call with one of my teen clients,
00:02:34 and I just wanted to do a quick podcast to talk about what we talked about on that coaching call. The sometimes in my coaching calls, like I have some specific steps and some things that I teach, but I like to leave the option in coaching calls to just kind of go whatever direction that it feels like it, it needs to go. And so one of the things I’m working on as a coach,
00:03:03 like I come to coaching calls, always prepared with something, and I’m getting to the point I, I’ve coached a lot of people. I’m real confident in what I teach. I don’t go over the top to prepare something because when I used to do that, I would lean on that too much. But in the past week I have taught, let’s see,
00:03:26 a handful of Teens and adults and I have shared the same video multiple times, and I wasn’t planning that the first session, I’m looking at my calendar, I think it was on Monday, the first session. It kind of went that direction. I was like, Hey, here’s a YouTube video, let’s talk about inspiration. Like what creates that in your life?
00:03:47 And it was really good. And I was like, Dang, that was awesome. I wanna talk about that again. And then in another call it came up again. So I shared the video this time with an adult and it resonated really well. And I’m like, Man, I’m on a roll. And then it came up again. And so I’m telling you this because in a coaching call,
00:04:04 like I have, like the three pillars that I try and work within are identity growth. Oh, sorry, I’m messing this up. This is why I do show notes. Anyways, I talk about identity, connection, and growth and identity is kind of seeing who you want to be and really trying to be who you want to be. And it’s understanding who you want to be,
00:04:32 who you believe you are, and trying to be the best version of you. And then that’s the identity component and the connection component is relationship based. It’s starting with your own connection to your feelings, having a great connection and relationship with yourself, and then building on that loving, powerful relationship with yourself and then connecting with others and having a good loving relationship with them.
00:05:00 And then the last of the three pillars is growth. I believe one of the most important things that we can do as human beings is grow and transform ourselves. And I know a lot of people, especially in the coaching industry, they’re looking for like little improvements here. Oh, let me help you improve this, let me help you improve that. But I find people aren’t typically looking for improvements.
00:05:28 Yeah, improvements are nice, but they want a transformation. They want this six pack body, or they want to be a millionaire, or they want this destination, this vacation in Hawaii or something that’s this complete transformation from where they are. And so as I coach, I kind of let things kind of fall in place. I don’t have a lot of structure to how I take people through like,
00:05:54 Oh, here’s step one, here’s step two. No, like there’s some beginning stuff and some intermediate stuff and some more advanced stuff, but sometimes I teach the advanced stuff and like it just flows. Anyways, today I was coaching a young man and he was telling me about his emotional state. And I asked him, Hey, typically what is an emotion that you feel all the time?
00:06:22 And I teach this concept that I call Sesame Street emotions. When we were kids, we would watch Sesame Street and I remember the episodes like, Hey, this episodes brought to you by the letter B, and look at that boy riding a blue bike. His name is Bob and his best friend Billy, and blah, blah. And it all starts with B.
00:06:43 And so I asked this kid, Hey, what is your Sesame Street emotion? What’s the emotion that you have all the time? And he’s like, Apathy, I just don’t care. I, there’s no joy to my life. No excitement. It’s just apathy, hardly any emotion at all. And I gave him a homework assignment. I was like,
00:07:04 Dude, I want you to do an emotions journal. And over the next week from today’s coaching call to next coaching call, I want you to just explore what are all the emotions that I’m feeling in addition to apathy. And as I kind of talked about that, like I asked him like, What do you think? He was like, Oh, I guess I can try,
00:07:28 but I just, I don’t know. And I was like, Well, what don’t you know? And he said something to the effect of, I don’t know that I feel any emotions other than apathy. And I’ve heard that before, and I’ve coached on it before, but I’ve never coached it this way. And I loved this way that I coached it this time.
00:07:48 That’s why I’m doing a podcast about, But I talked to him about my definition of emotional health, and he’s like, Yeah, your definition is that emotional health means that you can experience any and all emotions and that you can identify and process those emotions I was like, bingo, you nailed it. Now the problem is this young man, he’s like, I can identify the one emotion that I feel in his apathy and it feels like this.
00:08:16 And here’s where it is in my body. The problem was that he was believing that that was the only emotion that he felt. And so like I’m telling you, sometimes I have no idea where coaching sessions are going. And something came to my mind and there was a commercial once upon a time about improving your German, and there’s this German coast guard who’s like kind of doing his thing.
00:08:43 And then these people with an speaking English come over the radio and they’re like, Hey, we’re sinking. We’re sinking in this German coast guard in the best English that he could muster. Said, What are you sinking about? And he completely misunderstood ’em because in his mind, he didn’t hear the th sound for thinking. And he is like, Oh,
00:09:10 they’re saying we’re sinking. What are you thinking about? And I started explaining that in some languages, there are sounds that don’t exist in other languages, like the th sound in the, in English, the the sound, like the like this, that these, that th sound doesn’t exist in German. And so when you hear German people say that, or this,
00:09:40 it’s Zah or zis like, Like when he interpreted, Hey, we’re syncing, his brain was, Oh yeah, what are you thinking about? And the kid’s like, Yeah, I guess I kind of understand that. And I was like, Man, I wish I had a better example. And then it came to my mind like, Hey, there is a TRIBE in Africa.
00:10:04 There are the Kimba TRIBE in Nabi or Namibia, Na, I should have practiced that before I went live. But there’s this author named Gavin Evans, and he wrote the book, The Story of Color. And I stumbled on this, I dunno, several years ago. And basically this guy teaches that our language has an impact in the colors that we see.
00:10:36 And in America we have, or in English, like this guy is from England, but in English we have the color green and we have the color blue, and we have all these other colors with names. But this Kimba TRIBE in Namibia, they don’t have a name for the color blue. It actually falls into the spectrum of green colors. And so this author,
00:11:03 I think he’s a doctor, I don’t know, he is doing studies and experiments, but he would have people in this TRIBE look at this color wheel and there would all be green except for one would be blue. And I’ll put the link to the video. You can seriously just Google. I don’t know, I’ll put the link in the video. But basically this man would show these people in this TRIBE,
00:11:31 this color wheel with all these greens in one blue. And they struggled to pick out the blue because in their perception, they were all green and just a different shade of green. But then he showed a different color wheel, and this one was all green. And when I looked at it, I’m like, Yeah, they’re all green. But there was one that was a slightly different shade,
00:11:54 and people from this TRIBE, they could identify it super quick because they had a name for that. And so in English, we have a name for red, and we have a name for light red, which is pink in Russia. I don’t speak Russian, but apparently they have a name for blue and a name for light blue. Like here in English,
00:12:16 we just say blue. And if it’s not baby blue, but still we just call it blue. And the reason I shared this with this young man is that this TRIBE struggled identifying certain shades of color, specifically blue because they didn’t have a name for it. And I struggled and he struggled to identify the green. That was a different shade because we don’t have a name for that.
00:12:42 And I think what happens emotionally when we don’t practice identifying our emotions and naming them, we lose some awareness when it comes to that emotion. And so this TRIBE, they don’t have the same awareness when it comes to the color blue because they don’t have a word for it in their language. It’s not something that they talk about regularly. It’s not something that’s in their vocabulary,
00:13:09 that’s in their subconscious mind. And same with us in that shade of green. And like in Spanish, like they have accents on words. If you haven’t been trained to listen to the intonations and the accents, those are things that you don’t naturally pick up. You have to train yourself to pick those up. And this young man’s homework was to keep an emotional journal and to just track throughout the day what emotions are you feeling?
00:13:42 And we’re not trying to manipulate what he’s feeling and make him feel happy or excited or hopeful. No, we just wanted to track what is the range of emotions that you experience? And the goal is to help him develop some awareness and realize, oh, I do feel more than apathy. I also feel hope. I also feel boredom. I also feel anger.
00:14:11 I also feel peaceful. And as he can identify those emotions and as he can name them and realize, Oh, this is what that feels like, that will build his emotional awareness so that when the emotions come, he’ll be quicker to identify them and understand what’s going on. And then he can be quicker to explore, Dang, why did I feel that way?
00:14:37 And understand how his thoughts and his beliefs tie into his emotions. So basically what I would like to teach you guys, and I have not read the book, the Story of Color. I’ve just seen a couple YouTube videos by this Gavin Evans. But the thing that I wanna help you understand is that awareness is a powerful, powerful thing to search for or to try to reach.
00:15:10 And oftentimes we, like you’ve heard the saying, you don’t know what you don’t know. And recently I’ve been rereading the book Leadership and Self-Deception, and they talk about being in the box. And unless you are aware that you’re in the box, you have no idea that you’re in the box. And if someone tries to help you get outta the box without you being aware that you’re in the box,
00:15:37 you’re resistant. You don’t want that help. And when we have emotions that we’re not aware of those emotions, we are resistant. We don’t, we haven’t practiced processing them. It isn’t in our wheelhouse. And so what I would like to invite you to do is to keep an emotional journal this week, really develop some awareness over the emotions that you are experiencing.
00:16:06 One thing I was going to mention that I almost forgot this TRIBE in Africa, there’s nothing wrong with them. Like they haven’t gone down a separate path evolutionarily and like, Oh, well, they can’t see certain colors. The thing is even, oh, I was studying this a while ago, I might be wrong on this, but there are certain cones that help us perceive blue.
00:16:29 And a lot of scientists thought, Oh, that determines whether or not you can see blue. But what they found out is whether you have the cones or not, you can still see blue. It’s more important that you are aware of that color distinction. And anyways, the thing I was getting at like the German Coast Guard guy on that commercial and this TRIBE from Namibia,
00:16:53 and I’m probably butchering that, I apologize if I am, but there’s nothing wrong with them. Like they just haven’t developed that specific awareness. And so this young man, when he tells me, man, all I ever feel is apathy. Like, Dude, there’s nothing wrong with you. Like you aren’t developmentally broken, and that’s what’s keeping you from feeling different things.
00:17:16 No, it’s just the awareness component. And when I was able to help him understand that he was just, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say excited, but he was like, Oh yeah, I can totally see how I just focus on feeling apathetic or bored or I just that one emotion. And so I want to invite you do the same homework,
00:17:40 do an emotional journal, really explore what are you feeling throughout the week and gain some awareness. Awareness is a powerful, powerful tool that will give you the power to make specific changes in your life, and it will give you the power to grow and progress. And so that is my invitation, guys. I usually have show notes, but I’m trying to get ahead and I just winged this one,
00:18:09 so hopefully it was okay. And hopefully you want to go achieve some new emotional awareness and hopefully that all made sense to you. And if not, I apologize, We’ll be back to our regular way of podcasting next week. All right, guys, Thank you for tuning in. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye. Thank you for listening to this episode.
00:18:35 One of my highest values is helping others. And if you’re like me, the type of person who likes to help others, please share this podcast with your friends and family. If you’ve found this helpful, they will too. Also, I want to help you. If you have any questions, you can email me at ben@benpughcoaching.com. I might even address your question on a future podcast episode.
00:19:03 And if you would like to work with me one on one, which space is very limited, or if you’d like to learn more about one of my memberships or courses, please email me, ben@benpughcoaching.com. Lastly, can I ask a favor? I believe that we are here for two reasons. First, to grow personally and second to help others grow.
00:19:30 If you would be so kind, please leave a positive review on iTunes, sharing your own personal growth. This will help inspire other parents to achieve their own growth. I’d be grateful for your assistance as we work together to transform more families.
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