Emotions are the Dashboard of Your Life

How many of us put on a happy face to conceal the real sadness, anger, or jealousy we feel? Most of us hide our real feelings many times a day for fear of being judged, being inappropriate, or appearing petty.

Ironically, by resisting our negative feelings we are resisting our own happiness. Let me give you an example.

My friend Barbara, a 47-year-old mother of three, typically hides her feelings around her daughters' boyfriends. She doesn't want them to know she's angry at them for not treating her girls more respectfully. More than once she's confided that if they were her boys, she would have taught them a thing or two.

It just drives Barbara crazy when Brandon forgets to open Nichole's car door or when Paul walks into the house in front of Tawny. But Barbara doesn't want to alienate Nichole or Tawny, so she acts like everything is just fine. She thinks her anger is petty, and focusing on the negative is just not her style.

Barbara's dilemma? She doesn't know what to do with her negative feelings. She doesn't want to have them, but ignoring them is not making them go away.

What Barbara ultimately learned was that negative emotions are like the red lights on the dashboard of a car. They exist to let you know what your life needs to run smoothly.

To get a clearer picture of this analogy, put yourself in the driver's seat of a car. Imagine the oil light on the dashboard lighting up. What is your reaction? Do you sit there and remember all the other times the light has gone on? Do you ignore it and pretend it is not really happening? Or do you just stay in the experience of it all, thinking: Oh, no, my oil light's on. Darn, darn, darn!

While these are responses we often have to negative emotions, they're not how we respond to our car's oil light. When the oil light goes on, we buy a quart of oil and pour it into the engine. It's as simple as that. You notice the light, you understand that it means the car needs something, and you give the car what it needs to run smoothly.

Our relationship with our emotions will improve dramatically if we perceive them as the dashboard of our life. They reveal what we need or what we have plenty of. Like a satisfied dashboard, our positive emotions, such as pride, love, and glee, tell us that we have good things going on in our lives. But when we experience negative emotions, we can pretty well bet there's some need screaming for attention.

How did Barbara discover those needs?

With guidance, Barbara learned a simple two-step questioning system that led her to the answer. The first question she learned to ask was: What do I fear? This is an important question because negative emotions expose what we consciously and subconsciously fear. When we fear something is possible, a part of us believes it is possible.
When Barbara asked herself what she feared when she felt angry at Brandon and Paul, she was surprised to discovered she feared her daughters would have unhappy relationships. Part of her thought this was silly and illogical, but another part of her believed this was a real possibility.

Of course she could rationalize that every mother worries about that. But all rationalizing accomplishes is making the fear seem reasonable, when in fact the point is to eliminate the fear. Rationalizing is like seeing the oil light go on and thinking, well, I can certainly understand how this car would eventually run low on oil, and then leaving it at that. Rationalizing is not going to give the car what it needs to run, and it won't give Barbara what she needs.

What Barbara's life needed was answered when she learned the second question: What do I want instead? This question forced her to decide what she wanted to occur if she took down all the barriers to happiness.

When Barbara asked herself what she wanted instead, she realized "I want happy daughters who easily get their needs met in relationships and who also give their partners what they need."

Barbara, already an advocate of affirming and visualizing, immediately saw the beauty in this little one-two questioning. As soon as she decided on and visualized something loving and expansive to replace her negative fear-belief, she felt physically lifted. Her mind was filled with the vision of what her life really needed at that time, and her happy emotions confirmed this.

And because she knew the power of mentally holding the picture of her daughters and their partners in harmonious give-and-take relationships, and she couldn't wait to see how it would all show up in her life.

"Not only are Brandon and Paul still dating my girls," she said, "but they've just magically turned into delightful gentlemen. I don't know if they saw a movie or something. It's actually kind of strange. And my daughters are just blissed out!! I couldn't be more blessed."

What Barbara did was really quite simple. Instead of believing or ignoring her negative emotions, she used them as red lights to reveal what she really needed and wanted. These needs and desires were the fodder for her visualizations, which ultimately became her new experiences.

"Emotions are no longer a mystery for me," acknowledged Barbara. "In fact, paying attention to them on a consistent basis has turned so many areas of my life around, I just can't imagine how I survived before!"

Your emotions really are a gift. They tell you what you want so you can visualize it into reality.

Joanne Rodasta, M.A.n?2000 Joanne Rodasta Wilshinnnnn