Feelings motivate us. Period. They are why do or do not do anything and everything. We need certain feelings to do hard things.

When I ask a client how they want to feel about their health goal they say excited.

We want to feel excited; excited is fun.

Excited does not help us get through the discomfort of doing hard things and feeling uncomfortable feelings.

Courage, bravery, determination, commitment, motivation, focus, and persistence; these are the emotions we need in order to overcome challenge, reach goals, make dreams reality, and to grow.

These needed emotions do not necessarily feel good. In fact, bravery has an element of fear in it. But they move us somewhere… towards what we want.

Generating Emotions for Doing Hard Things

We have the ability, thank you to our more recently evolved part of our brain the prefrontal, that allows us to choose thoughts and feelings.

Here are some of the thoughts that I intentionally think when my brain warns me of discomfort or when my brain trys to block me with “you don’t know how-to”.

• “Everything is figure-out-able.”

• “I can handle this.”

• “What does not kill me, makes me stronger.”

• “What if this is exactly as it is meant to be?”

• “What if nothing has gone wrong?”

• “My growth is worth the challenge and discomfort.”

• “I can handle any feeling, especially discomfort because it is the path to my bigger life”

• “I’m doing blank… no matter what.”

“No matter the discomfort, no matter the challenge, even if it is hard, especially when I fail. I want it and Im going after it as if my bigger life and future self depends on it.”

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These thoughts are what I use to manage my mind, create my feelings of motivation, commitment, focus, determination, persistence, and do hard things in spite of discomfort. It is how to become anti-fragile and how I am becoming stronger and in better and better shape for the challenge of my life.

The challenges are inevitable; how we show up for the challenges is our call.

My Food and Mood clients, at some point, always meet a crossroad where they must choose to stay small and continue down their old path or to step up, face the discomfort, and let their life get bigger.

How do you think your experience would be different if you viewed discomfort as a sign you are on the right track?

What feelings do you want to choose deliberately to make your life bigger?

The Problem with Emotional Eating… your life stays small.

Where do feelings come from?