I’m in the process of switching up one of my core operating emotions. I’m putting the effort into switching out urgent for important. I’m calling it operation urgent, it makes the process a tad bit more fun for me.

Emotions are often one of the easiest doorways into our human internal reality. We are either motivated or thwarted because of our emotions.

A few people are emotionally locked up and frozen. But most people are aware of their feelings to some extent if only the awareness is feeling negative or feeling positive.

(I am using bad and good interchangeably with negative and positive partly because I want to neutralize bad; bad is not a problem but rather a categorization.)

Bad and Good Feelings

Between good and bad there is a large spectrum of emotional granularity, but actually the granularity does matter too greatly.

Knowing if we feel good or bad is an insightful piece of information.

What matters is in differentiating between useful-bad and indulgent-bad emotions.

Because if we are attempting to get something done in our life, with indulgent bad energy, it is next to impossible. It feels like our wheels are spinning.

For example, the feeling of urgency is one of my core emotions which seems like a really important emotion… until I really take a look at its effects on my life.

I also have a big tendency to feel stressed. Urgent is akin to stress.

Playing with a New Emotion: Important

Recently I was playing with the difference of urgent vs important.

Urgent, for me, feels like pressure from behind me which is pushing me forward.

A couple of my clients who have been exploring urgent link it to frenetic and rushed.

When I play out urgent I feel like there is an un-sustainability to it, like I will run out of gas, and collapse exhausted.

When I lean into feeling important, I feel an energy that comes from inside of me, that is grounded and focused.

When I play out the emotion of importance, I sense a zoomed out ability to make decisions. I feel more embodied; more aware of myself and my surroundings.

The main thoughts that drive my urgency are:

• “I don’t have enough time.”

• “No one should have to wait for me.”

• “I have to do this as fast as possible.”

I have noticed that these thoughts also have a connection to scarcity and my attempt to fix scarcity is by using with urgency.

Here is the really crazy catch though. If I play urgency out and notice how I show up in my life when I am feeling urgent, I see that I multitask, I rush through things (often doing them half-ass and needing to do them again), I neglect to be fully present, and I create stress in my body.

Que: operation urgent.

Switching Out Urgent

Even though urgent is one of my core operating emotions, I am putting in the effort right now to un-do this pattern of mine.

I do not see an upside to living in urgency.

The opposite is true. I see the downsides; one of the biggest being the stress it creates in my body.

The stress inducing emotions that I see my digestive clients often running are overwhelm, worry, urgent, frenetic, rushed, victimhood, and anxious.

When we track these emotions for my clients, we see that they over-eat, over-work, over-do, over-compensate, or over-give.

Remember, every single emotion comes from our thoughts. To switch up a core operating emotion we have to get to the root cause… the thoughts that are creating it, the beliefs, which create our neural pathways.

Believing something new is a mind-bendy experience.

I currently am in the phase of simply noticing and questioning my engrained thoughts. “Do I really have to rush through this?” “Is it true that I do not have enough time?” “What if I do have plenty of time to do what is important to me?”

Eventually, I will be regularly generating the emotion ‘important’ and ‘in-charge’ as my core operating emotions for getting stuff done.

What are the top three emotions that you regularly run? Are they useful to you?

Have you thought about what is your own version of ‘operation urgent’?

ps… I wrote this post with far less urgency than I normally feel. I decided to cut my weekly posts down from 3 to 1 and to see what happens. Believing that I had to write 3 posts per week was just a thought. I am trying on a new thought, “One post is good enough.”