How Do You Pay Attention to Your Feelings

Is there a way to navigate through our highly sensitive emotions when it comes clashing with the crucial moments of our entrepreneurship? 

As a highly sensitive individual, I often wrestle with my emotions in the past and even up to the present. But these same emotions have helped me be where I am today as an entrepreneur, even helping and reaching out to fellow highly sensitive individuals who may not be entrepreneurs, but who can fully relate to how these feelings can get the best of us. 

That’s why I’m very excited to chat with our podcast guest, Mike Chu, who is one of the rare male guests on the show. We have talked about therapeutic practices, trauma work, and basically navigating these waves of emotions in the midst of our businesses. Let me share with you some highlights of what we talked about. 

How Therapy Entered the Picture

For Mike, who is exposed to martial arts and personal development programs of Tony Robbins and John Maxwell, therapy used to be like crap. He thought that if a person ever engages in therapy, that person has an illness. But after his personal episode of darkness, which included plummeting from his business and getting a divorce, he realized that therapy, particularly somatic therapy, was the superpower and key that unlocked his next level of success. Not only that level, but therapy also unlocked his next level of peace, fulfillment, and lasting impact on other people. 

When you are used to ignoring your emotions, therapy helps bring these feelings out. The pathway is taking your thoughts out of your head and into your heart. And these kinds of shifts of feelings are very essential, especially to entrepreneurs. 

The Impact of Therapy

In his experience, Mike shared that learning somatic therapy helped a person grow, not only in the sense of moving forward with your life but also shedding the trauma that you have acquired through the years. You may be able to talk yourself out of your feelings, but your nervous system always remembers how you feel and how you react when a trigger happens. Therapy helps you see these nervous system reactions and let them flow out of you.  

Paying Attention to your Feelings: The Principles of Stop-Drop-Roll

Mike shared how he learned about stop-drop-roll as an elementary student during fire drill exercises. As a grown-up, these principles became his tools in navigating through the dark seasons of life whenever his nervous system reminds him of his reactions to certain triggers. 

Stop

You do a deep breath. This is simply being fully aware of your feelings. Identify and name each feeling in every breath you take. What you do here is you give yourself the permission to actually be in that feeling, that you do feel anxious, worried, tightening of the chest, or others.

Drop

This is the act of actually slowing down and starting to get the feeling out of your head and into your body. So when you stop and say you feel a tightening in your chest, you actually touch your chest and feel it there. You notice and touch your body’s reactions right where it happens. 

Roll

At this point, you just keep breathing with the emotion until you start feeling the energy flow out of your body. Affirmation statements greatly help in this area. One of Mike’s go-to affirmations is “Even when I feel all of this fear, I can breathe.” You just basically roll with it. You roll with the feeling until you reach your own center again. 

This is such a rich podcast that you would definitely be glad to hear the end of it! To keep on listening to the full episode, follow here.