What am I feeling?

For many the question of ‘what am I feeling?’ is full of uncertainty and often a blank expression. Discovering a feeling or emotion can be challenging if we’ve hidden out so long that we aren’t even sure anymore. At one point, for me it wasn’t all that easy for me to answer that question as well. Over time through listening and being patient that has changed.

At first the experience for me was like going through a checklist. Do I feel happy? Do I feel angry? Do I feel sad? Am I frustrated? Am I lonely? Even a checklist was difficult because in some cases I wasn’t even sure what the feeling actually felt like. I even changed the questions to be more like does this feel like loneliness, or does this feel like frustration? It was also difficult because it was usually someone else asking the question and normally a response is expected fairly quickly. Since I didn’t know and I was using a checklist it could be 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds before I’m come to an answer. Fortunately most people were quite patient with me while I went through this process.

Identifying a single emotion or feeling within a few seconds became a major achievement. The checklist went quicker or I would use a shorter checklist of a category or grouping of feeling starting from a vague idea of what I might be feeling. Still it wasn’t automatic process.

Over time it did become smooth and easy. Over time I would ask myself the question in my head just as practice. Over time I knew what different feelings felt like. Over time I could identify more feelings and more textures of feelings as well.

Then I came to a confusing point where when someone would ask me what I was feeling, multiple feelings came up all at once and I didn’t know what to answer again. For a while it felt like I had gone backwards and suddenly I was back to taking 10 seconds to answer ‘what am I feeling?’ The confusion came because the normal expected answer is one feeling. I realized that I was going through the list and putting numbers to each feeling to find the most dominant one and assuming one feeling was what was wanted. It took a while to put this all together and understand what was happening. Truly I was feeling many things at once and that the answer to ‘what am I feeling’ could really have multiple answers.

Multiple feelings at once may seem like an unusual idea, but I’m pretty sure it’s normal. Consider bittersweet – a combination of feeling a fond memory and knowing it’s no longer there. Funerals and weddings are full of mixed feelings. Funerals have that same bittersweet quality but even more so. They can be full of love for the departed and love among the friends and family, and great sadness that they are no longer here. At a wedding there is such happiness from the parents as they see their beautiful children grown up, while also feeling some loss that their children are no longer little ones, but grown up.

 What are you feeling right now? All of them!

The Roar of the Crowd

On September 10, 1972, Frank Shorter won the gold medal at the London Olympic games. That win was seen my millions on live tv here in the US and helped to start to running boom that continues to this day. A few days ago was the 40^th anniversary of that win and in the past week I’ve heard many great stories about Frank.

The one I want to share is about his finish of the Olympic marathon. A few minutes before Frank would run into the stadium, one of the workers came running out of the tunnel waving his arms pretending to be the winner. When Frank entered the stadium he didn’t see the imposter, but he heard the boos that were now coming from the crowd at the imposter. Frank was asked how he felt about having his thunder stolen in one of his greatest victories. His response was that he raced for himself, he didn’t care about the roar of the crowd.

Here’s a quote from Jeff Brown with a similar tone though this one is definitely more about a personal journey:

“Most of the greatest achievements on the planet are unknown to others- privately held overcomings, silent attempts at belief, re-opening an armoured heart. ... "”

I am one of those for whom both Frank’s comments and Jeff’s quote resonant. I am who thrives in an inner domain where athletics or work are quite personal and also quite satisfying. For me, this is also true in the realm of personal growth. Frank, Jeff, and I are all men so perhaps this is a more masculine feeling in general.

In talking with a women friend recently we were talking about this very topic. Specifically we were talking about the fact that I rarely share the adventures I head off on. For example, when I raced Race Across America, I didn’t even tell my boss at work until about a month before the race – and this is a race I’d spent 8 years dreaming about and 15 months preparing for. The woman I was talking with and I are good friends and even with her I sometimes don’t share the big adventures.

But she said several very wise things. First was about sharing and connecting – that if we are to be connected as friends we have to share even the crazy stuff and the personal stuff. The more that is shared, the closer we become, and this is even truer when it’s so meaningful. Connection is the stuff and life, but we can only truly connect if we share who we are with another.

The other thing she said was about giving and receiving, gifting and being gifted. Sharing an adventure or personal story is a gift given to a friend. By sharing you are honoring the other person and the bond between the two of you. In turn you have honored yourself and given back to yourself. It’s a complete win and deepening into life and connection.

While many of us may not care about the roar of the crowd, whether its athletics or arts or a personal struggle, we shouldn’t be the ones to decide if the crowd gets to roar or not. We can share who we are and we can do it humbly and honestly and with grace. The crowd or our friends can have their experience and make their own choice about whether they roar, or not. The great thing for the one on the adventure is discovering who it is that roars for you, who your fans really are. Those are the people you want around anyway, but if we never give people the chance to roar, we’ll never know what there is to life.

Give it a try

"It's impossible" said pride.
"It's risky" said experience.
"It's pointless" said reason.
"Give it a try" whispered the heart.

More on Vulnerability

"We have the strange idea, unsupported by any evidence, that we are loved and admired only for our superb strength, our far-reaching powers, and our all-knowing competency. Yet in the real world, no matter how many relationships may have been initiated by strength and power, no marriage or friendship has ever been deepened by these qualities. After a short, erotic honeymoon, power and omnipotence expose their shadow underbellies and threaten real intimacy, which is based on mutual vulnerability. After the bows have been made to the brass god of power, we find in the privacy of relationship that same god suddenly immobile and inimitable to conversation. As brass gods ourselves, we wonder why we are no longer loved in the same way we were at our first appearance. Our partners have begun to find our infallibility boring and, after long months or years, to find us false, frightening, and imprisoning.

We have the same strange idea in work as we do in love: that we will engender love, loyalty and admiration in others by exhibiting a great sense of power and competency. We are surprised to find that we garner fear and respect but forgo the other, more intimate magic. Real, undying loyalty in work can never be legislated or coerced; it is based on a courageous vulnerability that invites others by our example to a frontier conversation whose outcome is yet in doubt.

We have an even stranger idea: that we will finally fall in love with ourselves only when we have become the totally efficient organized organism we have always wanted to be and left all of bumbling ineptness behind. Yet in exactly the way we come to find love and intimacy with others through vulnerability, we come to those same qualities in ourselves through living out the awkwardness of not knowing, of not being in charge.

We try to construct a life in which we will be perfect, in which we will eliminate awkwardness, pass by vulnerability, ignore ineptness, only to pass through the gate of our lives and find, strangely, that the gateway is vulnerability itself. The very place we are open to the world whether we like it or not.”

-- David Whyte

Vulnerability

Today I found a link by Owen Marcus to a TED talk by Brene Brown. I've watched a bunch of talks from TED and this has to be one of the best I've ever seen. Brown has powerful ideas about shame, guilty, vulnerability, worthiness, and courage. Amazing that she packs so much into just 20 minutes.

After watching both that TED talk and this one, also by Brown, I'm at a loss for words. Mostly I want to share so others this these talks as well. They really drive to the heart of being human.

Just watch