S3:E5 Training Up The Mind

Resting In The Arms Of The One Who Disarmed You

If our emotions assign value and we aren’t feeling, we are not generating value propositions upon which we have choice. We must first, then, be aware we are feeling anything at all – this opens us up to choose based on the message being sent by the emotion. Emotions are messengers. I learned this from from Mike Davis. He is known as the Emotional Success Coach and I found him in my search to align my Christian faith with the practice of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. NLP helps us learn the language of our minds and it was a taught to me in my coach certification training. I wasn’t sure whether to embrace NLP or run very far away as a Jesus follower. It can be used in what appear to be some pretty non-Christian ways. But it reveals our design. And God put that design in us. When I began looking for evidence of it’s use in the scriptures, it was there to be found. Of course, the name NLP is just another way to describe many ways we have modeled observable truth of our design for our uses. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Eye Movement Therapy(EMDR) are two others that take the observable truth about or design and put it to work to serve our growth. Therefore, I have come to conclude we are to use it. In fact, I have become compelled to share it, in light of our faith toward our joyful obedience to God.

This is another part to why I study and research and share about this today.

 So, it is in my pursuit of aligning with the Christian faith using this NLP emotional, cognitive behavioral choice model that I found and connected with Mike Davis. In light of our cognitive and emotional processing, he says often, our emotions are messengers.

In order to get the message, we better get the feeling then. Being aware of the feeling moves us to a place of choice.

FOCUS: What are you thinking about? 

Many of us think it works a different way. Many of us believe if we feel, we’ll lose our ability to choose because the emotion, the feeling will overwhelm us. How clever of Satan to lead us to such a place. It’s in the lack of feeling we experience overwhelm and inability to choose.

But we aren’t training up our emotions. We don’t know how to use them. Or do we? In order to act on the opportunity of choice given through the message of the emotion, we must do something many of us figure out for ourselves without realizing what we are doing. We must create distance between ourselves and the feelings. When we are not too distracted and busy, we tend to do this and make the appropriate choice.

For example, before we had children, Phillip and I had a much easier time handling our finances than after. We naturally had the space to make good financial decisions unintentionally giving ourselves distance from feelings of stress or tension that helped drive good decisions.

When our days became more full of activities at school, church and home and of the day to day responsibilities of raising children, we didn’t know we lost that distance from such feelings, because we weren’t ever intentionally “using” them.

It’s remarkable to realize how quickly feelings of stress and tension overtook me when we found ourselves struggling to cover expenses. The feelings suffocated me and I shut down, not realizing that by design, I needed distance from those feelings to better respond to them.

Fuel: What examples do you have in your own life of this?

We know that distancing ourselves from our feelings helps us process through them.  

The idea is captured in statements we make like, “Give me some space.” Or “I need some room to breathe.” Or “Let me distance myself from that.” These statements all illustrate a truth that when we distance ourselves from normal, difficult or even passionate emotions, we see things more clearly.

We can use this truth and others to train up our emotional intelligence, giving us an emotional maturity that willfully enters in before emotions hijack. We can use such training to choose to shift our emotional states or stay in them. If we know we have this choice, we’ll probably be more liable to welcome in our emotions and be more capable to appropriately respond to the messages they bring rather than stuffing them for fear of their potential power over us. We have choice. We can choose calm, as the psalmist did. We can.

FIGHT: In what ways will you fight for rest today?  

What’s that thing popping into your mind and within your power that you can do?  

When will you do it? 

What difference will it make for you and for others when you do? 

Who will you tell? 

I’m taking a podcast break next week.

I hope you’ll join me in two weeks as we talk whether this is biblical or not. I think about that when I learn things…I ask the question…what does God have to say about this.

Please follow and comment on this podcast on apple podcasts and follow, comment on, and share our IG posts @MettlEdge.Coaching 

I pray this podcast has been and continues to be a blessing.