What You Feel

“White supremacy has used the suppression of feelings to hold down communities.

If you block the pain, you’ll likely block the feelings needed to fight back against oppression.”

—Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement

 

Your body is your compass.

I invite you to imagine that you’ve just been dropped into the middle of a vast wilderness.

What do you want to make sure you have in your backpack?

Sure, water, snacks, and bear/snake/tiger repellant would be great, but your number one tool, by far, is a compass. Without it, you’d wander in circles until your supplies ran out.

On the path toward creating a life of justice and joy, there are many moments where we feel like we’ve been unceremoniously dumped in a vast wilderness. Lost. Stuck. Hurting. When the stakes feel high, it can be hard to discern which step to take next, let alone see possible paths forward.

And yet, we each already have an internal compass. Beneath all the swirling thoughts, there is an inner wisdom that can help us discern our next steps even when we don’t know our final destination.

Your body is your compass.

Our bodies are extraordinarily sensitive navigational systems. When we come to a fork in the road on the path through life, our bodies offer sensations that indicate which direction is a yes, which is a no, and which is a maybe. Like tuning forks, our bodies say, “Don’t go that way. Go this way. Turn that way. Yup. Nope. Not yet. We need more information. Nope. Yup. Maybe.”

Although your conscious mind may not know how to explain or justify your body’s signals—and may not yet even be consciously aware of them, your body is nevertheless processing and communicating all sorts of information below your conscious awareness. Every cell in our bodies is continuously tracking what’s happening in its own way and relaying information back to our brains.

But what if you don’t quite trust your body’s signals? What if you feel dread about doing something that you know is good for you? Or what if you know that you need to get more comfortable with discomfort?

Our bodies’ messages are often not simple. Discomfort doesn’t always mean stop. And comfort doesn’t necessarily mean go.

Our sensations and emotions are information.[1] If you feel tension, constriction, or other uncomfortable sensations, your body is trying to tell you something. If you feel excitement, peace, or deep engagement, your body is sending a signal.

Our feelings are like spokespeople for our needs. But it often takes practice to decipher the messages.

Our first task is to notice what we feel without jumping to immediate reactions or conclusions. Then, after we notice we feel a feeling, our next task is to get curious about what we really need, which we’ll focus on in the next episode.

For now, in this episode we’ll focus on how to discern what we feel in the first place and why noticing and discerning what we feel can be so hard.

Why We Might Struggle to Feel & What Happens When We Don’t

Perhaps you learned at an early age to negate your body’s signals. Maybe someone insisted that you stop crying when you felt sad, that you were fine when you felt sick, that you were making things up when you felt grossed out, or that your emotions or desires were destructive or irrational.[2]

To protect yourself from rejection and meet your needs, you may have made unconscious agreements with yourself to not feel certain emotions, to ignore or suppress these feelings if they ever arose, or to believe that some feelings were wrong, weird, meaningless, dirty, excessive, or shameful. As a result, you might say that you’re anxious when you actually feel angry or that you’re frustrated when you actually feel sad.

If your body holds a lot of unhealed trauma, it can feel excruciating to tune in to your body, so you might dissociate and flee to the apparent safety of your brain’s left hemisphere,

Self-Resonance: How

“When people change the way they speak to themselves,

they change the way their brain works.” - Sarah Peyton

 

In the last episode, I introduced the concept of resonance—that experience of relaxation we feel when we’re accompanied and truly understood by another—and I shared how self-resonance lays the soil in which all the other practices of radical discernment can take root. When we accompany ourselves with warm, precise attunement, it becomes so much easier to soothe our fear and pain, decipher our bodies’ messages, and chart a path that honors our needs and our values.

In this podcast, I’ll introduce you to three fundamental aspects of self-resonance—self-warmth, self-accompaniment, and self-attunement, and six practices to help you cultivate self-resonance.

As you read, I invite you to get curious about how you are or are not already practicing these, because The more awareness we bring to how we treat ourselves, the more choice we have to treat ourselves well.

Aspect One: Self-Warmth 

I invite you to bring to mind someone, real or imaginary, who is exquisitely capable of offering you warmth and care. They see you through kind eyes, speak to you in a caring tone of voice, and if you would like them to, put an arm around your shoulders or hold your hand. You feel your body relax as they offer you love and hold you in unconditional positive regard. This is the feeling of warmth. 

Aspect Two: Self-Accompaniment

In his book, Narrative Medicine, Lakota-Cherokee shaman and psychiatrist Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona writes that the dominant culture’s focus on individual healing is a historically new phenomenon. In shamanic traditions, healing almost always takes place within community.

Mehl-Madrona writes, Beyond any technique, relationships are what heal.[1] Trauma usually occurs in relationship, so healing ideally happens in relationship too.

Accompaniment means to come beside or to go along with. Resonance requires a sense of accompaniment, the sense someone we trust is with us.

We humans are relational creatures who need accompaniment from others to feel whole, and so, ideally, we receive resonance from other people we trust—friend, partner, family member, skilled therapist, coach, or practice buddy. If it feels hard to let ourselves be loved by other humans, we can also receive a sense of accompaniment from companion animals, trees, rivers, landscapes, other aspects of nature, songs, ancestors, or a sense of a greater spirit or the divine. We can also learn to accompany ourselves.

Aspect Three: Self-Attunement

To attune means to bring into harmony. Attuning to ourselves or another is like adjusting the radio dial until we find the signal we’re looking for. To find that signal, we focus our soft attention with genuine curiosity and ask gentle, open-ended questions to understand what is happening for us, without aiming to change the situation.

We know we’ve found the signal we’re seeking when the other person or the part of ourselves we’re attuning to responds with Yes, that’s it!

Now that we have the three aspects of self-resonance, let’s explore six practices for cultivating self-resonance.

Before we go, I want to remind you that when people hold a lot of unhealed trauma, attempting to practice self-resonance can bring up painful feelings. Warmth can melt us out of a numb, frozen state, and sometimes, that can feel uncomfortable or scary.

If that happens for you as you experiment with these practices, please take care of yourself. You might pause, scan the room for safety, wiggle your hands and feet, or do whatever else you need to return to a more comfortable state.

You might also seek out a trauma-informed therapist or another professional who can help you cultivate a sense of inner safety before you dive in alone. It can be hard for us humans to offer ourselves resonance until someone else models resonance for us.

Self-Resonance

“We are all rather like tree rings and shell patterns

in that what has happened to us leaves a permanent record.

The goal of trauma work, therefore, as I see it,

is not to erase or cure but rather to expand and include and

grow larger than whatever has happened to us.”[1]

– Francesca Mason Boring

 

It Feels Good to be Heard

One day when my son, Kai, was six, he and his friend were playing with a balloon at a birthday party. Suddenly, Kai’s friend’s three-year-old sister, let’s call her Gabi, ran crying out of the room.

A few minutes later, I stood up and went to the bedroom, where she sat on the bed crying.

Gabi’s mother was kneeling in front of her, pleading with her to stop crying, and her grandfather was standing in a corner with his guitar, strumming an upbeat song in an attempt to cheer her up.

Meanwhile, Gabi was seemingly oblivious to all their cajoling.

With her mother’s consent, I sat down beside Gabi and asked what was wrong. Between sobs, she told me that the boys had taken her balloon. It wasn’t their balloon. It was her balloon. And they hadn’t asked for it.

I looked Gabi in the eyes and said, “That’s really sad, isn’t it? Are you really sad? Do you really want your balloon back?”

Gabi turned and looked at me with a puzzled expression, as if she was surprised to finally be heard. Then she heaved a huge sigh, put her head on my shoulder, and slowly stopped crying. “Yeah,” she said, seeming relieved that someone had asked her what she needed without trying to convince her to feel differently.

After a moment, we stood up, hand in hand, and went to ask the boys to give her the balloon back.

They promptly did.

What happened between Gabi and me that day was resonance.

What is Resonance

The word resonance comes from the Latin word resonare, meaning to sound back.

Resonance is what happens between two people when one person brings their warm, curious attention to the other in an attempt to understand them, and the second person responds with—Yes, that's it!

When someone shows that they truly get you, and your body relaxes and responds with, Yes! that's resonance. Our human bodies vibrate at different frequencies depending on our emotions, and when we resonate with another person, it’s as though our emotional worlds vibrate together.

Resonance is compassion-plus. Compassion means to suffer with. Self-compassion researcher Kristin Neff identifies three components of self-compassion: 1) mindfulness—an awareness of what’s happening without trying to change it, 2) self-kindness, 3) a recognition of our common humanity and how we are not alone in our pain.[2]

We can feel compassion toward someone else without them even knowing it, but as Sarah Peyton writes in Your Resonant Self, “we cannot be resonant with a person unless we are being relational—resonance is a two-person experience. Someone else can’t simply declare a resonance with us. The receivers are the ones who get to say whether or not someone else’s presence or language feels resonant”[3]

Although I had been deliberately practicing resonance toward myself, my clients, and my loved ones for nearly a decade before discovering Sarah Peyton’s work, I hadn’t been calling it resonance. I’m so grateful to Sarah Peyton for naming the importance of resonance and teaching the neuroscience behind it. This precise language has helped me become even more precise in my practice.

Resonance can happen verbally or nonverbally, and we can receive resonance from a part of ourselves, another person, an animal companion, a song, nature, or any being in the more-than-human realm.

Today, I want to talk about self-resonance, the practice and skill of offering resonance to ourselves.

Rather than practicing self-resonance, when most of us encounter a challenging situation, we ignore, criticize, dismiss, negate, or diminish what they feel; try to fix what’s wrong before truly understanding what’s going on;...

I invite you to ask yourself this question:

When you feel hungry, angry, lonely, tired, sore, stressed, or sad, how do you respond?

Do you ignore how you feel, bypass your body's signals, continue to power through your day, or lecture yourself about what you should be doing differently to feel better?

Or do you approach your uncomfortable feelings as a cue to pause, get curious about what you need, and choose a step toward meeting your needs?

Or do you do some of each, sometimes tending to how you feel and sometimes ignoring yourself?

In Episodes Six and Seven, I’ve shared with you the power of pausing to transform old habits and make choices that meet your needs. If you’re curious to learn more, I recommend listening to those episodes.

Today, I want to build on the practice of pausing by encouraging you to be on the lookout for a new set of cues and to pause when you notice them. These cues can be summed up with the acronym HALT(S).

The HALT(S) practice has its roots in the recovery movement, and its premise is simple: We humans are more likely to make choices that don’t serve us well when we don’t feel good.

Traditionally, the acronym is HALT—hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. I add the letter “S” to represent sore, stressed, and sad.

Here’s the practice:

Throughout your days, pay attention to how you feel, and if you notice that you feel hungry, angry, lonely, tired, sore, stressed, or sad, take it as a cue to halt.

Pause.

Then, get curious.

Ask yourself: What small steps am I able and willing to take to feel better now?

Then take whatever steps feel doable.

You may have time to close your computer, go for a long walk, eat a nourishing meal, phone a friend, or get your journal out and reflect on why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. Or you may be in the middle of a busy work day and only have a moment to acknowledge your feelings and needs, and may need to wait to tend to your needs until later that day or week.

If you’re feeling pretty crummy (like a 1, 2, or 3 on a scale where 10 is feeling the best and 0 is feeling the worst), get curious about what you might do to shift to a 5 or 6. If you’re at a 6, get curious about what might help you shift to an 8 or a 9. And, of course, if 10 feels easy enough, go for that. But don’t go for perfection. Just stay curious about what might help you feel a little bit better, and take whatever steps feel doable now.

To help remind you to pause, you might grab a sticky note, write “HALT(S)” on it, and put it somewhere you’ll see it. Then, pay attention, and take notes about what helps you feel better.

Imagine that you are backpacking through life, and keep a list of the basics you need in your pack to feel nourished enough.

I invite you to start that list now. If you’d like, grab your journal and write down a list of the basics that help you feel not bad.

As you learn more about what helps you feel nourished, energized, and supported, add any new practices to your list. Make sure to stay focused on the basics. We can only carry so much comfortably in our packs, and it’s important not to weigh ourselves down with too many must-dos.

Your list may also include some limits you place on yourself—like not staying up past a certain hour or not scrolling the internet longer than is good for you. If part of you resists or rebels against these limits, I invite you to imagine that you are reparenting yourself—taking responsibility for what you need, offering yourself the care you may have missed out on as a little one, and setting loving limits to nurture yourself.

Of course, when we set limits for little ones, they don’t always like it. They might even throw a tantrum especially when they’re feeling hungry, angry, lonely, tired, sore, stressed, or sad. But as an adult who loves them, you know they need limits.

Similarly, self-care sometimes looks like stopping and saying no to ourselves.

A few years back, I took a course on organization with one of my favorite business coaches, George Kao.

Until then, I had a constant sense of living for tomorrow, always hoping I’d have time to enjoy my life once I finished the current project. But seeing George’s schedule inspired me and, in retrospect, changed my life.

After seeing George’s calendar, I changed my calendar from a default monthly view to a weekly view, scheduled time for breaks, a weekly review practice, responding to emails, bigger projects and goals, exercise, and friends, and color-coded each type of activity.

I quickly discovered—as have many of my clients have since then—that this practice, which I came to call conscious calendaring—helped me develop a better sense of how much time I needed to get tasks done, set more realistic goals, pause throughout my days, close the computer at the end of the day, and accomplish my goals.

And, I found that whereas productivity culture trains us to believe that we should do more than is humanly possible and that we should hack our way into superhumanly manufacturing more time, my conscious calendaring practice helps me get a human-sized amount of the most important stuff done.

I’ve included a snapshot of a week of my calendar in the show notes. To some people, it might appear rigid or extreme to account for every moment from waking until bedtime. But I can choose to veer away from my plans if I discern that changing course better meets my needs, and I often do. And as opposed to feeling constricted, my calendar helps me experience far more ease and spaciousness than I did before.

Today, I’ll share seven conscious calendaring practices that can help you integrate more pause and presence into your life and align your life with what matters most to you.

But first, let’s talk about which calendar tool to use.

Now, I’m not making any money off of this recommendation, and I’m loathe to be a salesperson for Google. And yet, if you’re not already using a digital calendar, I strongly recommend Google calendars. Bear in mind that my recommendation to shift from a paper calendar to an online system often elicits strong resistance in people who feel wedded to a paper system, so if you feel averse to using an online system, here’s what I’d say:

If your paper system has supported you to be in right relationship with time, do what works. That said, over many years of supporting many clients to shift to an online system, I’ve discovered that nearly all of my clients find that, after some initial practice and persistence, a digital calendar helps them develop a much more choiceful and easeful relationship with time.

That’s because, as opposed to a paper schedule, an online calendar allows us to easily move blocks of time around, create repeating events, shift calendar views between monthly, weekly, and other timeframes, and make other changes to reflect our current needs. Writing on paper just isn’t so iterable. And, in case you’re new to Google calendars, I’ve included a link to a great Google Calendars tutorial in the show notes. If you are completely opposed to using an online system, you might also check out Franklin Covey planners, which I’ve seen some clients have success with.

Also, I encourage you to use only one calendar to hold all your commitments. As you may have experienced, storing commitments in multiple calendars can create a feeling of frazzledness and lead to dropped balls.

Once you decide which calendar tool you’ll use, do the following:

Set the default view to weekly, which I find works best for seeing time constraints and the regular rhythms of life.

Create repeating blocks of time to reflect your repeating daily, weekly, and monthly commitments such as workplace meetings, childcare, or exercise. These repeating events will become your default calendar, so that you don’t have to recreate your calendar from scratch each week.

My clients are often burned out high-achievers who come to me because they realize that they’ve been doing too much for too many people, taking responsibility for more than what is theirs to handle, and struggling to say no or make clear requests of others to step up. They long for a sense of balance so that they can continue making a contribution without sacrificing themselves.

Sound familiar?

If so, I’m excited to share with you the concept of centered responsibility.

To get a sense of what I mean by centered responsibility, I invite you to experiment for a moment:

First, as much as is possible for your body, sit upright, aligning your bottom, belly, heart, and head with each other. Then, lean your body forward, imagining that the leaning forward stance says, “This is mine to handle.”

Then, lean backward. Imagine that the leaning back stance says, “This is not mine to handle.”

Finally, look for the place between leaning back and leaning forward, where your bottom, belly, heart, and head align as much as possible. This is the shape of centered responsibility. Centered responsibility is the ability to discern what is and is not ours to handle and respond accordingly even in really challenging and uncomfortable moments of challenge.

Over-responsibility is the state of habitually leaning forward and taking responsibility for more than what is ours to handle. Notice if you can see yourself in any of the following examples of over-responsibility:

Stepping in to save the day when others are capable of handling things adequately

Taking charge in areas in which you’re highly competent rather than giving others space to learn

Doing all the work in the group project

Blaming yourself when a team project doesn’t go as you hoped, despite the fact that you showed up fully and others did not

Saying yes when you really want to say no in order to avoid disappointing others

Saying yes to more than what realistically fits in your schedule

Stepping in for your boss who lacks leadership skills

Speaking up on behalf of another person in an effort to avoid conflict

Parenting your parents

Blaming yourself for anything that is another person’s responsibility

Under-responsibility is the state of habitually leaning back and not taking responsibility for that which is ours to handle, for example:

Blaming time itself for the fact that you wish you had more of it rather than doing the painful work of choosing priorities and saying no to what you just don’t have time for

Ignoring your feelings

Ignoring your needs

Not making clear requests for what you need and want

Lashing out at loved ones rather than learning to communicate your needs more effectively

Stockpiling grievances or growing resentful of others

Gossiping or complaining about other people rather than addressing your conflicts with them directly

Draining your energy by trying to do it all rather than creating systems and fostering relationships that support you

Burnout often arises when we are over-responsible in some areas—like taking on more than our fair share of work—and under-responsible in other areas like not setting limits or communicating our needs.

Now, sometimes in life, we have to take on more responsibility than is ideal for us. Sometimes, we have to sacrifice our own needs to tend to a sick loved one, aging parent, small child, or community campaign. And often, it’s just plain painful that we don’t have time for all the things we long to do. Time management is grief work. There will always be more that we want to do than time to do it, and that can hurt.

And, at the same time, the more we practice centering, the more our habitual default state can become centered. And the more our default state is centered, the more gracefully we can dance between leaning forward and leaning back—between taking responsibility and creating space for others to do so as well.

I invite you to think of a habit you’d like to transform—either an old one you’d like to let go of or a new one you’d like to cultivate. A habit is any behavior we engage in semi-unconsciously, one that feels like it arises almost automatically or effortlessly within us.

For example, you might want to stretch your body after you wake up in the morning, breathe deeply when your child says something that activates you rather than screaming, close the computer at 5pm, or turn off the lights at an hour that supports you to wake up and stretch in the morning.

Over the years, many of my clients have wanted to develop a writing habit. They schedule time to write, sit down to do it, but sooner or later, they feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the task and get pulled into distraction. They go down an internet rabbit hole, get lost in social media, or succumb to an urge to do something more straightforward like the laundry.

Whatever it is, most of us have something that we want to do but then repeatedly feel pulled to do anything else instead. For me, it’s exercise, as I find just about anything else more interesting.

Now, a question for you—

What do you think you need to do in order to change your habits?

Many people answer this question with the word discipline, which originally meant punishment for the sake of correction.

But, as you may have experienced, discipline doesn’t always work that well for changing habits, and a self-punishing approach can perpetuate other unhelpful habits like self-judgment and self-harm.

Today, I want to share with you a far more kind and effective approach:

Self-observation.

In the last episode, I shared how our habitual behaviors arise when our nervous systems detect a cue in our environments that prompts an activation cascade—a sequence of sensations, emotions, thoughts, and ultimately, behaviors. And, I explained how, when we pause, we interrupt the activation cascade and create an opportunity to choose a different response.

Unfortunately, we’re often unaware that we’re experiencing an activation cascade in the first place. And, without awareness, it’s almost impossible to pause and choose a different response..

Fortunately, when we practice paying attention to what happens when we’re activated, it becomes far easier to notice when we’re activated, pause, and choose a different response. That’s where self-observation comes in.

In The Power of Habit, Nathan Azrin, one of the developers of habit reversal training, states:

“It seems ridiculously simple, but once you’re aware of how your habit works, once you recognize the cues and rewards, you’re halfway to changing it.

It seems like it should be more complex. The truth is, the brain can be reprogrammed. You just have to be deliberate about it.”[1]

In other words, the more awareness, the more choice. The more awareness of our behaviors we cultivate, the easier it becomes to choose behaviors that serve us and the people we care about.

In my Presence-Based Coaching training years ago, I learned a self-observation practice that I’ve come to rely on to help my clients (and myself) choose new behaviors and cultivate new habits. Here’s the practice:

Choose a behavior that you’d like to change and are willing to spend a few minutes investigating each day. Then, dedicate a few minutes each day to reflecting on instances during that day when you engaged or didn’t engage in the behavior.

If it is a behavior you want to let go of, ask yourself these specific questions, which track each part of the activation cascade:

Did I feel a pull to engage in the behavior? If so, when?

What sensations and emotions did I feel in my body?

What thoughts did I think?

What did I do?

What happened as a result?

If you’re tracking a behavior you want to do more of, ask yourself: When did I have an opportunity to engage in this behavior today? And, what did I do then?

If you engaged in the behavior,

We’ll start today with a quote from Tara Brach and her book, Radical Acceptance.

Brach writes:

It is believed that in the midst of a bullfight, a bull can find his own area of safety in the arena. There he can reclaim his strength and power. This place and inner state are called his querencia.

As long as the bull remains enraged and reactive, the matador is in charge. Yet when the bull finds querencia, he gathers his strength and loses his fear.

From the matador’s perspective, at this point, the bull is truly dangerous, for he has tapped into his power.[1]

In today’s podcast, we’re going to talk about how to stop reacting in ways that don’t serve us and find our own querencia through a practice of micro-pauses.

Now, granted, when it feels like every minute counts and we have no time to spare, it can be really hard to stop and find our power. Dominant culture insists that we produce constantly and our schedules overflow with obligations to community, work, children, parents, friends, and everyone else, so it’s hard not to feel like a bull in a ring with life coming at us sometimes. The notion of integrating pauses into our days might sound like something only New Age self-help gurus have time for.

But when we don’t pause to assess what’s really needed, our habitual reactions can bring us down paths we later regret.

To step outside of overwhelm, discern what we really need, and consciously respond in ways that serve us and the people we care about, we must pause.

The pause is the moment of choice.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl writes:

Between the stimulus and the response is a space, and in that space lies our power and our freedom.[2]

The pause is the space between the stimulus and our response. The pause is the place where we choose our next step.

Now, I’m not talking about going on a retreat or meditating for hours. I’m talking about the briefest of pauses. Even a few seconds can make a huge difference.

One reason why pausing can be so powerful is that when we pause, we interrupt our activation cascades. Activation cascades are sequences of physiological reactions—sensations, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors—which unfold as if on autopilot in response to cues that our nervous systems detect as threats or opportunities to meet our needs.

For example, let’s say that you receive an email from a colleague sending critical feedback.

Here’s what your activation cascade might look like in reaction to the email:

You detect the cue, often below your conscious awareness. In this case, the cue is the email.

You feel sensations in your body. When you read the email, you might feel tension, constriction, clenching, heat, restlessness, agitation, irritation, or other uncomfortable sensations.

You might also feel an urge to reply immediately or slam your computer closed or text a friend. Habits often feel like urges to dissipate built-up energy, like feeling compelled to do something or having an itch that wants scratching.

You feel emotions. Perhaps reading the email brings up emotions like anxiety, nervousness, overwhelm, frustration, confusion, dismay, embarrassment, or guilt.

You think thoughts. Maybe you think: “Everyone judges me.” “What if something terrible happens?” “My colleague is such a jerk.” “I can’t believe I did that.” “What do I do now?”

You react with a habitual behavior. Maybe you fight—you send a litany of complaints back to your colleague without first thinking through a more strategic response. Maybe you flee—you ignore the email and pretend like you never received it. Maybe you freeze—you feel like a deer in headlights or like the wheels in your head stop turning. Or perhaps you fawn and immediately apologize to your colleague without first reflecting on how much of their critique is actually your responsibility.

When we’re unaware that we’re experiencing an activation cascade, we’re likely to react with habitual behaviors that do...

Nearly ten years ago, I trained as a clinical hypnotherapist.

I wanted to help my clients break free from long-standing, limiting patterns like workaholism and people-pleasing and to help them access the freedom to honor their inner wisdom.

In our first weekend workshop, my teacher gave us an instruction that surprised me in its simplicity and that, in retrospect, shaped me into a far more confident person.

He told us—From now on, when someone gives you a compliment, say thank you.

That’s it. Don’t diminish the compliment, tell them about all the mistakes you’ve made, or project your attention back on the other person.

Just say thank you.

Since then, I’ve shared my teacher’s wisdom with my own clients. And I’ve come to think of it as one of my favorite tools in my arsenal of shoy.

That’s right—shoy.

Shared Joy & Bragging Gratitude

Coined by clinical psychologist Catherine Chambliss and her team, shoy is short for shared joy. It is the practice of showing interest when someone else relates a success story with your body language, voice, and follow-up questions.

My other new favorite word is bragitude—the practice of expressing gratitude when someone else’s support or success contributes to our own. It’s telling another person about our win and then thanking them for how they helped.

The research around the importance of sharing celebration and appreciation is clear:

Relationship researcher John Gottman found that the most significant factor predicting a married couple’s likelihood of divorce was the ratio of positive to negative comments the partners made to each other. He found that the optimal ratio was five positive comments for every negative one.

Similarly, researchers found that the highest-performing leadership teams at a company gave 5.6 positive comments for each negative one, and the lowest-performing teams gave 0.36 positive comments to each negative one.[1]

And yet, the cultural norm in so many of our organizations is to dive right into the work and neglect taking time to connect, give thanks, and celebrate. But when we treat celebration and gratitude as if they were wastes of time, we drain our energy and limit our capacity.

Here are five ideas for integrating more shoy and bragitude in your life:

Begin meetings or family dinners with everyone sharing one thing that’s bringing them joy or with the question What’s new and good?

End meetings with everyone sharing one thing they are taking away or are grateful for from the meeting.

When someone does something that you appreciate, thank them and be as specific as possible about why you’re grateful.

When others compliment you, catch yourself if you start batting away their kind words, and simply, say thank you.

Track how many positive comments you give in comparison to negative ones. And experiment with intentionally increasing the positive one. Of course, be mindful not to stockpile grievances. This isn’t an invitation to avoid giving challenging feedback but rather an invite to seize the opportunity to give thanks and praise.

As Brené Brown wrote in Atlas of the Heart, "In the midst of joy, there's often a quiver, a shudder of vulnerability. Rather than using that as a warning sign to practice imagining the worst-case scenario, the people who lean into joy use the quiver as a reminder to practice gratitude…

In our research, we found that everyone who showed a deep capacity for joy had one thing in common: They practiced gratitude.”

Over the years, I’ve come to rely on my practice of shared joy to help my clients—and myself—cultivate confidence, expand joy, and step fully into what we’re called to do next.

I invite you to choose one of the practices above and notice the difference it makes for you.

***

If you’re longing to build your confidence as a leader and to be supported by a group of like-minded peers who are excited to celebrate your successes with you,

Today, I want to invite you to reflect on the stories you tell yourself that limit your joy and to invite you to consider a new story.

I use the word stories to refer to beliefs, opinions, assumptions, and other thoughts we tell ourselves, often without even noticing them. When our stories go unnoticed, they often hold us back from feeling good and making the choices that honor our needs. But when we shine light on our stories and bring them to our conscious awareness, they begin to lose their power and we gain more freedom to choose how we show up.

So, with that said, I invite you to ask yourself: What do you believe to be true about joy?

You might even pause the podcast, take out your journal, and write a stream of consciousness about everything you believe to be true about joy.

Then, ask yourself: Do any of these beliefs hold me back from experiencing joy or feeling the ways I want to feel?

If they do, you do not need to try to change your mind or erase these thoughts from your brain.

Instead, the way to change our stories is to become aware of them and then to get curious about what story might serve us more.

There’s one story that people who care deeply about the state of the world often tell ourselves, which limits our joy. It sounds something like this:

Who am I to feel good when so many other people feel bad? If I feel too good, then I am betraying people who feel less good. I can’t enjoy all that I have when so many people have so little. I cannot be happy and be in integrity with the heartache of the world at the same time.

Does that sound familiar to you?

If so, and if you are willing, I invite you to try on a new story, one that works well for me.

I’ll start with the words of poet Jack Gilbert who says:

“We must risk delight… We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”[1]

I believe that one small reason we’re at the point of imminent global self-destruction is that we changemakers too often forget that we have the capacity to hold the polarity of grief and praise.

Too often, we overwork, overgive, overdo, grow resentful and curmudgeonly, become mired in interpersonal conflict, succumb to cultures of commiseration and gossip, and in the end, drop out altogether. People who consider getting involved see how hard it looks and opt out.

Granted, our work often feels Sisyphean, like a never-ending, uphill battle to push a boulder up a hill. Sometimes, we need to vent and complain.

And yet, when we choose to pay attention, we can see tiny wins all around us—moments of unexpected agreement with someone who's often on the other side of the aisle, a shift in behavior from a colleague who’s been challenging us, an unexpected vote from a city councilor who’s typically conservative, the approval of a grant that our organization is depending on, a bit more funding for schools, sunshine streaming through the window.

If we do not celebrate these tiny wins, we’re far more likely to become exhausted, overwhelmed, or cynical, wondering if any of our efforts even matter.

When we notice and celebrate our tiny wins, we’re far more likely to fuel our tank for the long haul, protect the energy we need to make decisions that serve us and our communities, and enjoy our efforts to make a difference in the world.

Training our attention to notice what works and what brings us delight grows our capacity to get clear about what would bring us joy in the future, imagine a more just and joyful future, and choose next steps in that direction.

And as opposed to happiness, joy can be found in any circumstance. The word joy stems from the Greek word gau- meaning to rejoice.

In contrast, the English word happy stems from the Old Norse word happ meaning chance or good luck, and when the word first emerged in the late 1300s, it meant lucky, favored by fortune,