You are not your emotions. But you can’t discount them either.

In those moments of fear, rage, love, or side-splitting hilarity, you can’t deny those emotions are as real as the headphones you’re listening to this podcast through, or whatever is in your visual field.

You feel emotions whether you like it or not, and emotions sway you whether you like it or not.

We often get into mindset training because our emotions have too much of a say in your life. Your fear of standing out prevents you from truly committing to training, or leaving it all on the floor in a workout. Your anxiety prevents social connection. Your nerves ruin your competition or qualifier performance.

Due to its popularity and its effectiveness, the Stoic framework provides a great starting point to getting a handle on these emotions. Quotes like “if you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment” are often misinterpreted in a way that suggest we should be removing our emotions.

Your emotions serve a purpose though. Disgust means you probably shouldn’t eat that food. Doubt is a good sign not to trust someone. Awe creates gratitude. If we dismiss our emotions entirely, we lose sight of a highly evolved skill set which gives us a unique advantage. Subtle emotions give subtle clues to what we need.

Left to run amok though, emotions destroy us.

There’s a middle ground to seek then. This middle ground is one from which we can observe emotions without becoming immersed in emotion. The goal is to get to a point where frustration doesn’t ruin any more of your workout than it needs to, and where confidence doesn’t lead you to blindness of your weaknesses.

You want to be able to use your emotions as indicators of truth. Your emotions are telling you something the reptilian part of your mind knows to be true, but your more recently evolved brain structure hasn’t caught up with yet.

Viewed through a purely evolutionary lens, your emotions exist because they serve a purpose. Otherwise they would have been wiped out of existence long ago.

Your job is to see them for what they are - indicators which may or may not be trustworthy.

In this conversation with Logan Gelbrich, we discuss the limitation and nuance of emotions, as well as:

How to hold the standard of success
Logan’s journey of mindset and what he’s learned along the way
Psychological safety and self-expression
Developing awareness
The 5 different perspectives you can view any scenario through
What great culture looks like & how to develop it
And why the Sphinx may be thousands of years older than the experts think.

Logan is one of those people who connects me to a deeper level of awareness, and I thoroughly hope you’ll enjoy this conversation.

2024-09-16- KSR - Hour 1