Feelings and Actions

If you would prefer to listen to the podcast, click here.

Hello my fellow humans, welcome to the human experience. I'm Pam Poole from Pam Poole Self Discovery Coaching at www.pampoole.co.nz. Today I want to talk to you about feelings and actions. Of course they are a big part of every human experience, every moment, you know anything and everything we do, every relationship.

It's really important though to understand how they affect each other and what order that comes in because when we're trying to help ourselves, we need to be able to look at that in a way that provides us with information that's actually effectively going to support us to move forward in a way that serves us.

So what do I mean by that? As part of the human experience, feelings drive our actions, right? So if, for example, we think that we're feeling a certain way but in actual fact it's an action, when we go to look at that to try and support ourselves to get the result or to change something in some way, or even just to understand it and gain awareness of what's going on. We really want to be sure we've identified that in the right area.

So one of the main, I guess, you know, descriptive words that get often confused in those two areas is anticipation. And a lot of people will think, I feel like it's anticipation. In actual fact, often anticipation is in the action line, not in the feeling line.

So we might feel excitement and the action or cognitive action from that place is anticipation because within that feeling of excitement it drives thoughts about what it might be like, will I enjoy myself, okay so in actual fact the anticipation is in the action line it's being driven, it's a cognitive action that's being driven by a certain feeling okay.

So if we don't see that and we decide to put anticipation in the feeling line, and I'm not saying it's not ever there, I'm just saying we need to be mindful of the context so that we can correctly identify whether, in this instance, it's in our feeling line or in our action line.

Say it's in our action line, and we put it in our feeling line as anticipation, then when we try and uncover the actions that we think anticipation is driving, it won't make sense and then when it doesn't make sense, we want to blame, you know, the circumstances or we want to give up on trying to help ourselves like well I don't understand it doesn't make sense but actually all that's happening is that we're trying to understand or gain awareness or insight into something where we haven't actually separated it into the correct order.

It would be like you know when we go to say bake a cake and we want to put, let's say, the baking powder, we want to put that in the liquid area. So instead of adding it in the flour at the beginning, because of the way it then impacts the following actions of what we add to it. We put it in last and it doesn't have that same impact. And then when the cake doesn't turn out, instead of recognizing that we've got the baking powder in the wrong order, we assume the whole recipe is incorrect. I hope this is making sense.

So this is why it's important that when we separate something to look at it to gain understanding, insight, awareness, skills, whatever it is you're choosing or you're wanting to kind of get knowledge about, this is why it's important to be sure that we've got things in the correct order so that we can be sure that the information or what's happening after that is actually accurate, will be helpful, and pertinent to what it is we're trying to uncover. OK? So popping back to anticipation, if we realize that it's in our action line, then we can say to ourselves, well, what feeling is driving this action of anticipation. Sometimes it could be uncertainty. Sometimes it could be, as I mentioned earlier, excitement. But it won't be the only action that it drives. It's just one of the actions. So the action of anticipation and then the action of possibly comparing. These are cognitive actions.

Okay, we're not at the moment talking about physical action. And then we look at that and we can understand or see because our actions create results. We can look at that and go well hang on, will these actions support me to achieve what I want to achieve right now or long term if we're building up process. So I hope that makes sense. If you have any questions just go to my website www.pampoole.co.nz. You're welcome to pop in or book a no obligation chat and I can clarify that further. Obviously there's always a blog and sometimes you know it's easier to for some of us to comprehend when we read rather than listen or some of us actually need both.

I'm kind of one of those people that like to both hear and see, read, sometimes write. But just to be clear, what we're looking at here is part of the human experience where we understand that our feelings drive our actions and that we need to be sure that we're identifying our feelings and our cognitive actions in the right areas.

So that the information that knowledge gives us makes sense and is accurate for the next step in the process of the human experience, which of course we're all cycling through all the time. All right my friends, my fellow human beings, have the best weekend possible and I'll touch base with you again next week. See you later.