You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women Podcast with Shannan Christensen, episode number 178. Welcome to Weight Loss for Successful Women, a podcast for women who are ready to break the diet cycle and end their struggle with weight for good. Here’s your host, fortune 100 executive, and certified life coach, Shannan Christensen.

Hello love. So excited to be back, Jenn and I are back. You know, we never left. We’re in the same outfits. We can’t fool you. I know if you’re watching on YouTube, I know. Just so you know, you can watch these on YouTube now, we’ve updated our YouTube channel. Go to @ShannanChristensen and watch us on YouTube. You can see the outfit I’m wearing. I’m wearing sparklies. And Jenn is just beautiful as ever. And so @ShannanChristensen, and you can see all of this year’s TBOSS Takes. Mm, so good.

So my love, today we are getting into the feelings. I know, I know love’s, feelings is a part of this, and it’s a big part of why many of my listeners, my clients, you, why you overeat it is because you don’t wanna feel a feeling. And so instead of feeling negative emotion, you stuff it down with, you know, for me it was a cookie or a cupcake. For you, it might be chips or pizza or pretzels. And so, feelings are vibrations in our bodies. They live in our bodies actually.

When we were kids, if you ever watch like a two-year-old, they have all the feelings. I love watching my grandkids because they go from like happy and just, oh my goodness, to, you know, crying and a mess, right? They’re just like, holy moly, you’re like, what just happened? But they feel their emotion, they feel it at a really high vibration on all the sides. They feel negative, they feel positive, they feel joy. Oh, have you ever heard a little baby giggling? I mean, it’s the best, right? I mean, they just, they feel emotion. And then throughout, and I’m watching this with my older grandkids too, right?

In school, and as parents we’re like, hey, hey, be quiet. You know, all of us, that happened, right? You know, stop that crying, right? Stop that nonsense, right? So we have been told over and over again, hey, stop the emotion. Don’t show the emotion. You know, this has come from long lines. I mean, I remember my grandparents, I mean, my grandmother did not show any emotion. I mean, she smiled, she laughed, you know, but she just, I never saw her cry. I never saw, I just never saw emotion from her. But again, she grew up in a time where it’s like, hey, none of that, you know?

And so, you know, I think we’ve all witnessed and seen this. And so what happens over time when you don’t allow yourself to feel emotion, you start to become very numb, then you start to look for things to numb yourself because you don’t want to feel the negative emotion. And then what happens is you actually start blocking the positive emotion. You stop like feeling great laughter or joy or happiness at the highest levels. You just become this numb kind of robot. And I know because it’s happened to me. It’s something that I have to be very aware of even today, because again, ladies, many of you who are listening, right? You’ve been on this planet 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years.

So this isn’t something, you flip a switch and tomorrow you can feel all your feelings. This is why I created Transform Boss Weight Loss, because this process of healing yourself and healing your relationship with food, feeling your feelings, I mean, it is a process, and it takes a good long time. And I think it’s just the journey for the rest of your life. You’re just learning how to feel emotion.

We just had this really powerful coaching session in Transform Boss. I took one of my ladies through feeling a feeling cuz she really needed to at that moment to feel that emotion. And of course, all the ladies who were on the coaching call, you know, they were feeling emotion too, and breathing with us. And it was a really powerful coaching call. And, you know ladies, feeling feelings, I think it’s almost like a skill you have to learn because we have been taught to push it down for so long. Now a feeling, just to be very clear, is a vibration in your body. It lives in your body, not your brain.

So when you say, I feel good, I feel bad. A lot of that’s our brain. Even when you’re identifying emotions, like sadness, frustration, happiness, joy, a lot of that lives in our brain, but actually, emotions live in our body. So we could feel like, when I get excited, my hands move, I smile, my body moves a little bit, my heart races a little bit. When I feel anger, my fists, you know, tense up, my body tenses, my neck. Maybe I even get a little headache when I feel anger, right? So like that is emotion. It lives in your body. And this is important because for so many of us, we’re just like walking heads. We just walk around with our heads bobbling.

So feelings live in our bodies. And learning how to feel emotion, I believe is a skillset. And you can learn that through coaching and through experiences with a coach who can teach you how to feel emotion. And so my take on feelings really is feeling emotion and learning to allow yourself to feel all of it. The negative, the positive. It will change your life. See, there’s so many things we don’t do because we don’t wanna feel emotion. I don’t wanna feel uncomfortable, I don’t wanna feel failure. And you don’t feel failure. You feel shame, you feel, you know, disappointment, right? I don’t wanna feel that, you know. I have so many ladies, you know, they listen to me every week who are so fearful of joining Transform Boss because they’re so scared.

What if I fail? What if I, you know, waste my money again? And ladies, it comes from not wanting to feel disappointment, but this is what I know. The more I feel disappointment, the more I feel frustration, the more I feel fear, I just bring it right alongside with me. I’m unstoppable. I just keep growing in ways I never could even imagine. And so learning to feel your feelings is everything, because then you can just live this life that is always how it was intended, the human experience of 50 50.

So Jenn, ooh, what’s your take on it? Ooh, my brain is like trying to condense, I’ve got so much. Where I wanna start is, I just think that I recently heard somewhere that around the age of 10 or 11 is where we start to show up how we think other people think that we should show up, no longer that natural feeling our feelings, like Shannan said, how we see the two-year-olds, right? Happy one second and throwing a tantrum the next. And I think that that just progresses through society. That even as women, right? We should show up a certain way. I have a very loud laugh that, you know, I had to like condense my, bring that down because it was too loud and things like that.

And just through this work, you know Shannan talked about us avoiding feelings like shame and sadness, because we often think if we feel those feelings, I know I’ve thought this, if I feel sad and start crying, I’m not gonna be able to stop. I’m just gonna lose it and I’m not gonna be able to pull myself together. But the opposite is quite true, is that when we feel those feelings and we allow ourself to just express those emotions and just go inward to our body, it in the end gives us peace and actually helps us to move forward. And it’s not just the feelings of sadness and shame. We also miss out on these feelings of joy and laughter. Like it is the best now that I no longer am just, right?

There were times I was just putting on a happy face. Now I am laughing and smiling because I’m genuinely happy. And I get to feel that all the way through. You know, Shannan got us these cards, and ironically, today’s is fear is boring. And I was just laughing as she was speaking because, you know, we, we do, we, we create these stories around our emotions that, you know, if I join Transform or if I go and try to feel this feeling, this is what can happen. And we build up this big story. And it’s just that, it’s just a story. When we can just live in these emotions and have the human experience we’re supposed to with experiencing all the emotions, it just allows us to keep showing up as our truest self, to experience it all. And just elevates, I think, our life experience.

Yeah. Ugh. I love all of that Jenn. I’m like, because, you know, I love, one of my favorite quotes is from Brene Brown. And she says, you know, when you numb the dark, you also numb the light. And I think about food for me, for so long, it was numbing. It was like my “numbing medicine” to numb myself because I didn’t wanna feel the sadness or the anxiety, right? I didn’t like to feel anxiety. I still have anxiety. Like there are times where I go to lay down to go to sleep, and then I’m like, oh hello, anxiety. As I’m getting ready to go to bed, I’m like, hello, okay, let’s, let’s breathe through it and process this emotion.

You know, my loves, we do a lot of work in Transform Boss on feelings because it is a lot of intensive work. I, you know, we have Unstoppable Live in May. We’re gonna do some fun things with feeling emotions in our body. And so today is just a snippet, it’s our take on feelings. And so I’ll, I’ll leave you with this. Here’s my take. When you can feel and allow emotion, whatever it is, you start to become unstoppable.

How you feel a feeling is you, so number two, so number one, feeling feelings. It is a must. If you want to lose weight for the last time, it’s a must. Number two, to feel a feeling, you just pause, which our last episode was the power of the pause. You take a breath and then you start to ask your body questions. How does my heart feel? How does my stomach feel? How does my neck feel? And by naming how your body, you can start to breathe and you can start to allow the feelings to be there. And then it takes about 90 seconds to two minutes for you to process the emotion. I like to breathe in emotion and breathe out emotion. And you can just continually go back into your body.

Now, for some of you, allowing a feeling might take five minutes, it might take 10 minutes, especially if it’s a very deep emotion or a powerful one, like shame or grief or loss. And allowing yourself, allowing the tears, just allowing the feeling to be there, go into your body, ask your body questions, and just start to name how your body’s feeling. That’s how you allow emotion. You know, just catching yourself when you have.

Number three, catching yourself. When you start  telling yourself, I’m gonna feel this later, when you start to feel a negative emotion and you’re like, I don’t have time for this, I’m gonna feel it later, catch yourself. Maybe you’re in a public place or maybe you’re around, but notice that like, hey, I need to process this emotion so that when you’re by yourself or when you’re in a space to allow yourself, cuz you can process an emotion sitting in your living room with your family. They could be watching tv, and then you’re just in, you’re taking some breaths and in your head you’re just like closing your eyes and you’re, you know, naming how your body feels.

So you can do this wherever, but if you don’t feel comfortable, especially if you’re first, you know, just take a note of it and then just, you know, allow yourself to process it later. I think it’s so important because look, ladies, emotion doesn’t go away. It lives in your body and sometimes it’ll come out as other things, a headache, pain, chronic pain, and sickness. So allowing yourself to feel emotion, I think it’s just one of the most powerful tools we have. Coach Jenn, I love you. Any last things that you wanna say or anything that you thought of while I was going through our take on it?

I guess the one thing is just, the more that you do it, the more that you practice feeling your feelings, you will then be in tune to, Ooh, my shoulders are a little tense. This is when I feel anxious. Right? You’ll be able to identify them quicker, and it won’t always feel like you have to identify everything, soon you’ll just be like, Ooh, there’s anxiousness. Ooh, there is sadness. And so the power of practice of doing this is everything. Ooh, I love that. Ooh, I love it, Jenn.

Well ladies, as you know, if you wanna come and join Jenn and I, come in Transform Boss Weight Loss, you can go to jointransformboss.com. You can learn everything about it. We’d love to have you. So next week, I’m so excited, we’re gonna talk about urges and desire. I’m gonna give my take on that. And Jenn will be back with us soon. You know, I love having Jenn on. She, I think she’s amazing and wonderful. So thank you Jenn, and I love you ladies. Bye for now. Thank you for listening to this episode of Weight Loss for Successful Women. If you love what you heard today and wanna learn more, come on over to BFLY coaching.com. That’s B F L Y coaching.com. See you next week.