Why bad feelings help you get unstuck (August 7, 2022)

If you feel like you are spinning your wheels in your career, your business, or relationships—it turns out that the stuck feeling you are experiencing may be a good thing.

Personal transformation strategist and CEO of Genius You, Simone-Ellen Keller, says that feeling stuck is your signal that it’s time to move to the next level, but most people don’t know how and that’s when mistakes happen.

“We are looking at it all wrong. Those so-called negative emotions we feel are fantastic. They are like our personal growing pains.”

Keller said insights came out of Covid in that the pandemic took away the things we use to distract ourselves, like eating out and going on holiday.

“Most people use distraction to avoid these feelings of ‘stuckness’. Ordinarily the ‘hum-drum’ of life is spiced with travel, parties and other forms of entertainment and relaxation. Covid took away those distractions and made us confront the stark reality that we need to grow and move on to the next level—which can be intensely uncomfortable in itself.

“Indications are that divorce, and separations, went up more than forty per cent over the pandemic. This suggests people do not know how to grow, and instead interpret the way they are feeling as dissatisfaction, boredom and a need to change rather than the need to reconnect.

“Of course, some relationships do come to an end as a result of our need to grow, but I would suggest that many of those divorces and separations didn’t have to happen if people knew how to respond—a desire for development is not necessarily a desire for change.

In not being able to use hard and supposedly negative emotions for personal growth and development, many people seek distraction or pull the pin and ba

“If divorce leaves you feeling unfulfilled, or changing jobs quickly becomes a case of more of the same, it’s a real indication that you need to dig deeper into what your mind is trying to tell you.

1. Learn to use so-called negative emotions

“So many of our solutions and development are in those yuck emotions. It may involve having a tricky, vulnerable conversation, but instead we renovate the house.

“There are no negative or positive emotions, just emotions that need to be heard and addressed. It’s not about segmenting emotions into those we like and don’t like. When that happens, we stop ourselves from accessing the emotions we need to move us forward,” says Keller.

2. Persistently search until you find solutions.

Moving away from ‘stuckness’ is how you grow and get liberated; it’s how you build the life that you want.

“When I was developing my programme, I had to align myself with the emotion of failure or I wouldn’t learn how to succeed. When something is not working it feels like failure, but it is not. You just have to go deeper to find the answer.”

3. Use so-called negative emotions like barometers

Keller says it is important to try and understand where the emotion is coming from, and why you are experiencing it.

“Use that emotion like a barometer to keep you on task. Hard emotions will feel disgusting, and will tell you awful stories, but when you work with it, that’s when you begin to grow and progress.”