Sometimes the emotional lessons aren’t as apparent as the rational ones.
The lessons dictating emotional life often come across as small and inconsistent. And it can feel like they’re taking too long.
But they are telling.
And if you can trust the compounding effect of these lessons building up over the years:
You can learn to treat them as stepping stones that empower your journey, rather than restrict it.
They might seem small at a glance, but they are telling.
And those tales can end up being your greatest fortune in life.
The only way emotional learning becomes ingrained in you, is as experiences are repeated over and over again.
With that repetition, your brain is strengthening your pathways. And it’s creating habits that will allow you to apply the emotional lesson during the times you need it most. The times of distress, frustration, and hurt.
Emotional learning is life-long learning. And it requires your diligence, your gracefulness, and your patience.
These lessons can look like:
Being more cognizant of a past behavior you’re not proud of. Examining the situation. Questioning yourself. Being honest with yourself. Asking for feedback on how that behavior came across. Understanding the impact it had. Not beating yourself up for it. But rather taking the information and utilizing it to empower your development and internal growth.
Recognizing where your capacity for self-awareness may have been limited, and did not allow you to show up your best in a particular situation. Give yourself grace. Just because you didn’t know or apply a lesson in a previous situation, doesn’t mean there isn’t opportunity for you to do so the next time around. It’s going to sound cliche and I forget what the quote is verbatim or who it’s from. But the notion that you should know that you did your best with the information you had at that time is so important. It’s a reminder that allows you to gift yourself grace, empathy, and compassion. So that you can open up internally and choose the lessons.
Being more mindful of moments where your empathy was required in a situation with a loved one. Empathy seems to be tricky for many people. Because there’s an element of protecting yourself and adhering to yourself and setting the boundaries that will allow for you not to get taken advantage of by anyone. But setting boundaries and having pure empathy can co-exist. Even if you’ve been conditioned to think that they can’t. It’s more about finding the balance between them. Less about having to choose one or the other.
Understanding the depth you could go towards when spending time with yourself. Many pride themselves in doing the work, in caring for self, in having substance. But it’s not a light switch. It never ends. You can always go deeper. And besides, the more time you spend away NOT doing the work, the more you rise up and create distance between the depth that provides you with these meaningful lessons. Now this isn’t to say that life is about always going deep within yourself. But it’s about forming a life-long practice with this so that you can harness the emotional lessons when it’s time to. So that you don’t create so much separation that it’s hard to recover. The depth shouldn’t be definitive. But it can be defining.
Assessing a frustration that happened. Diligently trying to understand where it’s rooted. And forming how you can respond in a healthier manner the next time around. Reflection, introspection, and assessment. These are all gifts you can give yourself. It’s okay to start small. But it all starts with a meaningful pause. A few of those meaningful pauses can compound towards more moments of better understanding. Creating more opportunities for you to pick out the lessons.
Reflecting on the moments you weren’t as kind. And exploring how leading with it the next time around can improve your life exponentially. Kindness is foundational. But the opportunities for kindness aren’t always apparent either if you’re not actively working on your awareness, or how you interact with the outside world. There’s power in prioritizing this and allowing it to become your superpower.
Falling out with a friend. An opportunity for you to reflect and understand the role you played in that fall out. An opportunity for you to create better understanding, potentially rebuild trust, or assess whether that friendship can continue to serve a purpose in your life, or if it’s one you need to sever. Which by the way, is MORE than okay. Many shy away from it. And it’s much easier said than done. And it can feel terrible. But what will feel worse? Making a tough decision now? Having a difficult conversation right now? Or being in a situation that doesn’t serve you, takes from you, belittles you, and restricts you, for years and years to come?
Not showing up for your partner. An opportunity for understanding what their needs are, as well as yours, and how you can co-create a plan moving forward to collaborate on those. Holding up each end of the partnership. Choosing each other—every single day.
Understanding, purifying, and taming your impulses. Recognizing where it might have strayed you away on your path. But harnessing the power behind breaking that pattern, regulating your thoughts and emotions, and choosing a pause that can help you make better decisions. Regulating your impulse is a skill. By taming it, you become more thoughtful, considerate, and more careful. You steer your emotions instead of letting them steer you.
Becoming more socially aware. We often talk about self-awareness—the foundation for everything, and an incredible fist step. But social awareness can be just as important. And the problem with social awareness is that because of the lack thereof, people resort to victimizing themselves, never taking any responsibility, never stopping to ask questions, not being mindful of the other person right in front of them, and not breaking free from the mind traps in order to cultivate those relationships with others purely and properly.
Increasing your emotional vocabulary. Without knowing more words to understand what’s happening inside you, you risk not taking advantage of the process that follows afterwards. By using more words to describe your thoughts and emotions, you learn to describe them better. You also learn how to interpret them better. You’re also better to pick out the lessons, the wisdom, the signals, the information that said emotion is providing you with.
The emotional lessons will always be there.
But that doesn’t mean they’ll be apparent.
And without taking the proper time to pause, to embrace stillness, to hear the silence, to surrender to the present moment, you risk more time passing between that crucial moment, and the lesson fleeting away from you.
Journal Prompts:
What happened in my life recently that was trying to provide me with a lesson?
What is that lesson?
What was that situation trying to teach me?
How could I have shown up better?
How can I show up better next time?
If my emotions could speak to me with guidance, wisdom, and compassion, and in retrospect, what would they say to me right now?
If you took the time to be intentional with this newsletter and found even just one thing that was helpful to you, please feel free to let me know on my Instagram (@thekevincastillo)—or by commenting here! You can also just feel free to respond to this email directly.
As always, thank you so much for spending your time with me!
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Thanks so much for your support every single week. It means the world to me.