This Newsletter at a Glance:

👠 What Is Your Emotional Achilles Heel?

🔎 TL/DR: Why Find It?

🛠️ Sol Bites: 4 Steps to Fix Your Emotional Achilles Heel

🎥 Video Bite: Ellen Barrett on Releasing Fear

🔮 Words of Wisdom

Step 1: Find your emotional achilles heel.

If you need help identifying it, try this technique: Track your emotions for a week and see which negative emotion is consistently absent.

Suppose you noticed you experienced a lot of anger and irritation, a substantial level of anxiety and nervousness, and a bit of shame and embarrassment. What negative emotion seems to be missing from your list? Sadness… In light of that, ask yourself, Were there any instances where you could have felt sad instead of—or along with—any other emotions?

Step 2: Expand your emotional vocabulary.

Having more ways to describe your feelings can help you identify the subtle variations of emotions—primarily related to the ones you dislike.

For instance, anger comes in many forms, including annoyance, irritability, rage, frustration, resentment, and exasperation. By noticing annoyance or irritation, you can improve your ability to recognize deeper or more subtle forms of anger, such as resentment or bitterness.

Take a screenshot of this wheel of emotions and save it to your phone to help you remember these nuanced emotions easily.

Step 3: Create an emotional scale.

To understand how and when your emotional achilles heel triggers you—and the intensity of those experiences—get a sheet of paper and write a list of numbers from 10 to 1. You will use it as a scale, allowing you to see the range of ways the emotion manifests in your life. That should help you improve how you cope with it.

For example, let’s say shame is your emotional vulnerability. If a co-worker makes a sarcastic comment about you during a work meeting internally, you first need to acknowledge the feeling of shame and validate it. Then, assess its intensity on a scale of 1 to 10. If you consider it a 7, you would briefly describe the incident and place it next to the 7 on your ladder.

The best way to develop any skill is by starting with the easiest part first. In this case, you should work on handling minor feelings on your ladder and gradually enhance your coping abilities. In this example, dealing with emotions of shame that you’ve marked at level three first will allow you to become more at ease and self-assured. Then you can address the more intense shameful feelings with more confidence.

Step 4: Build tolerance.

Rather than avoiding a painful emotion, practice coping with it.

For instance, let's say you don’t allow yourself to feel anger. At the grocery store, someone cuts in front of you in line. Instead of pushing away the feeling (maybe you subconsciously head to social media for a mental distraction), pause to acknowledge and validate your anger. Set a timer on your phone for 30 seconds and allow the anger to exist without reacting. After 30 seconds, you can check Instagram. As you find yourself in a similar situation, repeat the process—but gradually increase the timer each time. Once you can tolerate your emotional achilles heel for a few minutes, you can work on handling higher levels of the emotion—in other words, move up your emotional weakness ladder.

Here’s a helpful mantra: “No matter how uncomfortable this feeling is, I can handle it.” 

The cost of avoiding pain is far greater than the pain itself.