Next in our series covering, Data-Emotion-Sensations we look at emotion.
How does the change in your emotion influence your experience of activities and races?
We looked previously at the raw data element of training and racing. The emotion is often considered the “story” we associate with that data in some way.
These can be feelings that challenge us, perhaps feelings of insufficiency through comparison such as I’m not enough, I’m too slow; maybe a sense of disconnection of identity such as I’m not a cyclist, I’ve never been good at swimming, or an emotion of fear or future catastrophising, there is no-way I can do this, this is too far, too fast, too steep; or a feeling of anger if something doesn’t progress to expectations or our sense of self or safety feels threatened.
Or these can be powerful positive emotions – joy and freedom being out in a run, the pleasure of a beautiful expansive view, the feeling of connection with others completing a difficult event, sense of progress and growth as you reach a new milestone.
There can be 2 schools of thoughts around these emotions. One school groups emotions into a “good wolf” camp and a “bad wolf camp”. This is taken from the idea of “feeding the good wolf”. https://www.oneyoufeed.net/all-episodes/
Another approach is to receive each emotion as an invitation to explore with some curiosity where that emotion maybe stems from. Here is an interesting podcast considering the emotion of anger. https://www.reboot.io/episode/extras-20-anger-as-messenger-with-mollie-west-duffy-chrystal-bell-ali-schultz/
Action(s):
- On your next activity reflect on the dominant emotion you are feeling perhaps before, during or afterwards.
- Do you feel this is serving you?
- Experiment with the “feeding the good wolf” method – how does that resonate?
- Experiment with the method of understanding what may lie behind the emotion – what message is it sending you?
As always love to hear how this post lands for you and what you discover in your exploration of emotions!