The Great Explorer, Ernest Shackleton, who discovered the Magnetic South Pole, described the learning zone as:
“a place where there is a manageable amount of discomfort and where the emotions are heightened.”
We tend to think of emotions and feelings as good or bad. Happiness good, sadness bad. Excitement good, fear bad.
Yet by thinking this way we may seek to avoid ‘bad’ feelings.
If they were bad, surely we wouldn’t have evolved them. They must have evolved to serve a useful purpose. Perhaps that purpose is to help us learn?
For example, if I hit or trap my thumb doing something around the house. At the time, there’s a physical pain together with other emotions – maybe anger directed at yourself or even the inanimate object we bumped into!
Over time, as the bruising fades, then the emotion changes too. As we think back to what we did, we no longer feel anger. Perhaps we even smile, thinking “how could I?” Our emotions around certain events can and do change. That seems the case even for more traumatic events. Being able to subconsciously learn something useful from the experience seems to enable us to let go of certain emotions. My experience using Time Line Therapy for myself and with clients, has shown this to work effectively in this way.
So I would like to encourage you to consider our emotions as neither good not bad, but instead simply that you feel “negative” emotions as a way of learning from the situation.
Notice exactly what you feel. Consider what you need to learn from the situation to let go of the feeling and move on. That way, we never stop learning.
