No feeling is final

▶Watch this week's reflection · 2:29

This week I've been noticing how fast we sort a feeling the moment it lands. A good one to keep, a bad one to fix. It's the same reflex an office runs on when it asks whether you're a problems person or a solutions person, as if a whole human could be filed under one heading. Either way, the feeling stops being something you're having and becomes one more thing to manage and be rid of.

I was talking with a dear friend, another coach, about the feelings we're quickest to push away. The hard ones that we can reflexively label as unsafe and just want gone. What she named, and what I keep turning over, is that those are often the feelings with the most to teach us. We flee the discomfort and leave the lesson behind with it. It reminded me of the famous quote from the poem Go to the Limits of your Longing by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: "let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going." No feeling is final. Staying with it, I'm learning, is the only way a feeling gets to teach you anything at all.

So the next time a hard feeling arrives, what if you let it stay a while? Not to analyze it or fix it, only to let it be here without a verdict. The feeling you most want to push away is usually the one still holding something you haven't heard yet. Stay with it, and it tends to help guide you forward.

What might you learn this week from the exact feeling you'd rather not have?

Staying won't make it hurt less. But somewhere in it, what felt like something happening to you turns out to be happening for you.