Wired Not to Feel

I remember when my grandfather died.

I was upstairs in my bedroom when I heard the news.

I remember standing in front of my dresser with both hands resting on it, looking at my face in the mirror, trying to make myself cry.

Nothing came.

A More Refined Level of Emotional Awareness

This might sound obscure, but I've spent thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars learning how to deeply feel.

To become more of a heart-centred man.

I've been guided by mentors and by my patients, both the aware and the unaware, the high performers and the beginners. Everyone has played a role in shaping what I would now call a more refined level of awareness.

Not a finished state.

Not some plaque-on-the-wall, trophy moment.

Just a greater capacity to notice.

To notice what is happening inside of me.

To notice what I want to move away from.

To notice what I don't want to feel.

And eventually, to notice more of what is happening in the people around me.

That's the part I didn't expect.

The more deeply I learned to feel my own inner world, the more clearly I could perceive the subtle worlds of others.

The slight movement.

The subtle change in tone.

The whisper beneath the words.

The patterns quietly organizing someone's experience without them even realizing it.

Seeing What Others Can't See

Ironically, this refinement is what people ultimately invest with me for, whether they recognize it or not.

It's my capacity to discern what isn't immediately obvious.

A wonderful client from Texas once said to me:

"Steve, I'm paying you to show me my blind spots."

That statement has stayed with me.

Because showing someone a blind spot isn't simply an intellectual exercise.

You have to perceive it first.

And perception requires more than thinking.

It requires listening.

Watching.

Sensing.

Feeling.

It requires enough stillness within yourself that you can notice something subtle happening in someone else.

Over the years, I've had the privilege of working with elite athletes, highly successful business owners, leaders carrying extraordinary responsibility, and people simply trying to find their way through life.

And one thing has become increasingly clear to me:

As people pursue greater levels of mastery, they begin to value refinement.

They care about subtlety.

They care about nuance.

They care about precision.

Feeling and Precision

And I've discovered something I wouldn't have understood standing in front of that dresser all those years ago.

Feeling deeply didn't make me less precise.

It made me more precise.

Which brings me back to the title.

Wired to Not Feel.

The point isn't whether I cried when my grandfather died.

The point is that somewhere along the way, I had learned to disconnect from feeling because, at the time, it served a purpose.

Many of us do.

We learn what is safe to feel.

What isn't.

What gets expressed.

What gets buried.

What gets intellectualized.

What gets pushed aside so we can keep moving.

The Wiring Can Change

The problem isn't that we developed that wiring.

The inner obstacle is believing we have to keep it.

Because the beautiful thing about being human is that we are adaptable.

Our awareness can expand.

Our hearts can reopen.

We can become increasingly capable of experiencing the full range of being human without needing to run from it.

And as our capacity to feel expands, something else expands with it.

Our capacity to perceive.

We notice more.

We sense more.

We hear what isn't being said.

We become increasingly sensitive to the subtle information life is constantly giving us.

And perhaps that's one of the great misunderstandings about feeling.

Feeling isn't necessarily the opposite of strength.

It isn't the opposite of clear thinking.

And it certainly isn't the opposite of high performance.

I've come to believe the opposite.

Feeling my full range is not the opposite of high performance.

It is the foundation of it.

Because the people performing at the highest levels aren't simply thinking more clearly.

They're perceiving more accurately.

And that begins with the courage to fully feel.

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Continue the Conversation

What have you learned not to feel, and what might become possible if you allowed yourself to feel it?

Let me know in the comments below.

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Continue Exploring

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• The Space Between Thought and Action

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• Settling In

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