Hi clients and community! To serve you in a bigger and bolder way this year, I have: 1. brought my full mailing list over here to my substack newsletter (no payment necessary, unsubscribe below), and 2. iterated on the newsletter’s name and focus, which you can read about here. Here’s to more consistency and more love from me to you this year!
A question, for your consideration:
For you, what is mental well-being?
Take a moment, ask yourself, and listen for the answer.
I asked this of a gorgeous, intimate audience gathered to explore mental well-being and entrepreneurship with Harvard’s Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship a few days ago. Two students spoke up, and what evolved responses they had – evolved, by far, from my understanding of mental health when I was a student. One answered (and I’m summarizing), “accepting my feelings,” and one said, “being with the challenges.” If someone had asked me that years ago, I think I would have said, with a question mark in my voice: happiness and confidence. Or perhaps even: happiness and success.
There’s nothing wrong with happiness or success, but what was so cool about these students’ responses was the movement in them – the understanding that life ebbs and flows, and balanced mental health doesn’t cling to an imagined, static state of happiness or ride on the eventuality of success, but rolls with one’s experience of life’s ups and downs.
It is simply not possible to be happy all the time, right? In fact, we humans are built to feel well over 100 emotions (many variations of and beyond the primary five). In one exercise I did with a group of clients last year, they noticed feeling 20-30 emotions in just 20 minutes! And re success, well, the experience of highly successful but miserable people has shown us that achieving “success” doesn’t unlock some level of the game of life where we always feel good.
And on the other extreme, good mental health isn’t a continuous state of worry and stress, either. I often tell clients something my neuroscience phd brother told me years ago: “the brain was not designed for long-term worry.”
What I offered to the audience is in line with the students’ responses: to me, mental well-being is being fully engaged in the experience of my life. I want to feel all the feelings when they happen in my body, and notice my thoughts as they pop into my head, and experience my physical sensations – all with curiosity, self-kindness, and without making any of it mean anything in particular in that moment. (It’s mindfulness, y’all!)
The downside of this approach: You fully experience pain, anger, sadness, confusion, and the other rough emotions.
The upside of this approach: You fully experience joy, satisfaction, pride, love, and the other yummy emotions. You also move through the pain, anger, sadness, and confusion much more quickly – because on average, emotions last only seconds to minutes if we let ourselves really feel them. And, the emotions don’t amass in your body, building up to chronic stress. AND, because you are experiencing present reality, rather than an expected future or habitual past, your personal and business decision-making is less biased and more effective.
Sounds pretty great, right? Is this new to you or a helpful reminder? Let me know.
Yours in feeling our feelings,
Kathleen
p.s. For more on how you can approach your mental well-being this year, take a listen to an interview I did back in December for Rochester’s NPR station with fellow coaches Pam Sherman and Shoshanna Hecht, hosted by the fabulous Jasmin Singer: Navigating Personal Growth in a Transforming World.