Feelings. The grease for the world. Instead of avoiding them, what would happen if we acknowledge the information they give us? Connect with something more as Jules Maloney – Our Community Listens facilitator from Milwaukee, WI – Sarah, and Adam explore the feelings within.
JULES MALONEY BIO
How do you want to show up in life today? That is a question Jules Maloney tries to ask herself every day. The answer often includes being playful, mindful of words and just being nice. Jules is excited to be a new Facilitator in the OCL community, joining the fabulously skilled folks in the Wisconsin Chapter. Additionally, Jules is a Professional Development Trainer, Facilitator, and Strengths-Based Development coach. She is guided by the principles and practice of Nonviolent Communication from which she helps organize compassion-based family camps, runs Empathy Booths, teaches individuals and organizations tools for richer communication and adults how to slow down and enjoy the wonders of the moment with younger folks. She has an BA in International Studies, Economics and Peace Studies, a MA in Communication from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and helps guide the Wisconsin Empathy Guild. She lives in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee Wisconsin and cherishes time with her family.
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Adam Salgat:
Hey, listener. We would love it if you could take a quick moment to give our podcast a review on iTunes, Spotify, or leave us a message on our Facebook or LinkedIn pages. Hello, and welcome to the Our Community Listens podcast. My name is Adam Salgat, and with me again today is curriculum of improvement and development for Our Community Listens, Sarah Weisbarth. Sarah, how you doing?
Sarah Weisbarth:
Oh, Adam, I’m doing well. I just want to share with you I’m really excited this week. We have a family wedding happening on the compound this coming weekend, so I’m excited and overwhelmed at the same time.
Adam Salgat:
Well, that sounds about right for a wedding. That seems like a pretty standard pairing of feelings for a wedding. I hope everything goes smoothly.
Sarah Weisbarth:
Thank you.
Adam Salgat:
We have a guest with us today. I’d like to introduce Jules Maloney. She’s a facilitator in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Welcome to the podcast, Jules, and take a moment to tell us a little bit about yourself.
Jules Maloney:
Sure. Thank you. I’m glad to be here. I am indeed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I have spent the last three weeks taking advantage of the beautiful weather here, traveling around the state and camping. So it’s nice to celebrate this state in many ways, including the work with Our Community Listens. So, my world is really [inaudible 00:01:38] professional and based [inaudible 00:01:40] intelligence, so I’ve been working in this field for quite a while. I absolutely love the curriculum of OCL. It makes sense to me. It makes sense in how I want to show up in life and how people connect. So I have a master’s in communication focused on organizational communication, and then I also do some individual coaching with folks, helping them understand what their strengths are and how to show up more fully in those strengths. So it all aligns beautifully with Our Community Listens, the curriculum, the content, and how it invites us to be in the world.
Adam Salgat:
It sure sounds like it does. Everything that you touched on there, the ability to connect, to get involved and to reflect upon one’s self. Sounds like you’re really melding your past years and your future years now with Our Community Listens.
Jules Maloney:
Absolutely. I think this work, to me, is the answer to many difficult questions. For me, I often say, “At the end of life, what matters to me is the quality of the relationships I’ve had.” And this work helps me check in with, “Well, what are those relationships, and how have I been cultivating them? And what do I want to do going forward?” It really isn’t about the status. It isn’t about the stuff. It’s, “How do I connect with people? Even people that are not that close to me, people that I don’t necessarily want to hang out at a barbecue with, but I still want to have a rich connection with, because it matters.” So, absolutely.
Adam Salgat:
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. And a moment ago, you mentioned camping.
Jules Maloney:
Yes.
Adam Salgat:
Camping is something that I enjoy, and this time of year, in this fall season, it is a time when normally my wife and I would go up north and go camping prior to three kiddos. So we don’t do that trip quite as often now with the kids, but thinking about when we used to go camping often, it brings about a lot of feelings. And that’s today’s topic.
Now we’re going to talk a little bit about feelings, and it’s not necessarily going to be all warm and fuzzy, but I know we’re going to touch on that a little bit. I’m going to open this up to Sarah though, to pull it in, and kind of direct us. Where are we going to start talking about, and how are we going to address this topic of feelings?
Sarah Weisbarth:
Thanks, Adam. As our listeners know, we’ve been in the middle of a series around effective confrontation, trying to decide, “Should I confront?” Moving through our three choices, our three moves about acceptance and agreement. We talked about that several months ago. That was a real tough one. And, “If I’m going to ask for change, how do I ask for change in a way that values the relationship?” Like Jules said, and puts the problem outside of the relationship instead of in the middle of the relationship, and really just walking through. And one of the key aspects of effective confrontation is being able to identify a feeling. That’s really intriguing because when we teach this in class, it’s like, “Oh yeah, make sure you identify a feeling, and then we’ll move on to the behavior and the impact.”
And for me, I feel like we just kind of skipped past feeling, other than trying to come up with the word, whether it’s, “Overwhelmed,” or, “Excited,” or, “Tired,” “Thrilled,” whatever the word is, we just move past feelings, and I think feelings have so much more about them. And that’s why we invited Jules. Jules, with her background in emotional intelligence and, quite frankly, just her presence and her brilliance, when we came up with this topic, I was like, “We need some additional insight into the world of feelings.” And Jules, in your introduction, you said, “How we invite people to be in the world,” or, “How we invite others even to be with us.” And I don’t know if there’s a question there, but I’ve been reflecting on that for the past moments of, “Wow, how I show up really does have an impact, and I’m guessing how I show up is also related to how I’m feeling.”
Jules Maloney:
Yes.
Sarah Weisbarth:
… [Crosstalk 00:05:43] So on.
Jules Maloney:
[crosstalk 00:05:44] so true. The question I like to ask, and I actually have this written, I have it on the wall, and in my workspaces, I’ve put it up on the wall as well, and it says, “How do you want to show up in life today?” And it’s an invitation to choice. You do have choice in how you want to show up. However, there might be things that influenced you before that very moment.
I think about a commute I used to have going to work. It was a tough commute through the city. There was a lot of people who have a different interpretation of following the law than I do. [Crosstalk 00:06:15] And so if I was running late, or I got cut off, or somebody ran a red light and that was not feeling safe, I might arrive to work feeling agitated, and so that’s already influencing how I show up in life. So if I can pause for that moment and notice, “How am I feeling?” And connect with that, and understand that, and give it some attention, then comes my choice. “What do I want to do with that? What do I want to do with this stimulation?” Whether it’s what we might call a positive stimulation, or something that might have a negative connotation to it, which I do invite us to move past describing feelings as positive or negative. They just are. They’re just a true experience we’re having, but I can choose how I then respond.
I might in that moment say, “Yeah, I’m noticing I’m feeling agitated at work because that drive in was tough. There was a lot happening. That’s not how I want to start my day.” I might take a few deep breaths and recognize, “That’s done. I’m here. And now I have a clean slate in front of me. And that next person that passes me in the hall is probably going to have a very different experience of me having taken that pause, versus me carrying in the agitation from the drive in.”
So really noticing the feelings, acknowledging the truth of them, and then I can use my mastery and my skills that we learned in this curriculum to choose how I behave next. It’s not pretending that that education doesn’t exist. It does. I want to give it that space and then bring in my skills and move forward.
Sarah Weisbarth:
There’s so many things in there that have me wanting to ask you more. I want to start with that, “Pretending,” aspect. This probably an assumption or a belief system I have about the world. I think people have a hard time talking about their emotions. We have a hard time even acknowledging them. And I’ve even noticed for myself lately, a bias that I have. I’ve expertly labeled it the, “Suck it up,” bias, where I feel like, “Okay, well you’re feeling that way, but there’s nothing you can do about it, so just deal with it and suck it up.” And I don’t necessarily think that’s the most healthy thing for me to be doing, or really for any of us to be doing, to dismiss our feelings. But I seem like we have a hard time acknowledging them.
Jules Maloney:
Yeah. When you say that sort of, “Suck it up,” thing, my guess is that, whatever is bringing forward that stimulation isn’t going to go away. You’re just moving past it, but it’s still coming along with you, and it’s going to show up in another way. You mentioned before about sometimes skipping over talking about feelings, and it’s my belief that in the cultural context, me growing up in this country, being an American, an average lifestyle, we did not talk about feelings growing up. We did not talk about feelings in school. My family didn’t open up the door to help me understand all of my complex feelings. It wasn’t a common discussion, and I think many of us now are really craving understanding that more. We get into adulthood. We have these complex relationships. We want to feel connection. We want to feel meaning and purpose, but we don’t have the language to describe what’s coming up for us, and that maybe the tension we’re feeling, or the disconnect.
And so it really is going back to, how do we understand our feelings? How do we understand ourselves? Maybe it’s not just that I’m feeling, “Glad.” Maybe I’m feeling, “Elated,” because I was able to be effective in my work in a way that I hadn’t been before. How amazing that is to go from, “Glad,” to, “Elated,” to get that specific in our feelings and being able to articulate that to not only ourselves, but others. So there is this important process of building the vocabulary. It does take time. And I’ll admit, it feels weird. In the professional world, I’ll hear people say, “Well, I don’t want that touchy-feely stuff.” There’s so much about being effective in how we connect, first to ourselves, and then to others, by first being able to name, “What is this I’m experiencing? I’m noticing something in my body. Ah, it’s a feeling. What is that feeling? Here’s the word. Now I’ve got the word. How do I understand that word? How do I give it the space that it needs to just exist?”
Then I bring in the prefrontal cortex and the logic, and I get past that amygdala reaction and say, “Well, what do I do next? What are the values that are behind this feeling? How do I identify what it is that I want to do about this? Am I going to ask for somebody to see my perspective and come towards me as I come towards them? Am I going to ask them to shift their behaviors, to show up a little bit differently with the awareness of how I’m experiencing our interaction?” So my whole point in this is that this is a lot of work. It may seem simple to just talk about feelings. But to me, it’s really one of the most important things in building, not only our sense of [inaudible 00:11:24] wouldn’t happen first, but the quality of relationships we want to have at work, in our communities, and in our personal lives.
Adam Salgat:
I’d like to ask the question about the differences between men and women when it comes to sharing of feelings and identifying feelings. This past weekend, I read an article by a gentlemen talking about his experience growing up and how in sports, it was often said, “Rub some dirt on it.” The concept of, you get hit by a pitch in baseball and you don’t want to give the pitcher any gratification that it might’ve hurt you, so you run on to first. And he talked about how, in life, however, if we continue to ignore those feelings of pain or hurt, or even happiness sometimes, and we continue to just run on to first, we’re not going to identify when we need help. And we’re also not going to be able to ask for when we need help.
And his discussion really focused around how that happens often with men. This is something from my perspective that I often think about because I struggle with that idea of, “You got to be a man,” right? So I think feelings come into play a lot when the expectation of being a man is brought up. The idea that you’re not allowed to be vulnerable, or you’re not allowed to share what it is that you’re going through. So I’m curious if you could touch on that and what kind of experience you have in helping men, or just identifying the differences between sexes when it comes to the idea of sharing or connecting to your feelings.
Jules Maloney:
Adam, I so appreciate that you brought this up. I actually was just having a conversation about this yesterday with a friend. And again, this is a cultural context, because I know there might be folks listening to this podcast that live in different parts of the world and experience things a little bit differently. But I’d say in this culture, in the United States, from a very young age, boys are told to disconnect from their feelings. “Boys don’t cry. Walk it off.” Those messages are, wherever they came from, they invite boys to not feel their feelings. The glimmer of hope is that it is changing. I see that it’s changing. As a society, we’re recognizing the importance and the value of inviting that connection and not speaking those messages, but they’re still very pervasive.
And an example I gave yesterday with a friend was, “What would you do if you had a nephew or a son at six or seven years old who was playing with a baby doll?” That might be very uncomfortable for a lot of parents. “Oh my gosh, he’s playing with a doll. He should be playing with trucks,” or, “He should be in playing sports. What does this mean?” And so we say, “That’s not okay,” and then as that boy becomes an adult, there’s frustration when they don’t connect to a nurturing part of themselves [crosstalk 00:00:14:26]-
Adam Salgat:
Interesting.
Jules Maloney:
… Cultivating with that baby doll, right? How to care for the doll, and how to hold the doll. And then men might be uncomfortable with holding babies. “Oh, here, they want you. Female figure, nurture them. I don’t know what to do.” So that is very much in our society. And so the reconnection is really the same, it just asks for patience, and you named to me the biggest word, which is vulnerability.
It’s a big ask. How do you create a space where you can invite people to go against the cultural norms that they grew up in? To start to have that connection and not have there be an association that they’re weak, or that they’re less than. That in fact, being able to make that connection to their feelings and to speak to it actually makes them a stronger person, and easier to understand and connect. And it’s not assuming that women can do this naturally. That’s not the case. Many people grow up in situations where they don’t have that nurturance. They don’t have that vocabulary, and they don’t have that support.
In fact, I think I’ve seen many situations when we look at the gender biases that, when a woman expresses her emotion, if it’s a tender emotion, it’s seen again as a weakness, but if it’s a firm, clear, strong voice, then it might be judged as bossy or aggressive. And so how do we get past those judgments? Because here’s the thing, feelings are universal. Some cultural differences, but I know what it means to be experiencing deep grief, but Sarah and Adam, you might have each had a different life experience, but it brought you to grief. I may not have had that life experience, but I can connect with you in that place of grief. A deep sadness, deep mourning.
Same thing with joy and play. Something might be happening for you where you’re showing up, you’re coming into a meeting that’s kind of serious and you have this lightness, you have this bounce. And instead of me being like, “Oh my gosh, what’s that?” I might be curious, “I’m wondering what’s happening in their world that’s bringing them such a lightness to how they’re showing up.” That’s that desire, that curiosity to connect to these universal spaces.
Here’s an invitation for folks who are really wanting to build this understanding. So the first thing is just notice your body. Tune into the sensations in your body. It’s giving you information. That’s the beautiful things about our bodies, they’re always telling us something. And it’s often about a feeling. So maybe you have tension in your shoulders. Be curious about that. What is that tension from? Are you feeling a little bit of stress? Do you have a little bit of worry happening? Okay, so now that you’ve gotten that feeling, why? What’s behind that? What’s the need? “Oh, I have a presentation I need to do later today, and that worry is coming from my desire to be effective. And I just am not sure if I’m going to be as effective as I’d like to be. And then maybe there’s an integrity piece there, because I want to be received by my peers as a professional, as a skilled person. And so that’s why the worry is coming up and that’s why there’s tension in my shoulders, and that’s why I’m pulling them in.”
So once we have all this information, we bring in our tools and our skills that we’ve been learning about what to do next. We have a request of ourselves. We have a request of another person. Maybe we need some support. If you don’t take the time to do those steps, and we might be in that reaction, we might be picking up the bat. We want to really slow that down so that we can find our sense of self, find our words and communicate to build that connection. So we think about effective confrontation, it really is this constant cycling through, “What is living in my body right now? What are the feelings connected to it? What are the needs behind it? How do I speak to that? And how do we take that awareness to guess what might be going on for the other person, because they have the same feelings and needs, they just might be showing up differently. Well, if I have that knowledge, then I can guess what’s happening for them. I might be much more open to receiving their message. I can listen for their feelings and their values and not get stuck on their platforms and the judgements that they might be speaking.” And Sarah, I see you nodding your head. I’m so curious, what’s coming up for you right now?
Sarah Weisbarth:
Oh, I’m swimming through so many thoughts and ideas. I’m just really enjoying everything that you have to share, because it’s true. It’s so valid and it’s fundamental. I know the voice of reality that lives in me says that people don’t like this, still. Back awhile, you said something about the discomfort. And I know for me, one of the things I’ve been working on recently is recognizing, just like you said, that worry, that stress, what’s happening for me, my capacity to be able to deal with additional stressors is actually very low lately because of all the outside pressure that’s happening in our world. And I’m recognizing that I’m reacting a lot instead of responding. And for me, that’s triggered by a feeling, that information, that I have some sort of feeling happening in me, and I’m not taking the time to do exactly what you’re talking about. Slow down, think about it. What need, what value, before I have some sort of behavior and action. Which for me, if I slow down and think about it, I can respond instead of react.
And I’m going back to that feeling of discomfort where something’s happened, and maybe I’m just even uncomfortable with even trying to acknowledge the feeling. But there’s that sense of, “[Inaudible 00:00:20:14],” I don’t even know what. Discomfort is my best word for it. My gut’s a little weird and my brain froze up, and I’m like, “Ehh,” and I’m almost feeling like I react so that sensation goes away. I feel like I’ve been, done something, instead of taking the time to slow down and reflect on what’s really happening for me before I respond.
Jules Maloney:
Yeah.
Sarah Weisbarth:
You’re smiling. I feel like this was totally my therapy session. Thank you.
Jules Maloney:
[Crosstalk 00:20:44] what you said, one of my favorite things to say is, “People are messy,” and we don’t get it right. We don’t always have that ease and flow. And one of the things that I’ve learned from the OCL community that I use often is requesting for some space and grace, and being messy, right? That phrase, “Space and grace,” is so important to me, being able to acknowledge that. One of the things you were talking about too, is how difficult it is to speak into this space. And that goes back to Adam’s statement of vulnerability. What I have found is that over time, people see what I’m doing and they’d rather have me when I’m trying than me when I’m reacting. We don’t always get that. [Inaudible 00:21:34] might just judge me and dismiss me. But over time, people will see that attempt to be more skillful, and I find they give space and grace.
The other piece too, is, what would it be like for you in those moments to say, “I really want to respond to this in a way that makes sense to me, but I’m noticing I’m low-resourced and I’m [inaudible 00:21:54] I’m just going to react. Can we come back to this later.” To just even speak what you were saying in your mind, “I just, [inaudible 00:22:01] have the resources and the ease all the time.” What would it be like for you to hear that from someone you care about? Say, “I really want to speak to this, but I’m noticing right now, it’s not going to be the quality that I’d like to say. It’s not going to be the way I want to show up. Can I think about it and can I come back to it later?”
That again does take skill, but geez, if you were to say that to me, I would see that you care enough about my relationship with you that you want to show up more connected. And right now with this new world of adapting, I get it. I want to give people that space. I want to give them that opportunity.
So the other piece to what you’re saying too, is, we can do do-overs as well. I just had a do-over with my daughter. We had a situation, she’s an adult. She was wanting to share something exciting and in conversation, I revealed information she didn’t know. She reacted, and then I reacted to her reaction. And we don’t get in disagreements very often, so when we do it’s heavier. We both feel it. And I walked away from our interaction just feeling the weight of that for days, and I was giving space for her to come back to me, and I recognized she wasn’t. So I called her up and I said, “Can we please have a do-over?” And she was open to it. And so we sat down, it was tense, it felt weird, felt clunky, but she was still there. She was showing up. And I said, “I want to start again.” And I just started from the beginning, and I spoke, connected to myself, and I paused and I asked her, “How does that land for you?” I waited to hear her response. When I think about effective confrontation, there’s that whole piece of, “How’s the other people experiencing… How are they experiencing this moment? And how do I listen past, maybe, her judging statements, and connect to that deeper part of what she’s experiencing?”
And if I’m not sure, ask. Be curious. Because I want the connection. I don’t want to be right. I want the connection with her. That’s what’s important to me. Because then we can figure out all the sticky stuff later, when we have that connection. So the do-over is an important piece.
Sarah Weisbarth:
Well, [crosstalk 00:24:19] and you have to make that choice, right? You have to make that choice, that you want the relationship, not the being right, and [crosstalk 00:24:26] that sense of, where is the problem going to get placed?
Jules Maloney:
Yeah. I think being right puts us in positions. It puts us in platforms, and it gets us away from values.
Adam Salgat:
Jules, thanks so much for everything you’ve had to say. This is some great advice. And I really hope people are listening close. And before we started recording, you threw out a term that I made a note of, which was, “This is the grease for the world,” and the idea that it helps us move through judgment, and the idea of being able to connect through feelings. And it really got me thinking about, “Yeah, when we need to connect with somebody, connecting through feelings is one of the best ways we can possibly do it. Because it takes all of these other things that we try to put in front of trying to connect with somebody like race, religion, political views, just who they are and who we perceive them to be. But if we can find a way to connect with them through feelings, that is an astonishing development, I think, if we could do that more often. So tell me a little bit about where you came up with that phrase, or maybe that’s just something that came off the tip of your tongue earlier, but, “Grease for the world,” I kind of want you to talk on that a little bit more.
Jules Maloney:
I don’t know if I’ll make that into a t-shirt. I might want to wordsmith it a little bit more before it gets put to ink. I mean, we all judge. I want a name that. We all judge. I like to name it when I’m in it. I think some folks in the OCL community have heard me say this. So, my given name is Julie. And when I’m in a judging space, I call myself, “Judging Julie.” So the reason I do that is just to say, “Okay, this happens, and I’m here.” But if we can see our judgment as an invitation to go in, “Ah, I’m judging this person. I’m judging myself. I have… My values are stimulated right now. That’s why I’m judging them. Something’s going against what’s important to me.” So being able to connect to the, “Why?” The feelings are the invitation and the body sensation, the feelings, then getting to the values, that’s where we start to have a little more ease.
So I just really do want to say that, again, judgment is still going to be there. I don’t know that we’ll ever get rid of judgment as humans functioning in this world. But if you can change your relationship to judgment, and when you notice it, when you hear it or you see it in your mind, it’s an invitation for self-connection. And then that’s where things start to get going. That’s when we can start moving past the stories, and getting curious about, “What is my truth and what’s the other person’s truth?” Because they’re both true. They may be very different, but they are both true for those individuals. So I really do think that it is the grease, or the secret sauce, or whatever it is that helps us feel that quality of connection.
And to kind of bring it back to something that Sarah said earlier is, I think we have a lot of pressure in this society to be happy. You can still be cultivating a positive world, a happy world, and be fully connected to your anger. To be very clear when you’re feeling a deep sadness. That they can coexist. So it’s not to skip over those things or not acknowledged them, it’s actually to connect into them, and then that gives us the energy and the awareness, and that’s sort of what we need to move forward towards connection. That’s a little abstract, but I’m wondering if that helps connect that a little bit, Adam.
Adam Salgat:
I think it does for me. Absolutely.
Sarah Weisbarth:
Yeah, I feel like it’s both, and… Because I feel like it gives me context. Without deep sadness, I don’t have the opportunity to also then experience great joy in the same way, because I don’t have a contrast. Or I don’t have a difference to be able to understand the whole range of that spectrum of feeling, from grief to joy. I even agree with the positive psychology. I can’t be happy and go-lucky all the time, but, nor can I resist being happy, even in the midst of distress. There’s that opportunity to see the positives, but I won’t see those positives without also being able to acknowledge I’m also really struggling over here.
Jules Maloney:
So the trick is to not have a connotation of good or bad. It just is. Anger just is. It’s an energy. It’s giving us information. Sadness just is. If we get stuck on it being bad, oh my gosh, that would just pull me down even more. And instead, say, “I’m noticing this kind of heaviness in my gut and I’m feeling really sad about what happened with my friend earlier,” or, “… What happened at work. What is the energy of that, that I can then move forward towards connection? If I get stuck in… I shouldn’t feel sad about that.” Or, “I notice I’m sad all the time. This is terrible. Why? Why…” We’re getting lost in a signpost. We’re getting lost in seeing the flag as the information. Instead, it’s just giving [inaudible 00:29:55] direction to the next. Moving our stories about feelings or emotions being this or that, they just are. They are an experience. They are an energy that we can use as information to guide us to, what is our next process? What is our next step in being a more aware, effective person? And that will get us to those places of feeling richer in our life experience, because we are more effective.
And I think that’s what positive psychology gets to. There’s [inaudible 00:30:25] it gets translated, we hear it as, “Well, I should be happy,” when it’s really just an invitation to self-awareness for self-efficacy and connection, and having more meaning and purpose in our lives. So yeah, it’s a journey. It’s lifelong. I don’t know that I’ll ever master it, but I sure want to keep trying.
Sarah Weisbarth:
Yeah. I love that you’re expressing how much work it is, because so often, I give my two thumbs up on my little sarcastic comment, my message of hope, “It’s work, everyone.” But it is so worth it. It is so worth it.
Jules Maloney:
Yeah. I think if you were to ask my daughter, for me to do that do-over and slog through the messiness, I have such a rich quality of relationship with my daughters that I wouldn’t trade for anything. All the other things in life, whatever they are, I’ll work on them. But for me, the energy I put into my relationships and my coworker relationships, that’s what matters. It just feels so rich.
Adam Salgat:
As we start to wrap up here, is there anything else either of you would like to add?
Sarah Weisbarth:
I’ll just say, I’m not going to share any key takeaways because I’ve had a real big, “Aha,” in this conversation. We started out talking about feelings related to effective confrontation. We’ve continued to tie it there. Yet the more that I’m listening and reflecting, the process of effective confrontation and being able to identify our feelings is really just the work of life. It’s the work of life whether I’m upset with someone or whether I’m experiencing satisfaction, or whether I’m in that judgment space and trying to identify what that feeling is about. Walking through the steps of effective confrontation in my mind and engaging with people, talking about feelings, talking about behavior, talking about impact, that is just the work of life. It doesn’t have to be tied to an effective confrontation. So that’s my, “Aha!” Thank you very much for creating the space for me to have that moment. And chances are, we’re going to come back to another podcast to talk about that, because that’s a thing. There’s something there. That’s my, “Aha!” So thanks, Adam, for asking.
Adam Salgat:
[Crosstalk 00:00:32:56].
Jules Maloney:
It’s a way of being. It really is, it’s a kind of consciousness that we get to, so it doesn’t become compartmentalized or something that you turn on and off, it just is. But we do have the growing pains of getting there, and we do have the steps that we need to take to get there. So it does go beyond just using in confrontation. And I think what I would say too, is, what we’ve said many times in the world of OCL is, “Can you get comfortable being uncomfortable? And can you recognize that there’s so much value in being in this sticky place and just, each time, being willing to stretch a little bit more?”
And Adam, when you were talking about, sometimes the cultural constraints of men and being a man, and expressing feelings, can you find those people who you can do that with?
Adam Salgat:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jules Maloney:
Where you can start to expand more and more into sharing those vulnerable spaces, or speaking your truth, and getting comfortable with being able to do that, so it becomes easier and more of what you do. And then the other thing too is just, make it easy. Get to know those feeling words. Look at each one. Maybe pick one for the day. Let’s say, “What does this feeling mean to me? How does it show up? What are situations where I connected to that feeling?” So that when it shows up in your body or experience in the future, you can put that name right there. “There’s the language. I’ve got the word. Now I’m going to use that as connecting to my values. What is the value that this is stimulating, that it either is being met, or not being met? And do I need to do anything about that?”
So make it easy, build the language, get to know those words, reflect on past experiences. That is fertile soil. What happened this week that you want to celebrate? What did you feel? What were you needing? What did you do effectively? What is a mourning that you had about this past week? What was your feeling? What was your value? How could you have spoken into that? The more you can do that reflection, it starts to move to real time, and then you start just being in that consciousness, that way of being.
Adam Salgat:
Jules, thank you so much. You definitely tapped into a few key takeaways for our listeners, so thank you. And before I start utilizing any of my graphic design degree designing a, “Grease for the world,” shirt for you, I just wanted to give you the opportunity one more time to give us one last little element to walk away with, to think about, as we finish up the podcast.
Jules Maloney:
When it comes to feelings, they are yours. They’re not to be argued with. They’re not to be afraid of. Don’t turn away from them. Turn towards them. Be curious. Feelings are giving you information about yourself, and this will help you build connection with others. That’s the beauty of feelings, it’s…
Sarah Weisbarth:
Adam’s about to ask me for my thought in response to that, and all I have is this big head nod happening over here. Jules, it was such a pleasure to have you here with us today. As I shared earlier, I had some “Ahas,” I am confident that our listeners had “Ahas,” and are reflecting on feelings differently now. At some level of their process and their work, I have great confidence that our conversation and our time, and your insights, made a difference in somebody’s life today. Thank you for joining us. Such a pleasure.
Jules Maloney:
Thank you for having me. It builds my awareness and my connection, and my drive to how I want to show up in life today.
Adam Salgat:
Sarah, I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation that we just had with Jules. Is there more ways for people to continue this conversation about feelings? I know Our Community Listens is doing a lot of different content out there. Tell me how people can continue this education.
Sarah Weisbarth:
Adam, it’s even beyond the content. It’s about the connection, and we hit on that multiple times. So there are all kinds of opportunities for our listeners to connect with the material and connect with us, and have a conversation. Continue the conversation. We have webinars that happen regularly, and we have connect sessions that happen on the third Thursday and the fourth Tuesday of the month. The connect sessions are ideal to just join in with a group of people that want to have a conversation about whatever is happening with them. And it could be on the topic of the month, we’re talking about feelings in October, or it could be about some other content pieces that OCL presents. So join a connect session, join a webinar. You’re going to find all of that information on our website. Get invested with our newsletter. We have a monthly newsletter that comes out with links, and then that way, you’ll have exactly what you need to know, when you need to know it. And we look forward to all of our listeners joining us for upcoming sessions and just continuing the conversation and connection.
Adam Salgat:
If you have any suggestions about subjects for our podcast, feel free to reach out through our Facebook page. And if you’re interested in taking a class, visit ourcommunitylistens.org. Thank you again for listening to our podcast. And don’t forget, each word, each action, each silent moment of listening, sends a message. Therefore, you are the message.
